Bumble's Stumble | The Queen Bee
4/29/202644 min
It’s 2014 and twenty-four-year-old Whitney Wolfe sues Tinder for harassment, sending shockwaves through Silicon Valley. She walks away with a settlement but pays a high personal price for taking on the “boy’s club” culture in tech. That leads Wolfe to launch Bumble, an app with a radical feature — women make the first move. Bumble attracts millions of users and has a blockbuster IPO. But as the Bumble “Hive” grows, the pressure to scale takes its toll, and onlookers wonder: Can Bumble survive without its Queen Bee?
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice...
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsDavid Brown· Host0:00
Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of Business Wars ad-free right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app. [upbeat music] It's May twenty twenty-four. In the hours before dawn, installation crews fan out across Los Angeles and London, hanging posters for the online dating app Bumble. Above highways in Los Angeles, workers in cherry pickers rise toward massive fourteen-by-forty-eight-foot billboard frames. In London, crews head underground, carrying rolled-up posters into subway stations. By rush hour, these crews have hung the ads along major commuting routes. They're part of a sweeping rebrand by Bumble, which is trying to redefine how people think about online dating, and these ads are aimed squarely at people who feel burned out by it. One ad reads, "You know full well a vow of celibacy is not the answer." Another declares, "Thou shalt not give up on dating and become a nun." When Bumble debuted in twenty fourteen, it made a bold promise. Unlike other dating apps, women would make the first move. It was framed as the feminist answer to hookup culture, and the message resonated. In twenty twenty-one, Bumble's IPO exploded onto