I'm Emily Chang, and this is the circuit today. Modern love is basically synonymous with mobile love. There are countless dating apps to choose from and an overwhelming amount of potential matches. And while some people think apps level the playing field, others haven't been so lucky in love. I'm sitting down with Bubble founder and CEO Whitney wolf Hurt to talk about how more people are turning online for all kinds of relationships.
So I'm very obsessed with this mission of really helping and toxic relationships and inch our way out of loneliness and social isolation.
Whitney started her journey at Tinder, and yes there was some drama. She then went on to found Bumble and became the youngest woman to take a company public. She has her own stories of heartbreak in part why she wanted to change how people meet online. Here's my conversation with Bumble CEO and founder Whitney Wolf Heard.
So dating has changed a lot since I was on the market at least, and maybe you and I've been researching some new terms that people use these days, and I want to run them by you great and see if you know what they mean. Dating dictionary.
Yes, ghosting what is it?
It's rude and it's basically when people disappear on you with no explanation or reason. Yeah, they go dark orbiting. Ooh so I've heard about this one. I am not the coolest of the folks that run bumble at this point, so I'm slightly out of the.
Modern dating term loop.
But I think it's when they circle around you and kind of show up intermittently.
You're dating someone who says they're not interested, but then they still like your social media posts.
Right, so it's confusing, right, Like, what's up with that?
Right? Okay?
Riz or having riz zero idea? That is shorthand for charisma.
Oh, who know, right? I like it.
Breadcrumbing, Yes, have heard about this one. This is where they basically string you along.
They string you along so they like leave little likes they.
Show you, like red croporatic attention to keep you interested, but nothing enough to really be meaningful.
They never follow through. Correct Okay.
Cobwebbing never heard of this one. So cobwebbing, as I understand it is when you clean out the cobwebs you break up with someone, You get rid of the mementos, the photos, you delete their phone number.
On situationship, Yes, for sure.
This is very gen z. Lots of situationships that I hear about.
So that's when you're not dating, but not not dating.
It's a situation and because of that, it feels like a relationship.
And so it's a situationship. Soft launching, taking it slow, soft launching.
That would be good.
Soft launching, I believe means when you post on social media indicating that you're in a relationship, but you don't reveal the person's identity.
Ooh, that's a soft launch. Fascinating, So we did that. That was our soft launch for the ripe. Now are really going to dig it?
Bumble's been public for two years now, a couple of years. What surprised you most about being a public company? Like, do you feel you've aged two years or twenty two?
I think that what has surprised me the most is how short term the market can be. And I am such a long term founder and I am such a long term thinker. We operate with mission and vision and customer obsession, and it's fascinating to see how the street doesn't always think about the long term opportunity. And so that's been really remarkable to me with being introduced to this public environment.
How's mom life with two?
Mom life with two is chaotic and magical all at once. So grateful to have the experience. But mom life with two and a public company, it's hectic. But you know what, it's amazing and I'm very fortunate to be in the position I'm in, So we make the most of it.
Get work.
You've gone from startup to Unicorn to being the youngest woman to take a company public. And I've heard you say that you were really motivated by the fact that a lot of people didn't think you could do this, or.
That you were underestimated.
What were those red flags along the way or what were the signs along the way that made you think they don't think I got this?
You know, it's interesting.
I think even today I'm underestimated, and I think even today Bumble is underestimated in terms of what we can be and what we can do in the world. You know, if you look at what is going on in our world today, with all time high searches around how do I meet people, all time high self isolation, all time high sadness because of our phones, we are one of the very rare technology businesses that actually wants to help you get into the real world and meet people and
build healthy relationships. And I'm not entirely sure people realize just how big that can be.
When you started Bumble, you wanted a safe place for women to make the first move. What was the genesis of that decision when you were building.
