Dating company Bumble BMBL,
it went public on Wednesday and saw its shares soar 64% in its Nasdaq debut on Thursday before facing a further 7% in Friday’s trading session.
Here are five things you need to know about Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd, who created the “Women make the first move” dating app in 2014:
She is a former Tinder executive
In 2012, Wolfe Herd began working in the MTCH Match Group,
Tinder dating app, known for its sliding left and right. He says he came up with the name “Tinder”.
She was Tinder’s vice president of marketing for a period of high-growth platform users among young people.
Wolfe Herd left the company in 2014 and subsequently filed a lawsuit against Tinder for sexual harassment – receiving more than $ 1 million plus shares as part of a deal, according to reports.
Bumble’s IPO turned her into a paper billionaire
The reception of the Bumble market has caused Wolfe Herd’s 21.5 million shares to exceed $ 1 billion.
Of the 500 richest people in the world, less than 5% are self-made women, according to Bloomberg.
Wolfe Herd was seen with her baby in a video marking Bumble’s Nasdaq debut.
She became the youngest executive director to make a company public
At 31, Wolfe Herd is the youngest woman to run a company on a IPO, according to Business Insider.
Last year, 560 companies went public and Bumble is the third among them with a founder and the eighth with a CEO. In addition, more than 70% of Bumble board members are women, according to their filing with the SEC.
“Hopefully it’s not a weird headline,” Wolfe Herd told Bloomberg that Bumble is a women-run company. “It simply came to our notice then. It is what needs to be done, it is a priority for us and it should be a priority for the rest ”.
He invested in another dating app called Chappy
In 2016, Bumble and Wolfe Herd invested in a dating app called Chappy. The app was designed for gay men in the UK
In 2020, the app closed and a merger with Bumble was announced.
He defended legislation that made digital sexual harassment a crime
Wolfe Herd, who attended Southern Methodist University in Dallas and the company is headquartered in Austin, was a driving force behind Texas legislation, signed by Gov. Greg Abbott in 2019, which led to the sending of obscure photographs without permission were a crime in the state.
The legislation made these facts a Class C misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to $ 500. Wolfe Herd testified before the Texas House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee on the matter.
“It’s time for our laws to reflect this way of leading double lives, both physically and digitally,” Wolfe Herd said. “Look at the government right now, it only protects the physical world. But our young people spend much more time in the digital world than in the physical one ”.