Whitney Wolfe Herd: Dating app entrepreneur

Summary

Episode Summary: Whitney Wolfe Herd: Dating App Entrepreneur

Good Bad Billionaire, a BBC World Service podcast hosted by Simon Jack and Zing Singh, delves into the lives of the world's wealthiest individuals to uncover their journeys, motivations, and the impact they've had on society. In the episode titled "Whitney Wolfe Herd: Dating App Entrepreneur," released on October 7, 2024, the hosts explore the rise, challenges, and complexities of Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder of Bumble and co-founder of Tinder.

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Introduction to Whitney Wolfe Herd

Simon Jack and Zing Singh open the episode by introducing Whitney Wolfe Herd, lauding her as the "Queen of the Swipes." They highlight her unique position as the world's youngest self-made female billionaire (though this status was short-lived) and set the stage for a deep dive into her entrepreneurial journey.

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Early Life and Background

Whitney Wolfe Herd was born in 1989 into a relatively affluent family in Salt Lake City, Utah. Her father was a property developer, and her mother was a stay-at-home wife dedicated to raising Whitney and her younger sister. Growing up in a community dominated by the Mormon faith, Whitney was exposed to strict gender roles, which later influenced her views on gender dynamics.

Key Quote:

Whitney Wolfe Herd: "I was mentally absorbing a lot of things that I felt were call it assigned or unfair, an important episode." [04:28]

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Founding Tinder

After moving to Texas for her education, Whitney attended Southern Methodist University, where she became a prominent member of the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority. Her social networking skills were evident early on as she launched two businesses with Patrick of Dean Campf, leveraging her connections with celebrities like Nicole Richie and Kate Bosworth.

Post-graduation, Whitney ventured into the tech startup scene by working at Hatch Labs, a startup incubator in Los Angeles. There, she joined Sean Rad at Cardify, an app allowing users to swipe through retail loyalty cards. When Cardify was abandoned, Whitney became a co-founder of Tinder, initially named Matchbox. Her marketing prowess was instrumental in Tinder's rapid growth, particularly on college campuses.

Key Quote:

Whitney Wolfe Herd: "I definitely flunked a few classes, but then I also got 100 in some because I was so passionate and loved it." [05:43]

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Sexual Harassment Lawsuit Against Tinder

Despite Tinder's success, Whitney's tenure was marred by personal and professional challenges. She filed a sexual harassment and discrimination lawsuit against Tinder, alleging severe emotional abuse from then-boyfriend and co-founder Justin Mateen. The lawsuit accused the company of gender discrimination, leading to Whitney being stripped of her co-founder title.

Key Quote:

Whitney Wolfe Herd: "I took this company public at 31 years old with my baby on my hip, still dealing with postpartum depression, still not sleeping through the night, it has been a blur." [02:53]

The lawsuit was settled for approximately $1 million, resulting in Whitney becoming a millionaire at 24. This tumultuous period fueled her determination to prove her resilience and capability in the tech industry.

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Creation and Rise of Bumble

Post-lawsuit, Whitney aimed to create a more women-friendly social media platform. With the influence of Russian entrepreneur Andrei Andreev, founder of Badoo, she co-founded Bumble. The app was designed to empower women by allowing only them to make the first move in heterosexual matches, a stark contrast to Tinder's model.

Bumble's launch in December 2014 was marked by aggressive marketing strategies reminiscent of Tinder's early days. Whitney leveraged her sorority network, organizing campus tours, hosting events, and engaging with meme creators to build a strong user base. By 2017, Bumble had amassed 22 million users and was recognized as America's fastest-growing dating app, outpacing Tinder's growth rate.

Key Quote:

Whitney Wolfe Herd: "We're all deserving of a seat at the table." [21:34]

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Bumble's IPO and Billionaire Status

In February 2021, Bumble Inc. went public, making Whitney the youngest female chief executive to take a U.S. company public at the age of 31. The IPO was a significant milestone, valuing the company at nearly $9 billion and catapulting Whitney into billionaire status. Her public persona, which included ringing the NASDAQ bell with her infant son, symbolized her blend of professional success and personal dedication.

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Decline and Loss of Billionaire Status

However, Whitney's billionaire status was ephemeral. By autumn 2021, Bumble reported a decline in user growth for the first time since its IPO. This downturn, coupled with broader tech stock declines, led to a sharp reduction in Bumble's valuation. By November 2021, Whitney's net worth had fallen to approximately $940 million, and the company's stock continued to plummet.

In January 2024, Whitney stepped down as CEO, transitioning to the role of executive chair. This move coincided with Morrison's share price hitting an all-time low, further diminishing her financial standing. Consequently, her net worth remained below the billionaire threshold, currently estimated at around $400 million.

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Evaluation: Good, Bad, or Just Another Billionaire

Simon Jack and Zing Singh assess Whitney's journey across several categories to determine her standing:

1. Wealth (Score: 1/10 to 2/10):

   • Simon: Gives her a 1, noting she is no longer a billionaire.
   • Zing: Awards a 2, acknowledging her brief billionaire status.

2. Rags to Riches (Score: 1/10 to 2/10):

   • Both hosts agree that Whitney did not fit the traditional rags-to-riches narrative, owing to her affluent upbringing and influential networks.

3. Villainy (Score: 1/10 to 3/10):

   • Simon: Assigns a 1, believing Whitney was more wronged than wronging.
   • Zing: Suggests a 2, acknowledging societal criticisms of dating apps.

4. Philanthropy (Score: 4/10 to 5/10):

   • Simon: Rates her a 4, highlighting Bumble's targeted initiatives like the Bumble Fund and community grants.
   • Zing: Scores her a 5, recognizing her efforts despite not following traditional philanthropic avenues.

5. Power (Score: 2/10):

   • Both agree Whitney does not wield significant global power, though she held considerable influence within the tech industry.

6. Legacy (Score: 6/10 to 7/10):

   • Simon: Awards a 6, acknowledging her impact despite not fully realizing her legacy.
   • Zing: Rates a 7, viewing her as a cautionary figure in Silicon Valley's gender dynamics.