I would say the beginning of Bumble was really the intersection of a few problems, a few heartbreaking moments. And that's who I am. I like to identify a problem and then fix it. That's just kind of the way I operate. And when we set out to build Bumble, I think the problems were really first and foremost women never went first in their relationship, which led to the sea of toxic relationships. Everywhere I looked, someone was in a heartbreaking situation or situationship. But it was really more
than just lighthearted situationship talk. This was really quite toxic stuff, abusive relationships, degrading relationship relationships where women really felt like second rate citizens. And this was something that I had faced personally, but had seen from so many people in my life.
And you went through your own bad breakup or my own relationship, my own.
Several experiences of the dynamics of inequity in relationships.
So that was the first thing.
But then it also boiled down to a more lighthearted version of that, which was why was I not allowed to text a guy first in college? Why was that seen as a cardinal sin by my group of girlfriends?
Because of these rules of love?
And for literally thousands of years, this has been the rule of love. You know, look at how women have evolved over centuries in love captured dowry, exchange for property. This is the genesis of love. And so you had this history of love and then the explosion of modern love and mobile love, and the Internet was quite literally engineered with men in mind. Right, It was mostly these social products where men I'm not bashing them, I'm just
saying what it is. There was a lot of men that were solving problems that they experienced right through engineering.
Hot or not, face mash, just those.
Kind of things.
You can name ten more versions of those, and that is how we ended up connecting and dating on the Internet. And so when I found myself at the front line of that, I was seeing the intersection of broken love, women being forgotten in love with the explosion of toxicity and harassment on the phone. And it was really that online abuse, that online hatred paired with women being seen as second That really was the genesis of bumble.
That's where it came from.
Now, you also co founded Tinder, and as I understand, you came up with the name and you also helped sparkets run on college campuses.
Yeah, tell me about that.
Wow.
So you know, we were a small and passionate young team and we were starting Tinder really as a side project inside of a tech incubator, which felt very foreign at the time. I remember being teased by my girlfriends graduating college for going to work at a tech incubator.
They thought that was pretty nerdy when.
They were all taking jobs at fashion houses and magazines and banks. But it felt modern and it felt like the future, and I'll never forget. I think it was our very first major college launch. I went to SMEU, where I'd graduated from, with just a couple hundred dollars for marketing and the logos of Tinder and a couple tender t shirts that said don't ask for my number, find me on Tinder. But my college girlfriends that were
still in college I just graduated. We went out to the bars and they wore the t shirts and when someone would ask for their number, they'd say, find me on Tender. And we went to the sororities and the fraternities, and I went to Kinko's and printed a thousand pieces of find Me on Tender, find Out who Likes You on Campus flyers. And that was kind of a part of the beginning of the the wildfire, if.
You will, of that product, tinder Box. Yeah, that's right.
You ultimately left Tinder, and you sued Tinder for harassment and discrimination, You signed an NDA, you settled. I know you can't talk about the specifics, but how did that experience change you?
Well, first of all, you can't grow without discomfort.
Mm and I would say it didn't change me. It broke me. M it did it broke me.
I was a twenty four year old woman, and I had been working so passionately and with so much dedicate and so much conviction in what we were doing for two years straight, straight out of college, and all of a sudden, I found myself, you know, at the bottom of the rocket ship launcher by myself, and this rocket was just still going, which was Tender, and it was horrifying because I lost not only my career, but I lost my self worth, I lost my confidence, I lost
really the community that I had been surrounded by for every waking hour of those two years, and I really thought it was over. Not to mention, I was this, you know, young woman from Salt Lake City, and I was on the cover of every major tech headline, and my name was being thrown around the internet like you can't even imagine, with with very little understanding of what
was even going on. It was almost like I was in a store and this was before me too, This is before times up, this is before the tech conversation about how women are treated.
This is before all of that.
So I felt incredibly alone and scared and abandoned. But in those dark, dark, dark, very harrowing moments, I was able to be still enough to identify something bigger than me, which was that the Internet was broken and the way we were treating women in relationships was wrong, and that something had to change.
Well, you were on the rocket launcher and you said, hey, I got a different idea.
Maybe I can use this launch pad too. Yeah.
For a long time now, tender has been thought of as a hookup ap. You know, this wiping rights, wiping left thing has given online dating a bad name.
