Whitney Wolfe Herd stepping down as CEO of Bumble

Slack's CEO will take the reins

AUSTIN (Austin Business Journal) -- Bumble Inc. co-founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd is stepping down almost a decade after starting the Austin-based dating app company.

Herd will officially step down as CEO on Jan. 2, and she will be succeeded by Lidiane Jones, who is currently CEO at workforce communications company Slack, according to a Nov. 6 announcement. Herd will remain at Bumble as executive chair.

Herd founded Bumble in 2014 after being a co-founder and vice president of marketing at Tinder. She built Bumble into a fierce rival with a differentiated approach to dating – requiring women to make the first move and following up with a series of user experience rules that helped keep women more comfortable and safer in the rapidly emerging world of app-based dating. In addition to its namesake dating app, Bumble also operates Bumble for Friends, Badoo and Fruitz.

Bumble went on to become a billion-dollar company and had its initial public offering in 2021. It is perhaps no surprise that Bumble's next CEO will also be a woman.

Read the full story at Austin Business Journal.