Final Judgment:

• Simon: Considers Whitney "Just Another Billionaire," even though she is no longer a billionaire.
• Zing: Aligns with Simon, labeling her as "Just Another Billionaire."

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Conclusion: Just Another Billionaire

Both hosts conclude that Whitney Wolfe Herd embodies the archetype of "Just Another Billionaire." While she has significantly impacted the dating app landscape and championed women's empowerment through Bumble, her brief stint as a billionaire and subsequent financial decline place her in the category of influential yet transient billionaires. They acknowledge her resilience and pioneering efforts but refrain from labeling her as unequivocally "Good" or "Bad."

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Notable Quotes

• Whitney on Balancing Work and Personal Life:

  "I look at my life as a division of work and personal. I blend it and maybe that works for me and maybe it doesn't work for someone else. But I will tell you, it is hard." [02:53]

• Whitney on Empowering Women:

  "The power lunch is no longer just for men. We all deserve a seat at the table." [21:34]

• Whitney Reflecting on the Girl Boss Era:

  "It is disappointing to see just how little women have advanced. I've watched the fall of what people call the girl boss era. That's tragic in my opinion." [30:31]

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Final Thoughts

Whitney Wolfe Herd's story is a testament to the complexities of entrepreneurship, especially for women in the tech industry. Her journey from co-founding Tinder to creating Bumble, facing personal and professional challenges, and navigating the volatile landscape of tech startups offers valuable insights into the intersection of gender, power, and business. While her billionaire status was fleeting, her influence on modern dating and female empowerment remains significant.

Transcript

[Simon Jack]

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the uk.

[Michael Lewis]

Hey there, it's Michael Lewis, author of Going Infinite Moneyball, the Blind side and Liars Poker. On the latest season of my podcast, against the Rules, I'm exploring what it means to be a sports fan in America and what the rise of sports betting is doing to our teams, our states and ourselves. Join me and listen to against the Rules on America's number one podcast network, iHeartradio. Open your free iHeart app and search against the Rules. Listen to against the rules on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.

[Simon Jack]

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[Xing Singh]

Welcome to Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service. Each episode we pick a billionaire and we find out how they made their money.

[Simon Jack]

Then we judge them. Are they good, bad, or just another billionaire?

[Xing Singh]

My name is Xing Singh and I'm a journalist, author and podcaster.

[Simon Jack]

And I'm Simon Jack. I'm the BBC's business editor.

[Xing Singh]

And on this episode we have the Queen of the swipes.

[Simon Jack]

Yes, you're going to have to help me with this episode because having been married for nearly 20 years, I got married before dating apps became a thing.

[Xing Singh]

So this is going to be a wild look into the landscape of modern dating for you and I'm very excited to be your tour guide.

[Simon Jack]

It is witch Whitney Wolf Heard, the founder of Bumble and co founder, one of the co founders of Tinder.

[Xing Singh]

So Whitney Wolfe Heard became the world's youngest self made female billionaire at the age of 31.

[Simon Jack]

We're going to tell you the story of why she filed a sexual harassment and discrimination lawsuit against Tinder and how.

[Xing Singh]

The public scandal inspired her to create Bumble.

[Simon Jack]

She's part of a small group, one of a very small number of female tech founders and that's part of the story in a way.

[Xing Singh]

It really is. But unlike many of our other tech founders we've discussed in the show, she doesn't code and she didn't go to business school.

[Simon Jack]

In fact, she was a popular sorority girl. We'll talk a bit more about what that is later. She had a great eye for marketing.

[Xing Singh]

Though, and if you were around in the 2010s she was on the COVID of magazines in power suits, hanging out with famous friends like Reese Witherspoon and Meghan Markle.

[Simon Jack]

Her image was girl boss, waking up every two hours during the night to check her inbox.

[Xing Singh]

Let's listen to her speaking to BBC News tech reporter Shona McCallum in 2023 about having it all I don't really.

[Whitney Wolfe Herd]

Look at my life as a division of work and personal. I blend it and maybe that works for me and maybe it doesn't work for someone else. But I will tell you, it is hard. It is very hard if you look at the fact that I took this company public at 31 years old with my baby on my hip, still dealing with postpartum depression, still not sleeping through the night, you know, it's been a blur.

[Simon Jack]

And as we just heard there, she took her female friendly dating app Bumble public and that made her a billionaire.

[Xing Singh]

But within 10 months she was stripped of that billionaire title. Listen on to find out why.

[Simon Jack]

Let's first go back to the beginning and see how she gets from zero to a million. She was born in 1989 to a pretty wealthy family.

[Xing Singh]

Yeah, her father was a property developer. Her mom actually was a stay at home wife. She stayed at home to raise Whitney and her younger sister.

[Simon Jack]

She was raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, which is home to the US's Mormon community. But she was from roughly quarter of citizens of Salt Lake City who aren't Mormons.

[Xing Singh]

Yeah, her mother was Catholic and her dad was Jewish. But because the Mormon faith was so dominant in that neck of the woods, the conservative values of that religion pretty much dominated their community.

[Simon Jack]

And she said it's quite assigned as far as gender roles go. Women are expected to get married, have children even in their late teens or early twenties. Men are expected to provide for the family at a young age.

[Xing Singh]

She said that looking back, these kind of attitudes laid the groundwork for what came later. With Bumble, that female focused dating app. She says, I was mentally absorbing a lot of things that I felt were call it assigned or unfair, an important episode.

[Simon Jack]

She describes receiving severe emotional abuse from her first born in high school, and her mother recalls going to the boyfriend's house after being told he'd threatened Whitney with a gun.

[Xing Singh]

Yeah, it's really, really sad stuff. One friend actually called it one of the most Horrific relationships she'd ever seen.

[Simon Jack]

And Whitney said that relationship drove her ambition and helped inform her understanding of what was wrong with gender dynamics.

[Xing Singh]

The ex boyfriend in question has denied all these claims. He's told Time magazine that they were absurd and fictitious, and he was never convicted of a crime.

[Simon Jack]

But it feels like an important, formative moment for what she goes on to do. At 18, she left that relationship and Utah to attend Southern Methodist University in Texas. She failed to get a place on her desired marketing degree. Instead, she opted for something called global studies.