How hard was it to then start Bumble.
With that as a perception point.
It's interesting because, really, had everyone just paused for two seconds and said, maybe we should just take a moment and think about what this experience is like for women? What do women want when they date? What do women want when they connect? What do women want in their lives? Would have been a really easy answer, And that answer to me came in the form of Bumble and so on Bumble, which actually was a departure from the original idea, which was really meant to not be in dating at all.
Trust me, the last thing I wanted to do is go get back into the dating app world.
So you didn't even intend to start another dating app?
Absolutely not.
I was actually wire framing an app based on kindness, better behavior, and compliments. I wanted to create a viral social product for girls and women where they would treat each other with kindness and they would actually for the first time, have a positive social network, to hopefully change the way we talked to each other on the end, and to create a kinder ecosystem to be the foundation of relationships and then you know, go and make plans
and the universe will laugh. So one thing led to another and here we are.
Best like plan.
So, wasn't it There was a there there? There was a Russian entrepreneur who was behind badou right, the European dating site, And didn't he kind of pull you in and'd.
Say so about this? Yeah?
There, Yes, So the founder of Badoo had contacted me during the lawsuit, and I was taking no emails and calls. I was in a really bad emotional place. I was certainly not out there networking off of this headline. In fact, I was hibernating and I was being reclusive, and he was persistent. He wanted to talk, and so ultimately the stars aligned and I agreed to meet with him, and he actually tried to recruit me to be the head
of marketing for his European dating app. I politely said, absolutely not, but I'm working on an idea to change the world. I want to empower girls and women through the first ever positive social platform. M there's nowhere on the Internet that treats us well or encourage us good behavior. I'm going to go do that. And he said, nice, Nice, I'd like you to do a dating app with me. So no, that's not up for option. I'm going to
do a woman's empowerment product. Long story short. This went back and forth for months, and I said, you know, I'm gonna go raise money and do this. He said, okay, I'll make you a deal. Instead of raising from someone else, I will back you. I will contribute resources and experience from my bad team. And I know you want to be founder and CEO of your own thing, and that's great. You are founder, you are CEO, this is your project. But let me help you, and let's let's let's do
a partnership. And after a lot of back and forth, I kind of felt, you know, do I have to lose? I can't be more untouchable than I can be right now? What can get worse than this moment? And so, in hindsight, what a blessing to have gone through that, because when you have nowhere else to turn and things can't get in your mind more stressful or more disempowering than that moment, it's actually a really amazing opportunity because you can only go up from there.
So you start saying yes, and.
I eventually agreed to doing this under a lot of different parameters of founder and CEO.
Women have to be in control. What does this look like?
And that would have been the beginning of our bumble journey.
What are the lessons that stick with you from that time?
So the lessons are plentiful, but I think ultimately it's what you do with things when things happen right, It's how you respond, and it's how you go forward. And I can't change anything about the tender times. I can't change anything about the entire journey. All you can do is say, what are my options from here? What can I do to improve? What can I do to choose the best path forward for what we have in front
of us? And it was a great partnership while it lasted, and everything is a time, a place in a chapter. Business is like seasons, right, nothing is always forever. And so while that was a a great experience and we would never have had the opportunities we had without the duced partnership. He ultimately ended up selling his take to Blackstone in twenty nineteen. I became the group level CEO and then we would go public shortly thereafter.
So now that you're here, we're here. How would you describe your CEO style? For example, I just interviewed Brian Chusky. He says he gets really deep in.
The details, really deep in the details.
And then of course there are folks who are more big picture, what's Whitney style.
So I definitely get in the detail else probably too much for some folks liking, but that is the style of a founder, in my opinion. Founder CEOs care about their business in a way that a CEO just can't, and so for better or for worse, I get very involved in the details. But I think the style I've always had is just lead with authenticity.
I try to be kind. That's not nice.
Nice is fake, Kind is honest, Kind is respectful, but truthful and kind is not always what you want to hear. Nice is, but nice is not serving anyone. So I really try to lead with kindness, and I try to lead with humanity and empathy and really putting myself in people's shoes before making decisions.
