Grubstakers - Patreon Unlocked Episode 231: Whitney Wolfe Herd feat. Kate Willett

Episode Date: May 26, 2021

Dating's weird, isn't it? In this episode we're joined by the wonderful Kate Willett (@katewillett on Twitter) to explore the wild uncertainties of dating and the financial windfall available to those with the foresight to monetize it with a gimmick. Specifically we give an overview of the life and times of Bumble's Whitney Wolfe Herd and learn how she made her billion dollar fortune through shady Russian start up money, hostile work environments, offshore tax avoidance shell corporations, and most important of all, an app that puts women first. Kate's podcast Reply Guys can be found here: https://soundcloud.com/replyguys You can listen to Kate's audible audiobook "Dirtbag Anthropology" here: https://www.audible.com/pd/Dirtbag-Anthropology-Audiobook/B08W5FSQ1V

We find people that basically can't make enough to eat before they go into the fields. I don't believe that. I think that you're looking at other places that are not Central Romana. People actually who focus on and who like getting an orgasm never get one. Pull up your socks and figure out what you're going to do. Any chance we'll ever get to be a completely red state? Oh, yeah. Well, the future is always uncertain. But more uncertain now.

And listen, Blue Ivy is six years old. Beyonce's dead. She tried to outbid me on a painting. Everybody in Atlanta right now at the Louis Vuitton store, if you're black, don't go to Louis Vuitton today. In five, four, three, in five that's why you need to take a meeting with kanye west bernard arnault hello and welcome to grubstakers the podcast about billionaires my name is sean p mccarthy and i'm joined as always by my esteemed co-hosts

steve jeffries yogi polly wool andy palmer and so as the united states inches towards vaccinating its population against the coronavirus there is expectation that maybe by the summer there will be something of a so-called return to normal where people in the big cities can once again regularly experience the soul crushing meat market of swipe based dating apps. And our billionaire subject today is one of the people who seems to be benefiting from that, the co-founder and CEO of Bumble, Whitney Wolf Hurd. And to discuss her life and her product, we are joined by one of my favorite comedians, co-host of the Reply Guys podcast, and author of the new Audible audiobook, Dirtbag Anthropology, Kate Willett. Kate, thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. And before we start, did you just have any particular opinions on Bumble going into this podcast? I hate Bumble.

It's my least favorite app for dating. I would choose Tinder and all its horrors over Bumble any day of the week. Because what I'm not looking for, like what I'm trying to avoid in my life from this moment forward is like more lazy dudes and Bumble is like the lazy man's dream. Like it's enabling, right? So it's just like, I don't, it's just like, yeah, I'm a guy that doesn't want to put forth in any effort going on this app. So I have tried Bumble. I did not like it whatsoever.

Never gone out with anyone on Bumble in real life. So yeah, not a fan whatsoever. Well, that was the only appeal to me when I joined. Doing as little work as possible. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'd go on there if i were a guy i mean i've never i've never uh done a date or gone on a date with anyone on bumble because it's uh maybe not my

crowd like at least from a guy's perspective um every other profile has a picture of someone in a yacht uh with the implication hey uh you should have one of these seems like the girl like the girl boss app yeah yeah kind of yeah i'm you know dating apps are all pretty bad but i usually generally use hinge if i use any of them sure it is one of those things where like the dating app economy is so fractured like in my mind i don't i like i know people meet on there and then have successful relationships and stuff, but the entire system seems so fundamentally broken. It's like someone being like, yeah, no, the American academic system is good to learn. It's like, I don't think that works necessarily just as much as dating apps work for finding

someone. I think it's a great way for people who love to quote the office to meet each other. Yeah, absolutely. And it's like one of those things where everyone who's quoting the office thinks that no one else is doing it. Like it's a sign of originality that like one in five people are doing. You miss 100%

of the shots you don't take. Don't do this. Wayne Gretzky michael scott hey bonus points if you get the reference i've seen that maybe about the bonus points if you get the reference at the end is the icing on the cake i just i just used my super like after you said that andy but yeah so the subject today whitney wolf heard to just kind of give you a general overview uh probably most of the people listening to this have some experience with bumble the innovation as opposed to tinder and these other you know swipe right swipe left dating apps is bumble the woman has to make the first message right so you