[Xing Singh]

Now, she actually thinks that this is the best marketing degree that she could have done because it allowed her to understand why people behave as they do. And human behavior is going to form a very important part of what makes dating apps like Bumble and Tinder so attractive.

[Simon Jack]

Whitney wasn't a brilliant student. She said, I definitely flunked a few classes, but then I also got 100 in some because I was so passionate and loved it.

[Xing Singh]

But socially, Whitney was doing very well. She became a popular member of the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority. And I think at this point, we need to explain what the sorority system is in the states.

[Simon Jack]

So sororities and fraternities are organizations set up on campuses within U.S. universities, and they can go across lots of different campuses. So you usually have an initiation. You. Once you're a member of sorority or fraternity, it tends to be kind of for life. You put it on your resume. It's a networking tool. So it does last a long time.

[Xing Singh]

Yeah. And I think a lot of sororities and fraternities. Am I right in saying this? Actually live together on campus.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah, that's right. They sort of have a club there. They have their own customs. Some have their own handshakes and parties. And parties, for sure.

[Xing Singh]

And Whitney Wolfhood actually did utilize those sorority networks, as we'll see later on. And she left a big impression on her sorority sisters, as that's what you call people who are part of the same sorority. One friend remembers, I would spend days locked in my room studying, and Whitney would be like, let's go out way.

[Simon Jack]

Of meeting new people and to network. And she got busy doing that almost straight away, because during university, she launched two businesses with celebrity stylist friend Patrick of Dean campf.

[Xing Singh]

So the first was a nonprofit selling bamboo tote bags to raise money for charity. So this got national press attention when celebrities that you remember from this era, if you're sort of the same age as Whitney, Nicole Richie, Kate Bosworth, Rachel Zoe, they were photographed with a tote bag. So Presumably Patrick has something to do with this because he was best mates of celebrities like Lindsay Lohan.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah, I remember that period from afar. Next, she and Patrick launched a for profit clothing business. They had seven tie dye styles made in Nepal that was picked up by two retailers in Los Angeles.

[Xing Singh]

After university, she went traveling through Southeast Asia. She said she was doing charity work at local orphanages.

[Simon Jack]

And she remembers finding it difficult to meet people traveling and wondered why there wasn't an app for this, an idea she kept stewing away at the back of her head.

[Xing Singh]

Now, after she came back from traveling, she went to Los Angeles and through friends, she began working at a startup incubator called Hatch Labs.

[Simon Jack]

Now, an incubator is exactly what it sounds like. You know, you put very small babies at the beginning of their lives, their young lives, in an incubator, sometimes to try and nurture them to health. That's basically what happens with a very fledgling little company that's different from accelerators. They take ones which have already got a bit of a business going and they try and expand them really quick. Incubators is for that first period.

[Xing Singh]

So it's stuff like, for instance, office space, mentorship, access to investors, like the really kind of basic stuff.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah, yeah. It's not lots of cash, it's sort of foundational support advice.

[Xing Singh]

But it was through Hatch Labs at the age of 22, that Whitney started working as a sales rep for a startup called Cardify. Now, this was an app that allowed users to swipe through retail loyalty cards. And this was led by a guy called Sean Rad.

[Simon Jack]

So that's where the swiping first comes in.

[Xing Singh]

Yeah, really interesting.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah. Cardify was eventually abandoned, but Whitney joined Sean and other Cardify members to found a new venture, a dating app that used the same swipe mechanism.

[Xing Singh]

And Whitney, with her background, became vice president of marketing. And together as a group, they called it Tinder. So the company's original name was Matchbox, but Whitney says that she came up with the idea to call it Tinder because they decided it was too similar to match.com?

[Simon Jack]

So let's do a bit of background on digital dating because it's been around for longer than you think.

[Xing Singh]

Oh, yeah, for far longer than you think. So let's rewind time back to 1965. Yes. Two Harvard students use an IBM 1401 computer, which was at the time around the size of two fridges, to create the very first computer based matchmaking service, which they called Operation Match. This involved a 75 question survey and it cost Those who were Looking for Love. $3.

[Simon Jack]

Jump forward 30 years to 1995. The World Wide Web had recently been made public, and the first online dating site, match.com was launched.

[Xing Singh]

Its founder, a guy called Gary Kreme, understood they needed to gather as much data about users as possible, like their attributes, their interests, their desires.

[Simon Jack]

And Gary also importantly, understood that he and other men weren't the key customer, because, as he put it, every woman would bring 100 geeky guys.

[Xing Singh]

Yeah, he had to actually hire a woman to help him attract female users to his site. And one of the things she did was she made sure that he got rid of weight categories. As you can imagine, this would not have been very popular among women.

[Simon Jack]

But online dating still wasn't the way most people got together. In 2008, just 3% of all Americans said they'd used an online dating site.

[Xing Singh]

In fact, the first actual dating app launch dates back to 2009, just after the launch of the iPhone3. And it was Grindr, which is made specifically for the gay community, which helped men find active users within a specific geographic area.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah, and in 2012, when Tinder is launched, some heterosexual women may have used a dating website, but they're not accustomed to finding partners through their mobile phones.

[Xing Singh]

Yep. So it might sound strange to anybody who now just uses dating apps to date, but there was a time where you could meet people without the use of your phone.

[Simon Jack]

What? Yeah. What? Just normal life through normal life. In my era, it was friends of friends, friends of friends.

[Xing Singh]

Blind dates.

[Simon Jack]

Exactly. So Whitney was Tinder's secret weapon for growing its user base on college campuses. Remember, she was the only woman at the top level of Tinder at this point. So she's a kind of lone figure in a way of being in a startup tech company, being a senior female executive, not that common.

[Xing Singh]

It's interesting as well that she was also using college campuses to sell the app, because that was also a feature of the early days of Facebook.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah, she would visit all the sororities and fraternities at her university to sign up members and printed T shirts saying, don't ask me for my number. Find me on Tinder, which her girlfriends wore to bars.

[Xing Singh]

She toured college campuses. She threw pizza parties. She gave out free thongs. I do not think that you could get away with that in the teenage.