I am who I am.
I really don't put on a face or a mask really in any situation.
Has that been hard to do?
Especially as a woman CEO who's constantly critiqued and judged in maybe ways that male CEOs are not.
I mean, I catch myself. I did it with you today. I asked if a certain shirt was appropriate or not right. These are the places where I catch myself saying would someone else say that?
Right?
But candidly, I come back to that time post Tinder, where I was being judged, scrutinized. I was called every name in the book, every name publicly, privately. I was shunned, And in that moment came freedom m because I realized this thing we all fear people not liking us, people judging us, people not approving of us. I was right there in the middle of it. I lived it, and I said, wait a second, Okay, I'm still breathing. I got through it, so now let's just go. The landscape
has changed dramatically. There's Tinder, there's Tinge, there's match dot.
Com, there's Rayah and plenty of Fish and the League and anymore.
That I don't do you know about how does the battle of dating apps play out?
I think it's great that there are so many people out there trying to build connection vehicles, right, but what sets us apart from everyone else is the mission we are really here to do more than just to build a dating app. Yes, are those highly lucrative businesses. Are they needed, for sure, But we're really building something that no one's built before. Well, we're building an entire relationship business. We are in the business of love more broadly.
Right, you're building a place where people can also make friends, find course partners as well.
That was always the vision.
So when starting Bumble, even in dating app form, I have all the early all the early drawings and paperwork. This is not a dating app. This is a relationship company. This is a company to build community, to find business opportunity, to find friends, to find someone to lean on. This is a place to share your struggles and your joys with others. And it's a place to find love if that's what you're looking for. But it's also become a self love brand. Be the CEO your parents wanted you
to marry and then find someone you actually like. It is so much more than just an app you download and swipeswipeswipe.
So you've spun off BFF, what's.
The goal there?
We believe that the friendship category can be just as important as romantic find someone to go out with on a Friday night, find a group of girlfriends to laugh with and do brunch with or whatever you're looking for. But also maybe find someone to date if you're ready for it. And then what happens when you're in a relationship.
Then you go to our product official where you and your new partner can keep your relationship healthy, make sure it's equitable, make sure you're feeling self love and so BFF Bumble four Friends is based on our standalone vehicle to build community, to find anyone you're looking for on a Tuesday, a Saturday, a Sunday, long term, to build that core network that makes your life fulfilling. Because our life is basically just a group of relationships.
So how well is that working?
Because I think a lot of people do still think of Bumble it's a dating app.
That's what you do there.
The reason why we launched a standalone product for BFF was there was so much success inside the core dating app. So I want you to imagine you had a bunch of young women that were married or in serious relationships
downloading a dating app to find friends. And so we felt that it was time to really unlock our potential and to spin out a standalone product where the folks that were single and looking to date as well could still enjoy the dating app and the friend finding mode all in one on core Bumble, but those that are not looking to date will have a platform dedicated to friendship and community.
You're in a lot of countries already. Of course, you've made a bunch of acquisitions. Where do you want Bubble to go next? You know what kind of global expansion do you hope to see and global growth.
So I've always said, if women are there, we're going because candidly, the reality of the global state of women is not great. We are one hundred plus years away from any form of real gender parity. And so it is my firm belief in our teams firm belief that if we want to make the world better, we have to start by enhancing the lives of women. And we believe that the easiest way and the best way, the most profound way to really create better, safer communities is
through better relationships. If you have healthy relationships, you have healthier societies, you have healthier communities. And so we are going to quite literally scale this across the entire globe.
We'll continue this conversation after this quick break.
I want to talk a little bit about the technology behind it, because algorithms seem to rule the world right now and everything around us, and can also dictate.
Your fate on a dating app. How does Bumble decide who to show you? So?
