For Bumble, the Future Isn’t Female, It’s Female Marketing

Whitney Wolfe Herd remembered the day she decided to go after dick pics.

“It started with me barging into a meeting and being like, ‘Guys, we’re going to make a law, and we’re going to make dick pics illegal!’ ” she recalled. Wolfe Herd founded and runs Bumble, the dating and networking app that says it offers women a safe way to meet people online. Bumble had already banned users from posting such pictures to their profiles and was working on software that could detect them when sent in a message. Yet according to a company user survey, about a third of Bumble women had received lewd photos from men, whether through text or other social media that Bumble couldn’t control. “I was just like, ‘This is bullshit,’ ” Wolfe Herd said. If it were illegal to flash someone on the street, she reasoned, there should also be a law against flashing people online. Bumble is based in Austin, so Texas seemed like a good place to start.