match and then you know women have to go through the experience guys go through which is thinking of something more clever than just hey hey, or what's up. And, you know, as Kate mentioned, this has been a great innovation of patriarchy was to brand this as feminism by forcing women to do all the work and, you know, pay for dinner and everything else. I don't think the hey and what's up threshold has been crossed for the most part. Oh, really? Yeah. Why mess with the classics are most people still

doing it oh yeah yeah absolutely well all i know is bumble's the number one dating app to find people that storm the capitol and snitch on the fbi to them that's definitely true that was cool honestly right there's this news story that i guess somebody was arrested and in the indictment federal prosecutors put a screen cap of him admitting to his Bumble match that he was at the Capitol on January 6th. Which is, you know, you can only imagine if the what it would feel like to have a woman swipe right on you and then report you to the FBI. You know, in the old days, you would have to be married to a woman for years before she would report you to the FBI. You know, in the old days, you would have to be married to a woman for years before she would report you to the FBI. Exactly. Did you see his

picture, too? Oh, yeah. I did. Was he cute? No. No. Was it the animal skin guy? Animal skin? No, no. It wasn't that guy. It was a guy with long, long sideburns and like i mean he looked like every fourth goon in like a biker gang that's what the cat looked like

he caused the words fat wolverine to trend on twitter that's how he looked um and i i mean what's incredible about that is like you look at that picture of him and then you think the person who swiped right on this guy. Sure. Reported him to the FBI. Right. Yeah. Was like surprised by what he had to say about storming the Capitol.

It's so funny to me because it's like, have you ever used Bumble before, buddy? You really thought the women on there would like the fact that you stormed the Capitol? Well, so the guy's name is Robert Chapman and he's, I guess, from New York. But I think the best thing about it was he is bragging about storming the Capitol. And the last message from the woman in question just says, we are not a match. What a great way, just like, I'm out. But so Whitney Wolfe heard just some quick, fast facts about her before we start her general life biography. According to Forbes magazine, she is worth about $1.3 billion as of April 23, 2021. And this is because Bumble has just in February 2021 had their IPO. So she's quite the rich woman. She was born on July 1st, 1989. And I know I've been doing this podcast too long when the billionaires are starting to get younger

than me. This is getting very annoying to be the old guy talking about this woman with more money than I will ever see in my life. But in addition to bumble uh the dating app they also have a friend matching service called bff right and they have a business networking service called biz b-i-z-z so there will be a lot of b puns throughout the course of this episode i want to issue a correction the fat wolverine was actually uh ted cruz i apologize for misleading any of our listeners how dare you but so uh whitney wolf heard um she currently as i mentioned is the ceo of bumble incorporated operates both bumble and another dating app we'll talk about a bit called badu uh she founded bumble with a russian billionaire who we will also talk about a bit his His name is Andre Andreev. She co-founded it in 2014. He was his stake in it. He used to own the majority, but he was bought out by Blackstone

in November 2019. Whitney Wolf Hurd owns about 13% of Bumble, just over 21 million shares. And together, Bumble and Badoo operate in 150 countries with 42 million monthly active users as of third quarter 2020. And those are all just fast facts from Forbes magazine. Yeah, from my research, I found out that she was born in Salt Lake City. And her dad is Michael Wolfe, who is a private land developer. And there's not much else about him and his mom. Her mom's reported as Kelly Wolfe, a homemaker. And there really isn't much about Whitney's childhood, except that in fourth grade, her family took a sabbatical to Paris, France.