Algorithm, machine learning and AI are absolute, absolutely incredible tools to help us better understand relevance, compatibility, and what you're looking for, But it doesn't determine your fate because the beauty of Bumble is that you get to set the tone of what you're looking for. You're setting the standards of what type of relationship you want. We have several filters and options and parameters that you get to put in place, and we show you people that match that
that are within that criteria set. And we also use a lot of really impressive AI technology to detect bad actors before it even happens. So if we feel that someone has a propensity to be abusive or dangerous or harassing, we really do our best to prevent things before they even happen. And so I would actually argue that it
supercharges fate. If you were to walk into a bar waiting for that perfect someone, you'd have to be there at the right moment at the exact right time and place Bumble for the same cost of a couple drinks at the bar. Gives you unlimited access to people in your area who might be on the other side of town or showed up at the bar five minutes after you left.
If Bumble's algorithms were perfect, everyone would be able to find a perfect match right away. Isn't the goal to let the algorithms play it out a little bit, play the dating game out a little bit, and drag out the chase.
The goal is to find you someone that you want to meet in the quickest, most efficient way possible. We have a really strong belief that Churn is our greatest ally. The quicker we can get you a success story. The quicker you will shout from the rooftops and to your single friends and family members and people at work that Bumble worked for you. And our goal is not to be in the business of keeping you in your phone all day long for the rest of your life. So
we feel that we have a tremendous runway. And if you told me we helped every single human on planet Earth find their special someone, I will gladly retire happily I think we will have fulfilled a very important role online of earth.
Huge on top market. Do people have misconceptions about how to trick the algorithm, you know, like if you just wipe yes on everyone, will that backfire?
So I think doing the trickster things don't really work to the same degree you might think. Because the algorithms are so sophisticated, and because we have so many triggers in place to detect scammers and spammers and bad actors, you know, we actually that would be a fly to us. If someone was just gaming the system, they would be downgraded because of that behavior. So we are literally trying to, through our algorithms, through machine learning, through AI, create a safer,
kinder community. So it's fascinating as we're at the intersection of AI taking over everything right now, how do we actually do what we did in twenty fourteen where we stepped in and said the Internet's been engineered to perpetuate bad behavior? Well, has AI been engineered to perpetuate bad behavior?
Maybe?
And so how do we take an active role to steer it, to program it, to train it to do better, to be good, to highlight goodness, and to also warn us about bad actors, So it's really about what you do with AI that will define how it affects the business.
We're gonna talk a little bit more about AI in a moment, but I just want to underscore this point because this begs the sort of big question about the business of dating in general.
One would think that the needs.
Of your users are at odds with the needs of your shareholders who don't want who want that app engagement up into the right How do you.
Reconcile that our business model is not rely on on advertising, which is reliant on eyeballs, which is reliant on time spent in and a app.
Or a subscription model.
Predominantly we do have some advertising, but the better relevance in terms of the matches you get, the better experience you have, the more unlock opportunity there is to converting someone to being a payer. And so I do actually think everyone is aligned. I think the subscriber drives our revenue, and so the better we can serve our members, the better we can serve our shareholders. And I think that's the beauty of this product, that we're all swimming in the same direction.
So I want to talk about the experience of being on these things because like your profile photo is super important because if I was on there, I'd be obsessing about my profile photo. If there was some magical new way to make a that first digital first impression, what would you change.
So it's very interesting. You know, humans behave very similarly in real life. If you were to say, no more phones, no more technology, let's all go back to meeting the old fashioned way at the bar, at the restaurant. You walk into the bar or the restaurant, and that's all you've got. You have you And what's actually quite powerful about the profile is that we've learned so much more about the person in a split second then you would
ever have the opportunity to in real life. M you now in the scroll of a finger, understand their political affiliation, do.
They want children, do they smoke? Where are they from?
What do they like to do? A photo says a thousand words. So it actually people consider it to be slightly superficial, but in fact, meeting in real life can be quite superficial, and so it's actually quite dynamic how you can see someone come to life through photos.
Here's the other thing is are people presenting themselves authentically like should we believe the guy who says he's five eleven or the girl who says she always is up for adventure.
