It was Andrey Andreev, who was Badoo’s head and was co -creator of Bumble. And then you faced another scandal in the workplace after the bumble started and plugged it. In 2019, Forbes published an investigation and was charged with creating a toxic and sexist work environment at Badoo’s London headquarters. He denied these accusations, but eventually sold his majority share shortly after the article was published. It is striking that you had to deal with the second important case of the alleged bad behavior of men in your professional life At the same time, you built a society whose brand was to strengthen women. What are you doing now? I think terrible. Absolutely worst scenario. Obviously I felt bad for anyone who felt how they felt, and I didn’t know about any of these accusations that for many people are like: “Whitney is a liar. The honest truth is that I was in Austin that ran Bumble, as a separate store. I have been shocked for Andrey to be honest about my personal interaction with him, which, sincere, I would never see anything.
There were a number of accusations of different times. Right. But I think most of the article covered things that were previous days. I’m not trying to drop again. This is not what I do. I try to say that if you look at the beginning of 2010, we all saw movies. WeWorks and Ubers. When you close your eyes in 2012 and think about technology companies, you see beer pong and all men together. I don’t think you close your eyes and remember the progressive office space. What will you take? I don’t know. Maybe I just found myself in two of the only situations, or was this image a greater topic of what was ubiquitous at that time in the technical culture?
The second thing about this period is that it is such a moment of technological optimism. All these applications were published, supported by incomprehensible amounts of money. They promised to solve so many world problems. Did you believe it then? I did it. If you want to get on the app, see who is around you, immediately connect with them and suddenly end up with someone you would never have met if it wasn’t for this interface that felt really transformation. It was also possible to order a black car for Uber. We were just at the moment – God, if people are listening to us right now, they will be like, “These people, what? They lived in a dark age?” (Laughs)
Hey, listen, I remember time in front of mobile phones. So you know where I’m going. It was a huge jump in terms of efficiency and ease. I couldn’t believe we were in the middle of it, and then I don’t say it in a self-designed way-it’s really hard to do twice. So many people have been over the years like, “God, she is only lucky, she was wearing very yellow, she’s a blond.” I am not quite sure that people are aware of how difficult it is to gain a critical weight in the application twice.
In the next Bumble era, you had a lot of growth during the pandemic when everyone was stuck in your applications. It was a huge moment. In 2021 you published, ring the bell, the child on the side and the growth of users next year begins to slow down. What do you think happened? My opinion It is that I have operated this company for the first few years as a quality over a quantitative approach. The phone provider came to us soon. They said, “We love your brand, we want to give your app pre -programmed on all our phones, and when people buy our phones, your app will be on your home screen and get millions of download for free.” I said, “Thank you very much but not thank you.” No one could understand what I was doing in the world and I said it was a bad way to grow. It is not a social network, it is a double -sided marketplace. One person continues and must see someone who is relevant to them. If you flood the system only infinitely – you won’t walk on the streets of New York and want to meet every person you go through. Why would you assume that someone would like to do it on the app? This is not a content platform where you can only move and move and move, and the scale controls the results. It happened that in the pandemic and other chapters the growth was the king. It was welcome because the end was everything.
