From harassed employee to billionaire — the story of Whitney Wolfe Herd

Whitney Wolfe Herd became the world’s youngest, female, self-made billionaire at the age of 31 after taking her company, Bumble, public in 2021. For the record, she was on Forbes 30 under 30 list in its 2017 and 2018 editions.

When Whitney was 22 years old, she started working at a startup running a dating app called Matchbox. Whitney rose to become the Vice President of Marketing at Matchbox and changed the name of the dating app to Tinder, which means “dry, flammable material”. She grew the user base for Tinder, making it a global phenomenon, and popularised it on college campuses.

While working at Tinder, Whitney began dating Justin Mateen, one of the co-founders of the company. However, following their breakup, there were allegations of abuse and with tension growing amongst the company executives, Whitney resigned from Tinder in April 2014, sued Tinder for sexual harassment, and reportedly received more than US$1 million and company stocks as part of a settlement. However, following her departure, she began receiving threats on social media that caused her severe panic attacks.

Having received a lot of vitriol from a section of the online community, she decided to launch Bumble, a female focused dating app. Presently, Bumble is the second most popular dating app with over 100 million users worldwide and was listed on NASDAQ with a valuation of over 14bn. Whitney achieved this success without manipulating numbers and carrying out unethical practices.

What she consistently did was display tenacity and continuously create valuable services. I guess in the end, we truly are responsible for how we choose to approach our challenges. We rise above them, or we fall to the level of the challenges.