Like in countless different news articles, it just says in fourth grade, she just goes to France. And there's not much of like a more rich person move than like, yeah, for a couple of grades, we just were in a nice European country for a little bit. Yeah. I grew up humbly. I mean, my parents took that thing. What's the word where like you can take a year off and not get paid and it's fine. A sabbatical. My parents did a sabbatical in France. Yeah. I mean, the only thing that connects France to her life now, because she didn't speak French, she's not like a person that operates in france but before she created bumble after her lawsuit with tinder which we'll talk more about later at one point she was going to name her female focus uh business networking uh app uh mercy uh thank you in french um but that fizzled out but then what bumble biz is is what mercy was supposed to be

that mirrors mercy i i know i'm saying mercy wrong but the moment i said i'm like i know it's not not mercy what how am i how am i pronouncing it wrong merce what i'm confused mercy like mercy mercy yeah you know what i i the app never existed guys I can call it whatever I want I'm gonna say Yogi's right because if you're an American and you're like looking at all the dating apps and there's one called Mercy like that's gonna attract a very specific group of people

that may not be what they're looking for there was a dating app I don't it definitely didn't end up being one of the billionaire ones but there was a dating app that branded itself as for people that had been just completely rejected on every other app. It was just whatever's left. Yeah, exactly.

I forgot what the name was, but it was something like not perfect or whatever. But yeah, it didn't really take off, actually, because the people on it didn't like each other either so yeah bad business model yeah it is interesting that the french word for thank you is that thing that they never practiced throughout the global south great uh but to start the general biography of whitney wolf heard kind of talk about her life, I don't think it's being unfair to say that she was born a rich kid. According to her official Wikipedia, she is the daughter of a wealthy property developer named Michael Wolfe. And we mentioned her sabbatical in Paris, France.

Generally not the kind of thing you get to do if you are not the child of a wealthy property developer. But so there's a couple different biographical sources that I went through for this episode. Probably the most prominent one that I'll quote from is a 2016 article in Austin Woman Magazine by Emily Laskowski. And the title of it is Whitney Wolf is bringing feminism to your phone. And there's a lot of B puns in this. So perhaps I'll just quote, you know, two paragraphs of B puns, if you guys can stand that. Whitney Wolf, the 26-year-old founder of Bumble, launched the social discovery platform heralded by many as the feminist dating app less than a year and a half ago with her core staff of six women working feverishly from Bumble's headquarters in downtown Austin, Texas. Wolf and her team zip and zoom from one task, one milestone, one breakthrough to the next. And all of that movement is generating a lot of

buzz. Wolf is, forgive the pun, a busy bee. She checks her phone intermittently between movements, responding to emails, texts, and phone calls. Buoyancy is a strength. She bounces between Bumble's outposts in London and Los Angeles, where it's standing room only for technology startups, yet anchors her team in Austin, away from the swarms of stinging competitors, with plenty of space to consider the myriad decisions she must make for her rapidly expanding company. Austin, she says, gives Bumble the freedom to spread its wings and fly yeah those uh those puns go down like honey yeah they did they did so many of them so many of them

yeah there's also the thing you see in the background is a cat i don't i didn't grow a tail or anything yeah for our audience she has a cat scarf that is lovely yeah the writer is meeting their word count yeah the article continues you won't believe how much tax avoidance this company engages in but so the article continues. She's born in Salt Lake City, as we mentioned, 1989. Quote, she spent her early childhood years in an environment more pastoral than metropolitan. She's quoted as saying, imagine not seeing a person's house unless you literally walked for two minutes. Everything was on its own spread and it was every child's dream.

It was this wooded, secluded type of childhood. And what that means is I grew up in a really big house. Yeah. Yeah. Where you had to walk two minutes before you saw the other house, basically. I don't know any place that isn't you walk a few minutes to see another house. Like I get that the point is like, you know, you don't walk across a hallway to see a neighbor like in a major metropolitan city. But in any general suburb, you have to walk a minute or two to get to someone's house. And it's not necessarily a mansion.