I think that's been one of the big questions over the last decade of dating apps. How do we get people to really be who they are? If they say they are something, let's ensure they really are. And so this is where we were first to introduce photo verification. This is where we have been a leader on the accountability space and so really finding other mechanisms to hold
people accountable. We have features in the app where you can actually leave feedback or make a report on someone if they were misleading about who they said they were.
Building a real deep connection takes time.
The apps give you this big dopamine hit of attention, and you know, conceivably you could just never settle down because there's something always better, justice wipe away.
How do you think this is fundamentally changing dating.
I think we could play the flip side of that as well. I think without choice, there's pressure to settle. And historically a big driver of why I started Bumble was when I looked around me, A lot of women I knew settled for toxicity, they settled for abuse, They settled for disempowering relationships because where else were they going to go? And so I think something that is quite beautiful about having options is that you don't have to
settle if you don't want to. Now, I understand there's flip sides to everything, but we choose to take the bright side.
You know.
The other problem I hear from users is like dating apps are expensive, and like everything is expensive, right now, do you really have to pay to find love?
When you go on that date with one person for multiple hours, that just cost you more than a couple hundred dollars A costs you a couple hours, so that time becomes money as well. So when you actually think about the value of a dating app that you could actually meet your spouse or partner, I mean that one date is not for sure going to work, right, And so when you think about the cost of dating, it's
actually quite remarkable how expensive it can be. So I think there's a real value add and also a time saver. You know, Historically, putting on your heels and getting dressed up and going out to meet people it's kind of exhausting. So I think there's a real trade off there, and AI is going to be a huge tailwind to this, a huge a huge catalyst to helping people really both shine but also attract in terms of compatibility and better matching.
And so I think that AI is actually going to be a supercharger for dating in general and connecting in general, because it's it's really the one arena that requires people to get offline. The end goal is to meet someone and to see each other in real life, and AI has started to threaten our need for human connections. So when you marry the efficiency of AI with the need to have real, meaningful connection, it's actually really powerful and really exciting.
I've heard people say I'm done with dating apps, like I can't do this anymore. What do you say to someone who's been unlucky on the apps.
For a long time.
I say, take a pause, use our feature that we built called snooze. You don't have to delete your profile and lose your bio that you spent a lot of time working on.
Get off the app for a while.
We would never want to sacrifice someone's mental health for keeping someone as a customer. We are not in the business of exploiting people's well being to keep them on our product. Dating is also cyclical relationships end, breakups happen, divorces happen, people cycle in and out of relationships. I love these stories when I hear them, but very rarely do you hear of someone who spent their entire life
with the same person. So when you actually take a longer term horizon, you know the re engaged customer is a really important business.
Do you see any I mean a boomerang effect at all where people want to meet in person again instead of online.
We see bumble as step one, meet match, have a quick chat, and go offline.
Go in the real world.
We want to make the world less lonely, and the only way that works is if you use us as a tool to meet great people and navigate your in real life opportunities.
Chatbots are chatbots already in dating apps?
Is that happening?
So chatbots are you know, all the hype right now on the internet. Here's where I think a chatbot becomes powerful. The average US single adult single doesn't date because they don't know how to flirt or they're scared they don't know how. This is where the power of AI and leveraging it for good becomes a huge opportunity.
Everyone's scared of the chatbot.
What if you could leverage the chat bot to instill confidence, to help someone feel really secure before they go and talk to a bunch of people that they don't know yet. When you take a challenging problem like oh, no, is the world all going.
To fall in love with chatbots?
No?
But how do we make the most of a chatbot? If that's where things are going and you can use it in a really powerful way?
Is there anything about an AI powered dating future that makes you worry that seems a little black mirror if.
You allow it to be bad? Could it be bad? Sure?
But a lot of things can be bad right Driving on the freeway can be bad if you take your hands off the wheel and close your eyes. I mean, you have to just engineer things to operate within certain guardrails and boundaries, and you have to sear things in the right direction. Is the world suggesting that the whole world replaces human connection with the chatbot? If that is truly the case, I promise you we have bigger issues than bumble.
I don't think you will ever replace the need for real love and human connection.