[Simon Jack]

Free thongs. Okay. That's an interesting brand association. Anyway, it was a classic startup in this period. Missing meals, not seeing friends with family, working all the hours. God sends very little sleep.

[Xing Singh]

And they were obviously a very Close knit group. Over at Tinder, she actually started dating one of the co founders and the chief marketing officer, Justin Mateen.

[Simon Jack]

All their efforts paid off. Tinder caught on like wildfire.

[Xing Singh]

Within two years, the app was matching more than 12 million people a day. There was an astonishing billion daily swipes left or right.

[Simon Jack]

Like I say, this is a period when I was sort of married and I'm happily married.

[Xing Singh]

I tried to get you to download Tinder for research purposes.

[Simon Jack]

You said no, I think that's a bad move. Either Tinder or Bumble. I just can't run the risk that one of my wife's friends will see me suddenly pop up on this dating app. But what was going on, you know, society wise? What was the vibe about these things? Were they embraced? Were they seen as suspicious? How did people feel about them?

[Xing Singh]

I remember the kind of launch of Tinder and dating apps more generally. I mean, it's almost nostalgic. I think everyone felt like it was a really innocent, exciting thing to happen, that you could, you know, rather than get all dressed up and go on a night out and have to put all that investment meeting strangers, you could simply just kind of scroll through your phone and look at people that you might be interested in. It was that sense of convenience and novelty, I think, that really made it catch on.

[Simon Jack]

And yet the idea of swipe left, swipe left, swipe left. There's a derogatory association with that, isn't it? You know, I'm swiping on you, I'm swiping on you. Which means no thanks. There's an inbuilt rejection in the process as well.

[Xing Singh]

Yeah, definitely. And also for people who aren't very good at condensing their whole personality and life into a few kind of choice images and a few funny bio, you know, you don't really tend to do very well on dating apps because it's so image focused.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah. And I'm just trying to remember back to the Mark Zuckerberg episode we did, because obviously one of the key things that Zuckerberg did on Facebook was he realized that putting on whether you were single or not single was quite an important thing in the early days of Facebook. And this feels like a development of that.

[Xing Singh]

Oh, yeah, 100%. I think it kind of taps into that animal part of your brain that is just interested in impurient knowledge about people that you know and people that you might not know. And also, let's face it, who doesn't like to have things in their life gamified like it did feel like a game to kind of swipe through people.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah. But it's at this very moment that Whitney filed a sexual harassment and discrimination lawsuit against her own employer, Tinder. Well, the company she co founded.

[Xing Singh]

Time magazine reported a former Tinder employee who record executives telling Whitney to, quote, shut up. The article also said that they demanded that she fetch breakfast and discussed her breast size in meetings when she was.

[Simon Jack]

And Whitney's romantic and professional relationship with Justin Mateen had clearly unraveled by this point. In the lawsuit, she accused him of calling her a whore at a company party, a desperate loser in a marketing meeting, telling others she was an alcoholic and sending her harassing texts.

[Xing Singh]

The lawsuit went on to claim that her title as co founder was stripped in 2013 due to her gender after Justin said that having a, quote, girl founder would devalue the company.

[Simon Jack]

So it's very interesting because we come up against this gender issue in the tech world before. It was quite a strong virulent strain during this period of sexism in these companies.

[Xing Singh]

Exactly. A really, really toxic period in tech, I think. And also kind of ironic because as the founders of Match realized, your dating app is nothing if you can't attract women to it.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah. She also claimed the chief executive, Sean Radd, had ignored her complaints, including him telling her in a meeting that her job was to keep Justin, her then boyfriend, calm.

[Xing Singh]

Tinder's parent company, Match Group, denied any wrongdoing, although a spokesperson said Justin's messages were, quote, inappropriate. He was suspended and then he resigned.

[Simon Jack]

The lawsuit was settled a few months later without admission of wrongdoing on either.

[Xing Singh]

Side, and she is now prohibited from commenting about her experience at Tinder.

[Simon Jack]

It's widely been reported, though, that Tinder paid a million dollars for the settlement. So not the way she would have want to do it. But age 24, Whitney is a millionaire thanks to that settlement.

[Xing Singh]

The lawsuit and the events leading up to it also gave her something. So she gained the determination, as she puts it, to prove everybody wrong. If she could help to create a blockbuster app once, she could do it again.

[Michael Lewis]

Hey there, it's Michael Lewis, author of Going Infinite Moneyball, the Blind side and Liars Pokemon. On the latest season of my podcast, against the Rules, I'm exploring what it means to be a sports fan in America and what the rise of sports betting is doing to our teams, our states and ourselves. Join me and listen to against the Rules on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search against the Rules. Listen to against the rules on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

[Xing Singh]

It's worth taking a beat here to discuss Silicon Valley and the tech industry. In the mid 2010s. The moment in which Whitney Wolf Heard found herself post lawsuit. So because of this lawsuit, she'd become kind of a divisive figure in Silicon Valley.

[Simon Jack]

And it was followed by a string of gender discrimination claims against other high profile tech companies. I think it's just pre. Me too.

[Xing Singh]

Yeah, exactly. So it felt like the tech industry was very much kind of paving the way for these conversations that would later reach this kind of of explosive moment with MeToo in Hollywood.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah, you heard her saying there it was really hard in the early days and she had friends who didn't want to talk to her anymore. She experienced online abuse, even some threats of rape and murder from complete strangers. So she's become this kind of very high profile person who is getting quite a lot of stick. And so she deletes Twitter.

[Xing Singh]

She describes her experience at this time. She says she was super depressed, she was paranoid, she was having panic attacks.

[Simon Jack]

But she had the support of a few key people to get her through this period. Firstly, her boyfriend Michael Heard, whom she had started dating that year. He is a Texas oil and gas heir and a restaurateur. And they got married in Italy in 2017. The wedding featured in US Vogue and she became Whitney Wolfe Heard and they now have two children together.

[Xing Singh]

So after leaving Tinder, Whitney initially didn't want to make another dating app.

[Simon Jack]

Instead she wanted to make a women only social media company where they could give each other compliments.

