After battling an exhausting personal lawsuit, she was on the brink of giving up.
But one meeting with an elusive Russian tech mogul reignited her spirit.
Yesterday, she became the youngest woman to take a company public, and a billionaire.
Here’s how that meeting went 🧶👇
1) In June 2014, Whitney Wofle Herd found herself in the middle of the toughest professional and personal challenge she’d ever faced.
She was suing the company she co-founded, Tinder, for sexual harassment.
2) She was stripped of co-founder title, received death threats from complete strangers, and was publicly humiliated.
Yet she still continued to fight.
3) After everything subsided, Whitney was drained.
“I was broken”
She retreated to her family’s house in Texas, away from the spotlight and the drama.
4) While Whitney was recovering, something else started coming into play.
Andrey Andreev, the British/Russian founder of Badoo, the world’s largest online dating network, took an interest in Whitney.
5) He’d been first captivated by her during a 2013 company dinner, while she was still at Tinder.
Badoo was now looking for a CMO and Andrey thought Whitney would be perfect. So he shot her an email.
6) After no response, Andrey, who maintains a purposeful secrecy, reached out through Whitney’s lawyers to get in touch.
Whitney’s reply was not what he was expecting.
7) She wasn’t interested. At all.
“Dream on. I'm not for hire"
But rather than deny Andrey over email, she decided to meet him in London and let him know face-to-face.
8) Whitney and Andrey met, and she made it very clear that she was not going to come work for him at Badoo.
But to his further surprise, she pitched him on a new startup idea she’d been quietly thinking about.
9) Merci.
Merci was a women’s only social network, all about empowerment, with no negativity or emphasis on physicality.
Andrey liked the idea and its theme…but felt Whitney should stick within her domain of expertise: dating.
10) Rather than head back home, Whitney stayed in London and spent time discussing with Andrey what combining her idea with a dating-concept would look like.
How could women feel more empowered?
"What if women make the first move, send the first message?”
11) She likened it to Cinderella, or a high school Sadie Hawkins dance where the girls ask the guys.
“What if we could hardwire that into a product?”
12) Andrey, fascinated with her talent and product intuition, offered to invest $10M in this still unnamed company.
Whitney accepted, and Bumble was born.
13) Yesterday at 9:30am ET, 6 years after founding Bumble, Whitney became the youngest woman to take a company public and a billionaire in the process.
Her journey has only just begun, and there's one thing you can be absolutely sure of.
She’ll keep making the first move.
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After the global success of the iPod, Steve Jobs wasn’t used to hearing the word “no.”
But when looking for the iPhone launch partner, that’s all he heard.
He had one last meeting with the only company who hadn't rejected him yet.
Here’s how he negotiated in that meeting 🧶👇
1) First, a bit of context:
Before the iPhone, the wireless phone industry could not have been more different than what it is today.
Wireless network providers (carriers) had pretty much all the control.
2) AT&T (then Cingular), Verizon, and others set the rules. They told phone makers how to spec the phones. They owned the distribution. They even controlled the phone’s software.
Phone manufacturers had little autonomy to do what they wanted.
In 1959, a Swedish engineer at Volvo patented what would become one of the greatest inventions of all time
Volvo stood to make billions
But after a meeting with Volvo's President, he decided to give it away for free - and it changed the world
Here’s how that meeting went 🧶👇
1) After receiving his mechanical engineering degree from a University in his hometown of Härnösand, Sweden, Nils Bohlin joined aircraft maker Saab to work on ejector seats.
For 16 years, he continued to focus on safety and was eventually designing complete pilot rescue systems.
2) Nils was anchored to the idea of safety above all else, and brought this same mentality to a welcoming team at Volvo.
There, he focused his attention on all the driver and passenger safety systems, starting with seatbelts.
After bombing the LSAT twice, a young college grad started selling fax machines door-to-door to pay her bills.
15 years later, she became the youngest self-made female billionaire ($1.1B)
One meeting with the right person helped turn her life around, and here's how it went 🧶👇
1) Born in Clearwater, FL, Sara Blakely was raised quite differently than most.
Her father taught her that failure was not only expected, but should be embraced.
At the dinner table he'd ask: “What'd you fail at this week?” If she didn’t have an answer, he’d be disappointed.
2) So when law school didn’t work out, Sara took it in stride and devoted herself to becoming the best fax machine salesman in the greater Atlanta area. And she did.
But after 7 long years, she couldn’t help but think, is this all she was going to do with her life?
1) After growing his auto-parts empire for 20 years, Shahid Khan turned to something else he loved. Football. A sport he was introduced to by his friends in college.
He'd always dreamed of owning his own sports team.
2) In Jan 2008, Georgia Frontiere, majority owner of the St. Louis Rams, passed away. This was Shahid's chance.
Prospective buyers who wanted to take Georgia’s slot wasted no time, immediately calling her children the same day her passing was announced.