I know this is something you think about a lot, which is how do we make the Internet safer for women, safer and less toxic for women?
How I've been thinking about this now for well over ten years since I left Tinder, and actually before leaving Tinder, I started thinking about it. I started seeing it there, I saw it in my experience there. So this has been my driving question of how do we actually make the Internet safer for women? And the answer is it's loaded, it's nuanced, and I don't have the perfect answer. I think it's a lot of steps, and it's a lot of commitment to hopefully inch our way towards a kinder,
safer platform. But what we've done to date to try to instill better behavior and to encourage better behavior is we've led with a few guiding principles safety by design, guardrails, accountability, not allowing bad stuff. Sometimes I feel completely alone in this wild, wild tech world, because you know, I'm watching the debate around free speech run wild, and I'm watching people, you know, prop up hate online and champion it. We just take a really different framework, and I think our
framework is so simple. No shirt, no shoes, no service is a real normal thing at every physical location in town. Why don't we say no hate, no abuse, no service. And that's what we've done. We have really strict terms and conditions. Cannot come on here, and hate cannot come on here in abuse, and you cannot come on here in harass. We've passed a law if you send an unsolicited loot image, of course will block you. Of course we'll tell the person not to open it. But guess
what we meant and made it illegal. Texas, California, other states working on it at the federal level right now.
And that's just the beginning.
You've been super active on the policy front.
What are you fighting for a safer internet for women?
There are no real guard rails that exist in legislature to keep women and girls safe on the internet.
It's very behind.
You know. We have a lot of these rules that exist offline. You can't. The equivalent of our unsolicited loud image bill law now is indecent exposure. You can not expose yourself in the streets. If you do, you're going to jail. Yet you can expose yourself on the digital streets at scale and nothing happens to you or before our law didn't. Before our features to protect you, it didn't. That's just step one For every example like that, there's ten others that need to be fought against. I want
to look back and say we had an impact. We didn't just help connect millions and hopefully down the road billions of people and help them find their special someone. We actually cleaned up the broken system along the way.
There are millions of success stories, but also a few horror stories. I'm thinking worse Tin Tinder Swindler, for example. Bad things happen everywhere, but that has to keep you up at night.
It does, It does, But I think we have to accept reality at the same time. And reality is you cannot control humans. You cannot control what people do. You can put the guardrails in place.
You can control what what technology they have access.
To correct, but is that really going to prohibit bad behavior in the end. Because you can also set a speed limit on the freeway, require seat belts, put every stop sign up along the way, put police officers on the road. People will still speed and they will still cause fatal accidents. We can try to reduce them, but you cannot completely eradicate anything bad from happening. But what you can do is you can control how you react, and how you respond and how you improve, And this
is the guiding principle. When bad things happen, we take a really hard look at it, a really self aware, really honest look, and we say, what did we do to contribute to this? What did we miss? What did we not have in place that could have either maybe not prevented it because it was so out of our control and we might have been just the starting point. But what could we have done to detect that this would have happened? What could we have done to better
predict that this was going to happen? How can we help hold the broader community accountable to prevent this in the future. And these are the questions we have. How do we engage with victims? What support do we put in place? We offer all sorts of trauma support for bad things that happen, and we have a safety center, among many other efforts. But we'll never be done with this. This is just the beginning of how we can help respond better in bad situations.
Do we need some sort of shared database of red flags?
We do, but candidly, it's very complex because sometimes the people that are reported are reported wrongly. Sometimes it leads to other injustices out in the world. That it's is spiral effect, and so this is top of the list in terms of priorities.
How do you think the pandemic changed dating? You know?
Or did the pandemic maybe change dating fundamentally. I just wonder if it gave people a moment of clarity where they thought, you know what, I don't want to be lonely. Maybe I do think about have to think harder about finding a partner.
Yes, I think the pandemic really highlighted that having a lot of transactional relationships is not true joy and it's not fulfilling, and that having real, meaningful relationships is exactly how we survive.
How do you determine who's a bad actor?
