Whitney Wolfe Herd

Wolfe Herd was born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah. Her father is a property developer and her mother is a homemaker Wolfe Herd went on to attend Southern Methodist University in Texas, and was a member of Kappa Kappa Gamma. After earning a degree in International Studies, Wolfe Herd did a brief stint in Southeast Asia. She's still close with many of her sorority sisters and even employs a few at Bumble. Wolfe Herd also launched her first business at 19 while still in college. After the Deepwater Horizon oil spill pumped crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico for five months in 2010, Wolfe Herd enlisted celebrity stylist Patrick Aufdenkamp to design tote bags that could be sold to help fund relief efforts. The resulting nonprofit, called the Help Us Get Cleaned Up Project, became nationally known after Nicole Richie and Rachel Zoe were spotted with Wolfe Herd's bags. At 22, Wolfe Herd was hired to work at startup incubator Hatch Labs in Los Angeles. After hours, she starting collaborating with a group that was looking to build a dating app. That app, which is now known as Tinder, quickly grew into a global phenomenon with Wolfe Herd's help. She even came up with the name Tinder, She is credited as a cofounder and spent two years as the company's vice president of marketing. During her tenure at Tinder, Wolfe Herd dated fellow cofounder and her then-boss Justin Mateen. She left the company shortly after they split, and filed a lawsuit alleging that she had experienced sexual harassment and discrimination. The legal dispute was settled privately outside of court, with neither party admitting to wrongdoing. Wolfe Herd launched Bumble in 2014, originally planning to build a female-focused social network instead of a dating app. Wolfe Herd was persuaded to forgo her original plan for the app by former business partner and Russian billionaire Andrey Andreev. Andreev owned a 79% stake in Bumble. Wolfe Herd has since expanded the app with additional services to help women meet new friends and expand their professional networks, called Bumble BFF and Bumble Bizz respectively. Bumble has also invested in other apps, including gay dating app Chappy, Bumble now says it has 75 million users in 150 countries, making it second only to Tinder in popularity. Wolfe Herd married Texas oil heir Michael Herd in an elegant three-day ceremony on Italy's Amalfi Coast in 2017. He is now the president of the oil and gas field operator founded by his late grandfather, Herd Producing Company, and also owns a high-end farm to table restaurant called the Grove Kitchen + Gardens. The pair have a son named Bobby after Michael's late grandfather. The Herd family splits time between their two Texas houses. They also own a vacation home in Aspen. In July 2019, she celebrated her 30th birthday with a multi-day party on a yacht off the coast of Capri, Italy. In January 2025 Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd announced she will return as the company’s CEO in mid-March.