But it's an odd way to describe your childhood in terms of how you grew up. And as we mentioned, Michael Wolfe, a wealthy property developer who was Jewish, was her father. And Kelly Wolfe, who was Catholic, was her father, and Kelly Wolfe, who was Catholic, was her mother. She attended the Judge Memorial Catholic High School until fourth grade. Back quoting from the article again, By the time she turned 11, her parents moved the family to Paris, specifically to instill in their children a sense of the world. Wolfe was placed in a non-Englishlish speaking school and immediately immersed herself in the culture. And then after a couple of years, they moved back from Paris, France to Utah,

to Salt Lake City. And this becomes one of the most difficult times of her life, according to this article. The transition back home to Salt Lake City proved more difficult than it had been to leave. Quote, I wouldn't get invited to birthday parties. Here I had just come home from living in Paris. I've seen half of the world at age 12 and I was an outcast. You know, every billionaire has a struggle story. I like thinking, you know, she's like 12 years old and she's like, yeah, I've seen half of the world. You know, we're like, let's definitely not invite her to this birthday party.

Yeah. And she only went to one place. Yeah. Yeah, Paris, Salt Lake City, that just about covers it. I've already seen half the world. I mean, I've been on two sides of the world, so. Right, right. Just imagine these, like, young girls

talking shit about her being like, she's so worldly we are not going to share our coca-cola classic that we have by the case for uh because our church has stock in them for whatever reason uh but for uh whitney wolf heard things would improve a bit by high school and then in college she attends Southern Methodist University, which was her mother's alma mater. She apparently was a member of the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, and she majored in international studies. And in addition to bee puns, this Austin Woman's Magazine article has a couple, I think, amusing anecdotes about Whitney's life. And one of them happens in college during the BP oil spill in late April, 2010.

You might know the deep water horizon drilling rig suffered an internal explosion and gushed, you know, millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. And at the time, Whitney says, Matt Damon was in that, right?

Yeah. At the time, Whitney says, Matt Damon was in that, right? Yeah. At the time, Whitney says, quote, I was really upset about all of the animals that kept showing on TV that were covered in oil. Do you remember that? They were just doused in oil, unquote. While efforts to contain the BP oil spill drifted along, Wolf brainstormed ideas that would benefit the organizations trying to protect the affected wetlands and wildlife. One morning while talking to her mother, who had just come from yoga class, Wolf had an epiphany.

I was like, perfect. I'm going to make yoga bags, bamboo tote bags, and I can get every girl on campus to carry them. I was in a sorority, and I knew that everyone carried a little bag to school. She finds a local organic eco-friendly distributor and then she starts selling these bamboo tote bags via Facebook. Right. By the way, if you want to like get the significance of her growing up in Salt Lake City,

take a close look at the Utah state flag. Just like bring it up on your phone and look right in the middle of it and are you asking us to do that right now andy i mean you guys can't this is mostly for the listeners if you don't know what i'm talking about what are you talking about look at the flag i didn't memorize i didn't memorize what the flag looks like i didn't know this was going to be on the exam yeah right utah flag oh it's all about the bees yeah oh wow yeah so it's it says industry utah and then it has a picture of a beehive in the

middle of it yeah it's a big mormon thing is that they're like we're like bees contributing the hive is like a metaphor for the Mormon Church interesting hmm yeah right almost called Salt Lake City desert which is like a quasi Egyptian word for B interesting yeah right yeah a lot like beehives the Mormon Church has billions of dollars in hidden assets invested into various property schemes throughout the world. 120 billion. More of those tote bags that Sean was talking about. She partnered with Patrick often comp who would launch the nonprofit organization called the help us project. And like,

just could you say that name again? Yogi, that's like a fucking third generation sweatshop air. Patrick just has triangle shirt, waste fire fire money when I hear that name. And if you go to the Help Us Project and type in Whitney Wolf, it like leads you to WhitneyWolf.com. And it's a Tumblr for someone else named Whitney Wolf, I think. But if you can see the tote bags to this day and it has like pelicans and stuff on them the bags were like photographed with celebrities like nicole richie and zoe uh

kasten or something like that and so they they were selling like angbusters but then she also created another clothing line called tender heart with often comp again which was to raise awareness around human trafficking and fair trade and like listen i mean, I might be going out on a limb here, but, you know, she's a part of a dating app empire. And like, I don't know about you guys, but it seems to me that like the global sex trafficking trade must use apps like this in one way or another. So the fact that she was raising money for this at the age of 19 in college, but then now is running a billion dollar empire, which certainly may or may not have roots into the sex trafficking industry is quite hypocritical,