So we have incredible machine learning algorithms that really are predictive of bad behavior even before another member might be exposed to someone. So every single day, people that come into our ecosystem different triggers, different things that they do. Our technology actually detects those behavioral triggers and those behavioral rhythms if you will, and says no, this is not.
Allowed on our product.
Our WASP technology actually detects, deters, and blocks a lot of people from ever even engaging on our products. Beyond that, we really listen to our customers. When someone sends feedback, we take it very seriously and it goes through a different set of terms and conditions. Was this directly in violation of our industry leading terms and conditions lists?
Right?
Was this abusive? Did this have hate speech? Was this at risk? It's the or violence. So it goes through this entire system of where does this fall. Now, if someone violated any of that, they are gone.
They do not get to be on our product.
But it's also more nuanced than that, because someone might just behave in a way that makes someone feel a bit uncomfortable. Someone might behave in a way that felt rude,
but not necessarily in violation to anything. And this is where we see a ton of opportunity to really lean into karma systems of sorts and really engineer a kinder community more broadly and allowing our customers to actually have our other customers backs, to highlight good people, and to downgrade from a visibility standpoint those folks that just aren't behaving.
Right, It sounds like trust is really important to you. That's something that you and Bumble value. Do you have any advice for someone like Mark Zuckerberg, who might be needing to think a little harder about how to.
Bring that into the platform.
I don't have any direct advice for any of the folks out there running the the products that maybe don't make this their number one. I'll put the advice out there for future founders. I think future founders have a lot of opportunities here to think about how this fits into their business strategy and to actually design their business
around this. You do not have to choose profit over ethics, and I think this was a big focus of ours from day one, that we wouldn't sacrifice our mission for eyeballs or for money, but I would say, you know, be really intentional, because once you scale a product, I imagine it's very hard to all of a sudden think about trust and safety after the fact. And so when people ask me about our competition, I wish them the best,
and I'm glad that they care about women now. I'm glad that safety is something they're thinking about after all these years, But it should have been foundational.
Do you see that.
Dating apps has fundamentally changed dating or do you believe it's fundamentally change dating even though the goal your goal is still love. You know what about the folks who feel like this is just it's so transactional.
Everybody out there can just go swipe, you know, on to.
The next one, and I, you know, I don't feel seen.
Well, it pains me to know that people feel that way and it's not something we dismiss candidly. That's a problem statement that stays in my head. So I don't want to ignore these things. I think you're better off listening and paying attention and hearing people and saying, oh, I'm sorry you feel that way, let me go find a solution for you. So do I really think that dating apps have made dating miserable?
No?
I think dating for people throughout a very long time, in its essence, has been something that has been.
A struggle for folks.
So I actually think technology and the way that we're operating out of this backward strategy of kind connections can actually help solve a lot of this over time.
What are the roo the things you're most excited about in the future where you're really where you're really passionate.
So I'm deeply passionate about a few things. And when I say a few, it's a lot of things. So I will try to narrow it down here for the sake of today. I'm still deeply excited about our mission, closing my eyes and thinking about a world where women don't have to go through the relationships I've gone through and mine. We're mild compared to what women go through
every day. But thinking about a world where communities are healthier because relationships are better and they're more equal, and what that can do to society over decades to come is really profound. But also just this broader relationship economy and this broader business of love. And I don't just mean romantic love. I mean love self, love, loving our friends, loving the doctor you choose, loving the people in your life,
and feeling fulfilled with those relationships. I think we're just inching our way into the very first inning of that opportunity.
Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Circuit. I'm Emily Chang. You can follow me on Twitter and Instagram at Emily Chang TV. You can watch new episodes of the Circuit on Bloomberg Television or on demand by downloading the Bloomberg app to your smart TV, and check out our other Bloomberg podcasts on Apple podcasts, the iHeartMedia app, or wherever you listen to shows and let us know what you think by leaving us a review. I'm your
host and executive producer. Our senior producer is Lauren Ellis. Our associate producer is Lizzie Phillip. Our editor is Sebastian Escobar. Thanks so much for listening.