[Xing Singh]

But in stepped another key person in her story, a London based Russian entrepreneur called Andrei Andreev.

[Simon Jack]

He'd founded Badoo in 2006, which was an online dating site with hundreds of millions of users across the world.

[Xing Singh]

And he sent her an email with a view to hiring her as the chief marketing officer at Badoo. And she told him, dream on, I'm starting a company and I do not want to be in dating.

[Simon Jack]

But after long conversations, Andre convinced her to stick to dating app. She agreed, but only if women could be in control. This is important now.

[Xing Singh]

At this point, dating apps were a crowded field. There were already quite a few, including Tinder and Badoo. But she recognized what was becoming a huge problem with the straightest dating apps at the time.

[Simon Jack]

Men tended to message as many women as they could, so women were inundated, which meant they didn't respond. The men then felt rejected and that caused some of them to even become aggressive.

[Xing Singh]

So Whitney's idea was that they needed to create an app where women could make the first move. And this was the premise of her new venture with Andre. An app where only women can send the first message in heterosexual matches.

[Simon Jack]

They call it Bumble from female bees. A pro apparently call the shots with branding.

[Xing Singh]

Leaning into the beehive motif, Andre got 79% ownership. He invested US$10 million for the launch with additional funds for growth. Plus he had his knowledge and infrastructure imported in from Badoo.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah, Whitney got 20% ownership. But importantly was the founder and the chief executive.

[Xing Singh]

Whitney hired a former sorority friend. She also hired a couple of extender employees to help develop the app. In fact, it's got a similar swiping functional.

[Simon Jack]

So the app was still being built, but Whitney set about marketing it straight away. She followed a very similar playbook to launching Tinder. She visited universities in bubble T shirts, handed out free thongs to sororities and beer to the fraternities.

[Xing Singh]

She also paid meme creators to create humorous content. So this was kind of new at the time. I mean, nowadays if you have a meme page on Instagram, pumping out memes will give you big bucks for marketing brands. But this is very much almost at the cutting edge of marketing. You could say, yeah.

[Simon Jack]

So she hired more friends. The company felt a bit like a sorority. Although hiring Friends was partly due to the fact that Whitney had had trouble hiring other people after the Tinder lawsuits.

[Xing Singh]

Some early employees actually felt that Bumble was dominated by privileged white sorority sisters. Although Whitney herself said she put into place practices to try and make it less cliquey.

[Simon Jack]

Well, the whole idea of a sorority is cliquey. So anyway, the app went live in December 2014, and in its first few years saw very quick growth. By 2017, it had 22 million users, second only to Tinder's 46 million.

[Xing Singh]

And crucially, it was also catching up to Tinder. It was actually America's fastest growing dating app company with 70% year over year growth compared to Tinder's 10%.

[Simon Jack]

And she was working hard during this time. She admitted to waking up every two hours during the night to check her inbox, her emails, although she said she was trying to cut down on that.

[Xing Singh]

And she also launched a bunch of brand extensions which were aligned with the kind of female friendly image. So that included Bumble BFF for finding friendship. This is what she was imagining when she was traveling do it for and Bumble Biz, which was for professional networking.

[Simon Jack]

At the Bumble Biz launch, Whitney said, the power lunch is no longer just for men. We all deserve a seat at the table.

[Xing Singh]

And this kind of feminist, female empowering marketing really kind of chimed with the sentiment at the time. Because, you know, don't forget this was the era of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign when, quote unquote, girl bosses were leaning in. You know, that whole Sheryl Sandberg.

[Simon Jack]

Sheryl Sandberg got it.

[Xing Singh]

Like book messaging about women finally taking charge in business.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah. And the other thing is that the economics of this looked a bit different. People, because the women were in charge, were prepared to pay a bit more than for other sites where they just get inundated by messages from men.

[Xing Singh]

Yes, 100%. So Bumble was actually making money, which Tinder at the time wasn't.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah. And in 2017, Whitney appeared on the COVID of Forbes magazine. Business publication chronicles the lives and the riches of some of the wealthiest in society. And she's on the COVID of that at age just 28. Very few women make a cover. It's normally graced by middle aged white men.

[Xing Singh]

So at this point, she is a. But the COVID line hailed her as the $1 billion queen bee of dating apps because Bumble is now worth a billion.

[Simon Jack]

So earlier that year, Whitney had been approached by Match Group, the dating giant who own Tinder, Match.com, okCupid, Plenty of Fish, and many others. And Match group initially offered $450 million for Bumble, but Whitney turned them down.

[Xing Singh]

She did a classic kind of founder move and she said no to the money.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah. Forbes reported they came back again with a company valuation well over a billion. Dol. Why do we think Bumble was so valuable?

[Xing Singh]

So I think this had to do with the fast growth, because 70% year on year growth for an app is incredible. But they were also monetizing it successfully. So you could have a free version of Bumble, but more than 10% of the users paid $9.99 for a monthly subscription to Access Extras. So that's compared to 5% of Tinder users who were paying a little bit extra to use extra features on that app.

[Simon Jack]

Is it true that Bumble was becoming an app that people went to find longer lasting relationships, whereas Tinder was a bit more casual?

[Xing Singh]

I'm sure the app would want to be known as the kind of casual dating app, but that is certainly what happened to Tinder, maybe because so many people signed up and obviously when you have huge amounts of people signing up, maybe quite a lot of them will be interested in keeping things casual.

[Simon Jack]

So Tinder's owners, Match Group, are still not giving up on their attempts to buy the fast growing Bumble. But Bumble responded with a pretty sassy public letter published on their website. Dear Match Group, we swipe left on you. We swipe left on your multiple attempts to buy us, copy us, and now intimidate us. We'll never be yours, no matter the price tag. We'll never compromise our values.

[Xing Singh]

A great little marketing twist.

[Simon Jack]

That's very clever to turn that kind of corporate action into some very positive publicity.

[Xing Singh]

So this intimidation that you might have picked up on refers to a lawsuit that Match Group brought against Bumble for allegedly infringing on two of its patents. Bumble countersued for alleged plagiarism.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah, it was all a big legal mess. But Bumble and Match Group eventually reached an agreement to settle all the litigation between the two companies.

