Whitney Wolfe Herd, BA ’11, doesn’t have any traditional leadership or marketing training. She also doesn’t read leadership books. Yet the SMU alumna was the youngest woman to take a company public in the United States at age 31 with the dating app, Bumble.

Now a household name at age 34, Wolfe Herd built her women-first tech empire largely by following her intuition.

“I lead with the way I want people to feel from the brand,” Herd said. “I want people to feel empowered and inspired and encouraged. I want them to be pushed and challenged. Leadership to me is really, ‘How do you want to be treated?’”

Wolfe Herd’s career as a leader came full circle when she spoke at SMU Cox’s Leaders on Leadership event series in April to a packed room of listeners, eager to glean some wisdom from the young business leader, wife and mother.

She was an international studies major at SMU, having failed the test to get into the advertising school, she shared with the audience. But she later learned that international studies would help her understand people on a deep level and give her the marketing experience she needed.

Entrepreneurial even then, she decided to develop tote bags to benefit relief for the BP oil spill and sold them all over campus. Although it wasn’t her most successful business venture, it helped set the stage for her journey to success—one that SMU helped spark.

“SMU gives you this unbelievable worldly experience before you ever even embark into the world,” she said during her Leaders on Leadership session.

Wolfe Herd poses with Nick Ludwig BBA ’24, the student who proposed bringing her to campus to speak at the Leaders on Leadership series.

Journey to CEO

When Wolfe Herd graduated from SMU with her bachelor’s degree, seemingly everyone had a job lined up except her. She traveled around Southeast Asia for the summer and stumbled upon a tech incubator, where she took a chance on a promising new dating app. It was called Tinder.

She co-founded and launched the now-renowned platform on the SMU campus. Tinder grew exponentially, and Wolfe Herd stayed there for two years as vice president of marketing before she decided to venture out on her own to create something that would shift gender dynamics and put the power into the hands of women.

In 2014 she founded Bumble, a dating app where women make the first move. Today, with its recognizable branding, the app is wildly successful, and so is Wolfe Herd: She was named to Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in 2017 and 2018, and she famously rang the Nasdaq bell in 2021 holding her son when she took Bumble public.

But at Bumble’s beginning, Wolfe Herd faced many skeptics.

“You have to push people, because the reality is the leader sees things that other people don’t,” she said. “You have to have conviction. You have to be bold. You cannot let people push you over.”

“If I had listened to everybody around me when I was starting Bumble, there’d be no Bumble. It was a stupid idea, according to everybody. So that’s just part of being a leader. You have to just push through when everybody else disagrees with you.”

When Wolfe Herd created Bumble, she set out to be a “person-first” leader who cared about her employees and her customers. She responded to each member’s feedback email personally, answered questions as the customer service bot and sent flowers to a member who went through a breakup. She even wrote a public open letter to a man who sent inappropriate messages to a woman on the app despite being advised to keep it quiet.

“That was how I got close to the customer,” she said. “It’s how I understood their problems, their joys, their complaints.”

Of course, that kind of detail can’t be scaled from a thousand people to 200 million downloads worldwide. But Wolfe Herd said she works to keep that spirit alive and evangelize the same behavior to others.

“When I was starting Bumble, I always said, ‘How do I build a company to last 100 years? How can I make this thing outlast me?’” Inspired by larger-than-life brands such as Disney, Apple and Hermes, she strived to create a brand that would make people feel something.

Associate Dean Shane Goodwin, who says he met his own wife on Bumble, interviews founder Wolfe Herd on stage during her Leaders on Leadership session.

Leading by Example

Throughout the past decade, one of Wolfe Herd’s main missions with Bumble has been to improve the internet and online dating for women, while acknowledging that she and her company alone cannot completely prevent harassment.

“But a company like Bumble is trying to intervene and say, ‘We don’t like this.’ So that was kind of our beat,” she said. “That was who we became as a brand, which was just to stand up for women.

“This is not an anti-man thing. … Something that a lot of people don’t recognize is when a place is great for women, it’s actually great for everybody.”

When Wolfe Herd speaks at SMU, as she did when she gave the University’s 2021 commencement address, her energy and passion for this cause seem boundless—but even she admitted she gets burned out at times by the to-do list and the pressure. When she hears Bumble’s success stories, she said they make all her hard work worth it.

 “When I feel exhausted, the universe delivers me a story and all of a sudden I’m recharged like an Energizer bunny,” she said. “If you find something that makes your heart light up, you’ll keep the magic.”

Whitney Wolfe Herd and Shane Goodwin interact with the audience during their conversation.

Getting Back to Inspiration

A few months ago, after 10 years as CEO, Wolfe Herd stepped forward into a new role and ushered in      a new CEO, remaining founder and executive chair at Bumble. Taking a company public comes with lawyers and HR people and finance representatives, and it can often put the focus on the left brain rather than the right.

“The reality is roles change,” she said. “When it gets serious, it gets serious, and you don’t get to be creative anymore. You don’t get to focus on the magical side of things anymore. … I wanted to get back to the inspiring stuff.”

Now, Wolfe Herd can have creative input with the brand while doing more of what she loves on a personal level—spending time with her family and practicing meditation after working for years with no mental breaks. It’s important, she said, for up-and-coming business leaders to maintain hobbies and passions and not lose sight of who they are for the sake of their company.

“You have to operate for you,” she said. “You have to know who you are. … I just did what was right for me, and I didn’t really let people’s opinions derail me.”

In addition to owning who you are, it’s also important to have a good attitude and a can-do mindset in business, Wolfe Herd said. “[Founders] are ridiculous optimists; they just think the impossible is possible.”

For Bumble’s next phase, she’s leaning into her creative role.    

“Bumble still has a huge runway, and we’re incubating inside of Bumble. The fun thing about my new job is, I basically have a little art shop now where I just get to dream, but it’s in this big publicly traded company.”

That’s exactly what Wolfe Herd set out to do. Now, the yellow-suit-wearing entrepreneur is watching the business she started from a novel idea grow and evolve beyond herself. She told a story, she understood the customer and she wrote the fairytale she wanted for her brand.

“It’s about building a company that can outlive you, that can change lives, that can improve lives, that can have impact—and about loving what you do at the end of the day.”

To sign up for the 2024-2025 Leaders on Leadership series, visit https://www.smu.edu/cox/leadership-series.