Dating company Bumble BMBL,
went public on Wednesday and saw its shares rise 64% in the Nasdaq debut on Thursday, before approaching another 7% in Friday’s trading session.
Here are 5 things to know about Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd, who created the “women make the first move” dating app in 2014:
It’s a former Tinder directive
In 2012, Wolfe Herd started working for Match Group MTCH,
the Tinder dating app, known for its left and right swipes. She says it came with the name “Tinder”.
He was vice president of marketing at Tinder during a period of huge growth in users of the platform among young people.
Wolfe Herd left the company in 2014 and later filed a lawsuit against Tinder for sexual harassment – she received more than $ 1 million plus shares as part of a deal, according to reports.
Bumble IPO made her a billionaire on paper
The launch of Bumble made Wolfe Herd’s 21.5 million shares worth more than $ 1 billion.
Of the richest 500 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 debut on the Nasdaq.
She became the youngest female CEO to take over a public company
At 31, Wolfe Herd is the youngest female CEO to lead a company to a public offering, according to Business Insider.
In the last year, 560 companies have gone public, and Bumble is only the third with a founding woman and the eighth with a female CEO. In addition, more than 70% of Bumble’s board members are women, according to the SEC.
“Hopefully it won’t be a rare title,” Wolfe Herd Bloomberg said of Bumble as a women’s-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 everyone else. ”
He invested in another dating app called Chappy
In 2016, Bumble and Wolfe Herd invested in a dating app called Chappy. The application is designed for gay men in the UK
In 2020, the application was closed and a merger with Bumble was announced.
She backed legislation that made digital sexual harassment a crime
Wolfe Herd, who attended Southern Methodist University in Dallas and whose company is headquartered in Austin, was a driving force for Texas law, signed by Gov. Greg Abbott in 2019, that made sending naughty photos without permission to become a crime in the state.
The legislation made such acts a Class C offense, punishable by a fine of up to $ 500. Wolfe Herd testified before the Texas House Jurisprudence Commission on the subject.
“It’s time for our laws to reflect like this, we lead double lives, physically and digitally,” Wolfe Herd said. “You are looking 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. ”