[Xing Singh]

So things were going well up until 2019, when Forbes published an investigation into Bumble's majority owner.

[Simon Jack]

Yes, Andre Andreev, by this point a billionaire himself, was accused of overseeing and allowing a misogynistic work culture at Bumble's parent company, Badu's London headquarters.

[Xing Singh]

Thirteen former employees described a work environment that was toxic and misogynistic, which included internal engineering updates named after porn stars, and a widely circulated video of one employee receiving oral sex from a sex worker. So pretty grim stuff.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah. Whitney said she was mortified by the allegations. She said, though she'd never seen any toxic behavior in the office, adding, andre has never been anything but kind and respectful to me.

[Xing Singh]

Andre denied the allegations against him, but he left the business. He sold his majority stake in Bumbo's parent company to an investment firm named Blackstone for $3 billion.

[Simon Jack]

So by 2020, Whitney, who's on maternity leave at this time with her first baby, took over as chief executive of the parent company, now renamed to just.

[Xing Singh]

Bumblebee Inc. And this coincided with a huge milestone for the app. They'd hit 100 million users in 150 countries.

[Simon Jack]

So, riding high. This is the perfect time to do something we've discussed a lot in these podcasts, which is to go public to sell shares in an IPO. And in February 2021, Bumble Inc. Went public. And at 31, it made her the youngest female chief executive to take a US company public, a company she had nearly 12% of the share.

[Xing Singh]

Whitney wore a bright yellow Stella McCartney suit and yellow manila Blahnik's classic Bumble kind of marketing move. Obviously, the like app is branded yellow, and she was carrying her 18 month old son when she rang the NASDAQ bell.

[Simon Jack]

It's quite iconic, that stuff. We've got her baby on the hip ringing the bell. People refer to that to this day. Anyway, the sale went incredibly well. It exceeded expectations. Bumble was valued that day at nearly $9 billion.

[Xing Singh]

Yellow balloons and confetti. Foul. And with good reason, because Whitney had just become the world's youngest self made woman billionaire with a net worth of 1.5 billion.

[Simon Jack]

So she's a billionaire, age 31. But it was short lived.

[Xing Singh]

In the autumn of that year, in the quarterly earnings call, the company posted a decline in overall user growth for the very first time since its ipo.

[Simon Jack]

And in the tech world, if you post declining user growth, your stock, your share price gets massacred. So this spooked investors. It caused Bumble's valuation to fall. By November, Forbes reported that Whitney was no longer a billionaire. Her net worth was now an estimated $940 million. So she was only a billionaire for 10 months. And since then the stock price has continued to fall. I had a quick look at the share price before I came in to do this. At its height it was about $70, $70, $80. Now it's at about 10. So it's lost 7, 8 of its value or 80 odd percent.

[Xing Singh]

So yeah, gosh, that's not very good, is it?

[Simon Jack]

Not very good.

[Xing Singh]

And since then it's worth noting Whitney has never managed to make it back into the billionaire club. And would you say the stock decrease is actually a trend among companies that went public during that time?

[Simon Jack]

I think there was a real mania for tech stocks around that period. And the faster your growth in user numbers was, the more lofty your valuation was. Which meant that if your user numbers began to wobble a bit, the downside for your stock was very indeed. And you know, it wasn't unique to Bumble Match Group, for example, which owns Tinder. Their share price also dropped during this period. And there may have been, well, a dating app fatigue. Is that a thing?

[Xing Singh]

Oh, 100%. I think so. And actually looking at the date, so the IPO was in 2021, you know, we're now in 2024. I would actually say that the predominant trend in dating over the last few years has been that kind of fatigue and frustration with dating apps. I think a lot of single people have felt that dating apps are too onerous. You in some ways what was positioned to us as being convenient and easy and you have an endless access to potential dates has actually made dating more complicated and frustrating. So you know, this is the era of people coining terms like ghosting because it's very easy to ghost someone on an app. You just stop replying to their messages or you block them. Much harder to ghost someone if they're a friend of a friend that your mate introduced to you and said you got on really well with each other.

[Simon Jack]

But what's going to happen to a generation of people who've gotten used to dating apps as a way of meeting people? What's going to replace.

[Xing Singh]

Interestingly, I do think there is a trend towards people wanting in person events. So, you know, you get people now saying things like going to a run club is how you meet people. Going to pottery class. There's a new kind of excitement and interest in in person events where you could be meeting strangers for the first time.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah, I suppose. Music festivals as well.

[Xing Singh]

Exactly.

[Simon Jack]

My daughter is currently at a music festival with her long standing boyfriend. I should, I should point out as well, she's going to kill me for mentioning that. Anyway. In January of this, this year, 2024, aged just 34, Whitney stepped down as the chief executive of Bumble. She moved to the role of executive chair and former Slack boss. That's that collaborative working application. Lydian Jones took over as CEO and Whitney said she was passing the baton to a leader and a woman I deeply respect.

[Xing Singh]

So despite Whitney trying to pave the way for her successor, Bumbo's shares actually hit an all time low following the announcement that she was leaving. So clearly she's still pretty synonymous with the brand.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah, all this means today that her net worth is just 400 million. So a big discount from when she had just over a billion.

[Xing Singh]

So in that interview with BBC News tech reporter Shona McCallum, just before Whitney announced she was stepping down, she spoke about how few young women who came up in tech in the 2010s were left.

[Whitney Wolfe Herd]

It is disappointing to see just how little women have advanced. I've watched the fall of what people call the girl boss era. That's tragic in my opinion. We had a handful of women founders who raised historic amounts of money for women who hired teams that had never been hired by women before. And yet they've all been decimated, particularly by the media. Now, if they were bad actors or they behaved poorly, that's not my role to judge. But I will tell you that a man would have gotten away with it.

[Simon Jack]

Interesting, because there was that brief flash you talk about. She was a key figure. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook, was seen as pretty much in charge of Facebook as At that time, operationally at least, and she's now stepped down. There seemed to be this brief flaring of female talent at the top of tech, which has not caught fire the way a lot of people would have wanted it to.