if you ask me. Yeah. I mean, I think we'll see a lot of different hypocrisies. And what I wanted to mention about these tote bags that she was selling for the BP oil thing, I just couldn't find out like anywhere what was done with any of this money, you know? So it's like it could have been like she pockets 80 i don't know but you know it like the other thing worth mentioning here in terms of why this is such an important story of her biography is because this

woman's a billionaire who uh the ceo being the ceo of bumble is the second job she's ever held in her life so you know it just kind of puts things in perspective. Yeah. Some people are just better than us. That's right. Well, you need to have an amazing feminist idea. That's all it takes. You know, this podcast is not nearly feminist enough.

We're taking one down right now. Yeah. I'm trying my best. I've come up with this new great feminist marriage app where you just let your husband play video games all day and you just clean the house and make dinner. Yeah, great idea, Sean. It's going to make you a billion dollars easy immediately.

I think so. Did we mention already something I learned researching this episode is that 73% of Bumble users are men? Really? Yeah, it's like any other dating app where it is mostly men, but they pitch it to women. I mean, like, we'll get into this when we talk about Tinder and her role as VP at Tinder. But, like, I don't know about you guys, but I think a good chunk of the online dating apps has got to be bots.

Like they've got some crazy number on Bumble because it's the number two dating app right now. And it's like 80, maybe like 95 million people use it. And it's like, that just seems ridiculously high. No, I think you're right. Well, they do. Bumble, like all of the other big ones, when you first join, they show you fake people. Oh, I think you're right. Well, they do. Bumble, like all of the other big ones, when you first join, they show you fake people.

Oh, really? Yeah. Is it like to show you people that are attractive, basically? They show you fabricated extremely hot people to get you to actually interact with the app or possibly give them money

hopefully to get a premium account or something. Yeah, you can sign interact with the app or possibly give them money hopefully to get a premium account or something. Yeah, you can sign up for the Bumble Premium where it will exclusively match you with people who were at the January 6 riots at the US Capitol. I would get matched with that Q Shaman guy.

Honestly, I would fuck him. I would not call him. But I would fuck him i would not call him but yeah yeah they pay for five dollars a month you can join like the q club or something right you can only see people who are certified participants in the insurrection yeah exactly patriots i think there are dating apps that are like right-wing dating apps but I don't know. partially because on Twitter, people were reporting that there's a whole bunch of people in DC on dating apps right now, and they were a part of the January 6th movement. You just change your tab to conservative, and you can match with these people and out them exactly like what

happened to this Patrick cat. And so they realized, oh, this is bad for business at one point. And we're like, we got to take this tab off. And then people on Twitter were mad about it. Like, this is the only reason I was using Bumble. I don't want to match with people that aren't my same political affiliation. I think it sucks that you can't filter on dating apps by leftists. Like you could, like,

I don't know. I, I use hinge and you can filter by political stuff, but it's only like liberal, conservative, moderate, or very liberal. liberal is like the most yeah they should let you filter by podcaster yeah really into free market economics well i mean the

thing was is that you know and gay marriage i fucking went on a date with this guy who said he was inspired by mayor pete and like that took me out of commission for a few weeks. He's very liberal. Yeah. No, he was very liberal. I was so upset by this experience. Yeah. Yeah. No, I know someone that like went on a date with some guy who was in Long Island and she like went to him to his place and then him and his friends that she was like, she went to his place and him and his roommates were like really heavily into trump and she's like i'm going to walk home like i don't trust any of you

and uh it is very frustrating that uh because i read recently that the people now um choose a partner based off politics more than race for the first time ever so like basically over the last like i don't know let's say yeah well some of us still do it the traditional way but now for the first time they're less concerned about race than they are by political affiliation which um is an interesting shift in our in the way we work but i do think that some of this comes and we'll talk about this later but some of this comes from like judging people off of one image or what they put online makes you just hyper focused on like who a person is whereas before like you know you might be like they they

cook a mean casserole and be like i want to fuck that person i don't know i'm just i'm trying to think of things that are things that you see on dating profiles you know if you hook up with a q anon shaman he won't make you breakfast in the morning because he eats via photosynthesis uh but to continue on with the story of whitney wolf heard uh probably my favorite anecdote from this little uh article is about her time at a thailand orphanage and so i'll just quote a bit from this. During college, she had studied abroad for a year and had vacationed overseas with her family during the summers, but yearned to see things at a different light. Again, no class markers in that. She says, quote, I just want it to be anywhere that was different from my own corner.

