Whitney Wolfe Herd is stepping down as CEO of Bumble after ten years
Whitney Wolfe Herd, who founded the female-focused dating app Bumble a decade ago, is stepping down and being replaced by Lidiane Jones, the CEO of workplace messaging platform Slack. Bumble said this on Monday.
Ms. Jones will succeed Ms. Wolfe Herd as CEO of Bumble on Jan. 2, the company said. Ms. Wolfe Herd will remain at Bumble as executive chairman. The news was reported earlier from The Wall Street Journal.
Ms Wolfe Herd, 34, who is also the co-founder of the dating app Tinder, said in a statement that she was passing the baton to a leader and a woman she deeply respected.
“This move to Executive Chairman gives me the opportunity to step up in a new and exciting role, return to my founder’s roots and bring tremendous passion and focus to this next chapter of growth,” said she.
Bumble, which requires women to make the first move, went public in 2021, briefly making Ms. Wolfe Herd one of the world’s few female billionaires. according to Bloomberg. In June, the dating app had 2.5 million paying users to Bumble’s second quarter earnings report. Bommel wants reports its third quarter results on Tuesday.
About a third of adults in the United States have used a dating app, according to reports a Pew Research Center survey carried out last year. But dating apps reported slow revenue increases and a slump in user growth last year, underscoring concerns among some investors that the sector is oversaturated, according to a Morgan Stanley Report.
The share price of Match Group, owner of dozens of online dating services including Tinder, Match.com, OkCupid, Hinge and Plenty of Fish, fell more than 15 percent on Wednesday, a day after the company has lowered its revenue forecasts for 2023 in its third-quarter earnings report. The number of users paying for Tinder fell 6 percent compared to the same period a year earlier, Match said.
Ms. Jones, a native of Brazil, took the helm of Slack, a workplace communications platform owned by Salesforce, in January. Previously, she was an executive at Salesforce and spent almost 13 years at Microsoft. She told The Wall Street Journal that she was focused on how Bumble could use artificial intelligence to speed up matchmaking in the app.
“As a woman who has spent her career in technology,” Ms. Jones said in a statement, “it is a gift to rely on my experience to lead a company dedicated to women and encouraging equality, integrity and kindness , all very personal and inspiring. to me.”