[Xing Singh]

It's interesting because I think she points to something that a lot of people forget in that a woman founding a company or taking charge of a company that is then valued at billions is a news event in the way that a man taking over sort of isn't, relatively speaking, because we assume that men are the types who take over companies or like build billion dollar companies, but aren't. But with that increase in media attention, that also means that a lot of people start gunning for your downfall.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah, there's some horrible statistics of how many women raise how much money in early startup companies or accelerator companies and it's well below 10%. So whereas there has been some progress in the boardrooms. So you have more female directors, you have a lot more female non executive directors. There's been some movement on the gender pay gap when it comes to founding companies and attracting capital. It's still a lot way to go.

[Xing Singh]

That's really interesting. So Whitney's story actually kind of charts the rise and fall of that girl boss era as well as the dating app era.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah. So Anyway, she's only 34, pretty young to judge someone. But let's have a go. We've got a number of different categories which we're going to judge 0 to 10. And we start with wealth, their absolute wealth and how they wear that wealth.

[Xing Singh]

Whitney was the world's youngest self made woman billionaire, but you know, only for 10 months.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah, Forbes ranked her number 84 in America's richest self made women for 2024. So she's still pretty high up there, but a fraction of her wealth. And in fact, given the fact she's only worth 400 million, it's debatable whether she should even be in this list at all. But she's such an interesting figure we decided to include her.

[Xing Singh]

She really is.

[Simon Jack]

She doesn't appear to have tried to flash the cash in a particularly ostentatious way. Having a baby on your hip as you ring the bell at the New York Stock Exchange is kind of like a hands on mum kind of thing.

[Xing Singh]

Yeah, it's interesting. I mean her wedding appearing in Vogue is classic rich people behavior. But you know, it was no Ambani wedding for instance.

[Simon Jack]

No, for sure. Well, very few are, if any ever. And we'll get to the Ambani's later on in our series. Okay, so wealth. I'm gonna give her a 1. In fact, I might even give her a 0 because she's not even a billionaire.

[Xing Singh]

Oh, I would be a little bit more. She was the world's youngest self made female billionaire. So I would give her. I'd be kinder. I'd give her a two.

[Simon Jack]

Okay, I'm gonna give her a one. You've talked me up by one. One point. So let's look at rags to riches. How far have they come on their financial journey?

[Xing Singh]

Grew up in a solidly middle class family, went to a university with a great sorority network which helped her out. She doesn't really score very highly for me on this rags to riches story.

[Simon Jack]

No. Father was a wealthy property developer and by contrast to some of our billionaires, she's below the billion dollar mark. So I'm going to give her a two for rags to riches.

[Xing Singh]

Yeah, I would actually give. Give her even lower, maybe a one.

[Simon Jack]

Wow.

[Xing Singh]

Because, you know, being part of that sorority sister network, she really worked those connections and you know, she didn't have to go very far to work them.

[Simon Jack]

No, fair enough. Okay, two from me, one from you. Villainy. What bad stuff have they done on their way to fortunes?

[Xing Singh]

I mean, there were those accusations of kind of white sorority sisters taking up space in Tinder and Bumble, but you know, versus her trying to take on Silicon Valley's sexism at the time. I think they kind of balance each other out for.

[Simon Jack]

And Time magazine feature says the media caster as the kill Bill of the tech world. That's the yellow clad woman. You remember Uma Thurman in Kill Bill movies seeking vengeance after men tried to bury her. That's channeling those very same tropes that she's trying to get away from.

[Xing Singh]

Oh yeah, 100%. And quite lazy as well. I mean, is the comparison made just because Bumble is also branded yellow?

[Simon Jack]

Yeah. So I don't think we can say that she's done much bad here. In fact, she's more wronged than wronging.

[Xing Singh]

Yeah, I would agree. Like from a person of stakes level, she really was put through the mill.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah, for sure. So I'm gonna say I can't find any trace of real villainy here. So I'm gonna say one.

[Xing Singh]

I would say, however, that some people would argue that dating apps have made society worse.

[Simon Jack]

Yes. So this is the classic problem we always have about separating the person from the products they invented. And that would be the same for Facebook, Amazon, et cetera. Fair enough. Now I think dating apps seem to me a soulless, horrible environment, which I don't understand at all. I think that only bad things can happen as a result of their existence. But that's because I'm from a different era. Zing.

[Xing Singh]

As much as everyone complains about dating apps, I do know more than a few happily married couples who have met on dating apps.

[Simon Jack]

Okay.

[Xing Singh]

You could separate, I think, Tinder and Bumble from the rest of the dating apps because there's something about that swipe mechanism that I think encourages people to just gamify their own dating life and treat people as disposable.

[Simon Jack]

Yes.

[Xing Singh]

In a way that other dating platforms didn't. So I remember the early days of okcupid.com and being on okcupid.com was actually quite difficult because you had to fill out the bio and make yourself seem like a real person. You had to do surveys. Doing a survey would put you in a better league of matches, et cetera.

[Simon Jack]

Right.

[Xing Singh]

But something about the disposability and ease of swiping Bing, all of that, it.

[Simon Jack]

Sounds either exhausting or awful to me. So basically I'm going to dial up my villainy score because I just, I don't know, I either don't understand, don't get, or don't appreciate the dating app world. So I'm going to give her a 3 in villainy.

[Xing Singh]

In Tinder and Bumble's defense, they were set up with obviously the intention of making money, but also with the intention of helping people find romance. Right. It's not like they were encouraging people to cheat or have affairs, unlike some dating apps which are about cheating and having affairs.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah, and it's all based on, you could argue on appearance. You basically say swipe, swipe, swipe. And it's all basically on first impressions of someone's physical appearance. I mean, you could argue that happens in the real world as well, but you get a chance to discover other qualities in a face to face encounter.

[Xing Singh]

Right. I mean, I'm really torn on this because it's so hard to imagine a dating landscape pre dating app. Now, I would say that an app like Bumble and Tinder feeds into humanity's worst impulses, but that probably isn't too much the fault of these dating app founders.

[Simon Jack]

Okay.

