Whitney Wolfe Herd

The move

2014. Whitney Wolfe Herd is a 24-year-old co-founder of Tinder. She leaves and files a sexual harassment lawsuit against the leadership. It settles. Most people in her spot would have moved on quietly. Signed the non-disparagement. Joined another startup. Stayed off social.

She starts Bumble instead. A dating app where women have to message first. Her view was that the worst of online dating, the harassment, the flood of messages, the power all on one side, came from how the product was built. Change the rules of the chat and the rest follows.

Bumble launches in December 2014. Within five years it has over 100M users. Wolfe Herd takes it public on Nasdaq in February 2021, aged 31. The youngest woman to take a company public in US history. She rang the bell with her 18-month-old son on her hip.

She took the women-first idea into Bumble BFF and Bumble Bizz, and into countries where it cost more culturally. The thing she got punished for at Tinder, being a woman leading in tech, became the whole point of the company that beat Tinder in eight major countries.

Why it was risky

She launched a direct rival to the company she'd just sued, in a market her old employer owned, with an idea the industry saw as marketing. Most VCs wouldn't back a women-first dating app. Her bet was that what women were putting up with was loud enough to pay for itself, if someone changed the experience.

The numbers

The first dating company built by flipping who makes the first move. Bumble has shaped almost every social and dating app launched since.

The lesson

The app wasn't the risk. Launching a rival to the company that had just tried to silence her was. Wolfe Herd bet that what women were quietly putting up with was only there because nobody had built anything better. R.I.S.K. is for founders who spot the thing the market calls a complication and build the company on it.