Bumble's Stumble | The Sting
5/6/202642 min
It’s 2024 and Bumble’s users are increasingly frustrated by matches that go nowhere. Investors are equally uneasy as the stock price cascades from its post-IPO highs. In response, new CEO Lidiane Jones rolls out a rebrand with a major change. But the rollout faces a backlash and the company’s slide continues. Founder Whitney Wolfe Herd returns to save her company and to find out whether an app built on human connection can be rescued by AI.
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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. It's spring twenty twenty-four in Austin, Texas. Inside Bumble's sunflower yellow headquarters known as the Hive, engineers and designers are working late. Empty coffee cups line their desks. Screens glow in the dim light as they work on something big, a new app, a new logo, a new algorithm, a new version of Bumble, and most importantly, a new feature that once upon a time would have been unthinkable. For the first time in the company's history, men will be allowed to make the first move. Down the hall from where the programmers are plugging away, the company's new CEO, Lidiane Jones, gathers her top executives in a conference room. Behind them hangs a framed print that reads, "Life's short. Make the first move." For a decade, that line defined Bumble. It was the company's differentiator, the reason women chose the app in the first place. Now, Jones is leading an evolution. Jones comes from the work messaging app Slack, where she served as CEO for the past