[Xing Singh]

I would probably put it down to a 2 out of 10 because it's really hard for me to imagine a world before these apps existed. It really is the genie out of the bottom.

[Simon Jack]

I think we found that the thresholds where basically our experiences are totally different.

[Xing Singh]

This is the generation gap they talk about.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah, it sure is. You're making me feel out of the loop. Okay, so two from you and a three from me for philanthropy. What about that? How generous have they been with their wealth?

[Xing Singh]

So we actually can't find massive amounts of money donated through traditional philanthropy, but, you know, maybe worth looking at the kind of initiatives that speak to a general principle of doing good.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah. So Bumble was the first major social platform to positively embrace behavioral guardrails and content moderation as part of its business model. Things that other platforms have been criticized for not paying attention to.

[Xing Singh]

Yeah. And this is really interesting. Whitney campaigned to criminalize descending of unsolicited nude photos that included testifying in front of both the Texas State House and Senate. The law actually got through in that state.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah. And in 2018, she launched the Bumble Fund, a venture capital fund focused on early stage investments, primarily in businesses founded by and led by women of color and those from underrepresented groups.

[Xing Singh]

And during the pandemic, Bumble created a $500,000 community grant program to give businesses up to five grand each in financial.

[Simon Jack]

And in 2021, this is an interesting one. Bumble temporarily closed all its offices for a week to combat workplace stress. Its 700 staff worldwide told to switch off and focus on themselves. Whitney made the move to try and help with collective burnout, something that she suffered from herself.

[Xing Singh]

Not much traditional philanthropy, not much giving away to charity or setting up foundations.

[Simon Jack]

But still, I mean, these quite interesting issues she's picked, picked her spots quite well there.

[Xing Singh]

Yeah. And maybe this speaks to a kind of thing among younger millennial founders and billionaires where you don't really want to go down the traditional philanthropic route.

[Simon Jack]

So philanthropy I'm going to give her. It's not a lot of money, but I think it's well targeted and things that are quite consistent with her experience and her interests. So I'm going to give her a four for philanthropy.

[Xing Singh]

Oh, I think I would give her probably straight down the middle of five. You know, she doesn't do philanthropy in the traditional billionaire sense, but she's definitely interested giving back in some way.

[Simon Jack]

Okay, five for you, four for me. Power we've talked about. She became a divisive figure during the big Tinder kind of punch up and controversy.

[Xing Singh]

Yeah. I feel like, in a way, she was so visible during that whole girl boss era, and she's now stepped away from that. I kind of think she doesn't really score super highly for me.

[Simon Jack]

By her own admission, things haven't Changed that much, although that she was a very influential person at one time. She's less so now. One of the tests we always use was could this person pick up the phone and talk to a head of state, the President of the United States? I'm thinking a no on this case.

[Xing Singh]

I would say even at the height of her fame and influence, she probably couldn't do that either. I mean, she was probably influential in the tech world, but not so much on the world stage.

[Simon Jack]

Fine. Okay, so out of ten, I'm gonna say two for power.

[Xing Singh]

I would give her a two or two.

[Simon Jack]

Okay, legacy. Remember she's the youngest female chief executive to take a U.S. company public. And that date she did that, that was the height of her success. But by her own admission, she says how disappointing it is that women in tech have not gone further than they have. So any legacy she promised to have, she slightly undershot it.

[Xing Singh]

I think her case has become a sort of figurehead for Silicon Valley sexism with what happened at Tinder. And also I think a kind of cautionary tale, right, of tech apps trying to go after women as a market and kind of failing because ironically, within their own ranks, they were not very female friends friendly places to work at.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah, that's the real tension here, isn't it? Something trying to empower women and yet in the bowels of the buildings in which these places were actually being run from, finding exactly the same kind of attitudes and behavior they were trying to combat.

[Xing Singh]

I think if you were writing a book about Silicon Valley misogyny, you would be looking at Whitney Wolf heard as a test case.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah, for sure. Okay, so in that sense there's a story to tell there. As you say, cautionary tale. There's legacy value in that 100%.

[Xing Singh]

So I would be giving her probably a seven out of ten.

[Simon Jack]

Okay, I'm going to give her a six. So six from me, seven from you, and then we have to make that decision. Are they good, bad, or just another billionaire? This one's easy. She's not even a billionaire. So I don't even have to just make a decision.

[Xing Singh]

I think that's a cop out. I think you need to judge her at the point at which she was a billionaire.

[Simon Jack]

Fine. Okay, so she was a billionaire, the youngest self made female billionaire. I think she's blazed a trail for women founders, chief executives, people who take a tech company public. But she was one of the co founders of Tinder. Do I think Tinder makes the world a place? I do not. So I'm just going to say she's just another billionaire, even though she's not one.

[Xing Singh]

Ooh. So do I think Whitney Wolf Herd is good, bad, or just another billionaire? I definitely don't think she's a bad billionaire, but I know that my friends who are single and still in the hell that is online dating will yell at me if I make someone who founded one of these apps a good billionaire. So for me, I think, unfortunately, she is just another billionaire. So, Whitney Wolfhard, you are just another billionaire. So who do we have?

[Simon Jack]

Next episode we have someone who describes himself as a reluctant billionaire and also.

[Xing Singh]

An existential dirtbag, which is his words.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah, it is Yvonne Schouinar, the founder of the outdoor clothing brand Patagonia.

[Xing Singh]

You might recognize Patagonia from its colorful fleeces. Its founder also has a very colorful story which involves giving away his whole company.

[Simon Jack]

Good Bad Billionaire is a podcast on the BBC World Service. It's produced by Hannah Hufford and Mark Ward, with additional production by Tamsen Curry. James Cook is the editor for the BBC World Service.

[Xing Singh]

The senior podcast producer is Kat Collins, and the podcast commissioning editor is John Minnell.

[Michael Lewis]

Hey there, it's Michael Lewis, author of Going Infinite Moneyball, the Blind side and Liars Poker. On the latest season of my podcast, against the Rules, I'm exploring what it means to be a sports fan in America and what the rise of sports betting is doing to our teams, our states, and ourselves. Join me and listen to against the rules on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search against the Rules. Listen to against the rules on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.