Whitney Wolfe Herd - A woman who made millions in the male world
Whitney Wolfe Herd is one of the most powerful entrepreneurs in the male world of technology. She is only 33 years old, but owing to the Bumble dating app she invented, she has already earned millions of dollars. Her story inspires and shows that women can do anything.
In 2019, Whitney Wolfe Herd was named the youngest billionaire in the world by Forbes.
After unexpectedly leaving Tinder in 2014, this genius built a dating app. Then she sued her former employer for sexual harassment and discrimination, claiming she was stripped of her co-founder title, and allegedly receiving threats and insulting text messages from her former boss, who was also her partner.
The case was quickly resolved by Tinder before Wolfe Herd embarked into the world of entrepreneurship on her own, with the help of Russian millionaire Andrei Andreev to build a rival dating app. That app is focused on providing a safer environment for women. The concept of the application is that only women can make the first contact.
Despite coming from a rich family, she has faced challenges in her career that many women in the technology industry have faced. Wolfe Herd took a job at Hatch Labs when she was 22 years old, where she met Sean Rad and Chris Gulczynski, who later joined Tinder's development team.
It is reported that she designed the logo and name of the application, as well as being responsible for the increase of Tinder's popularity among students.
She is now legally forbidden to speak about her Tinder experience, although the case was resolved for more than a million dollars. Sean Rad, the CEO of Tinder, quit shortly after that, and it's been suggested that he assaulted her.
After the legal battle, Whitney also faced fierce digital violence.
"I was overwhelmed with hatred on the Internet, with a lot of aggressive behavior, people calling me names, really painful things that I have never experienced. I felt as if all my self-esteem, any self-confidence I had, had been sucked out.“, she told.
She added that there were hard times when she thought „Well, that is it, i will no longer have a career, I am 24 years old, I came from one of the world's most popular technology companies, but the internet hates me“. It was a terrible time. Then one morning she woke up and thought „I'm going to rebuild."
Whitney usually wakes up every morning at 5:15 and immediately starts answering emails. The media even wrote that she wakes up every two hours during the night to check her inbox.
She admitted that she is just trying to stop it. She has no rest. She won't have a weekend. She hasn't lived like a 20-year-old since she founded Bumble in 2014.
In 2017, she married Michael Heard, a Texas oil heir, in a spectacular three-day wedding on the Amalfi Coast in Italy. They are the parents of one child.
The couple first met while skiing in Aspen in 2013, but Whitney saw him on a dating app for the first time.
She told the Telegraph, "He has a face you remember."