I wanted to see it. I wanted to understand it. I wanted to taste it, feel it, think it, do it. I just needed to understand it. Wolf packed a backpack and hopped on a flight to cambodia i was desperate to understand what life was like for people that didn't have the good fortune that we all do here she says i wanted to understand that side of life and help do something traveling throughout southeast asia and sleeping in three dollar a night hotels, Wolf eventually discovered an orphanage in Northern Thailand, which she found herself returning to day after day to volunteer.

Then one day she stopped. Quote, I'd go and be there all day and just kept saying, you know what, I have the good fortune of having an education. There's so many other capable humans here that can go and rock the babies and play with them. I have the ability to go home and do something that will touch all of these people somehow. I need to go do that because sitting here with the amount of education I have is actually a disservice to people. So she's essentially saying that it's far more valuable for her to give back through her massive tax avoidance dating app than it was to volunteer at an orphanage in Thailand. I mean, don't criticize her until you've taken a spur

of the moment trip to several different countries so that you can really understand what poverty is. Well, she was so worldly after her trip to France. She really understood the world economics after that trip.

And that's why she wasn't invited to those parties yeah i still would not invite this woman to my birthday party never never it is nice that she started with france and then saw all the colonies that they fucked up sure yeah right natural progression but you know and that's like when you have these kind of we've talked about this a bit over the course of this podcast, these billionaire struggle stories, because they all get rich and then they do these interviews and they all have to come up with like, what was the struggle when you already grew up rich? And so you have these like little anecdotes that get blown up into like this entire origin story. And in this case, it's like literally I went and i volunteered at an orphanage in thailand and was like i'm too valuable to be here any other schmuck can volunteer at an orphanage i have you know a ba

and my dad is a rich property developer i need to be in a silicon valley startup i had it so hard i had to see so many poor people but yeah i mean it like really does give you the mentality of these people like you just try to get inside the head of somebody who believes that you are doing more valuable work for the world if you are part of a massively overvalued silicon valley unicorn than if you're like helping impoverished people in an orphanage in the global south right but nonetheless she returns to the united states uh she had big dreams to start her own micro loan business again i'm quoting from this austin woman's magazine

article uh but apparently she got a proverbial wake-up call from her father quote my dad was like no good luck funding that get a job you need a job she remembers and so wolf got a job. You need a job, she remembers. And so Wolf got a job at Hatch Labs through a friend. She got a job at Hatch Labs, an incubator for startups in San Francisco. Wait, back up a second. So her doing good project was microloans? She wanted to start her own microloan business selling clothing, jewelry, and other artifacts made by women from different parts of the world. So yeah, she wanted to do a microloan exploitation business. Yeah, yeah.

Isn't that like a major cause of suicide in the developing world? Yeah. Microloans. Getting buried under microloans. Ugh. Yeah. And like patriarchal exploitation of the women who take on the loans. And then like there'll just be some guy waiting to take the money from them,

apparently. There's like a huge like UN report that exposed that like 10 years ago. I guess I guess it's probably better for the world that she made Bumble instead of doing the micro loan adventure. It's using your privilege for good. Yeah. You realize your your highest and best use as a person is not in the orphanage. It's doing this stuff. Yeah.

Making it easier for HR professionals to fuck each other. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you know, unfortunately, a lot of yacht guys have gotten laid from this app, but better than someone committing suicide over a micro loan. Well, we're not completely out of the woods on that one, but we'll cover some stuff in a moment here that might hint at some of that. So after she joins Hatch Labs,

Hatch Labs is a IAC incubator, and IAC is the holding company run by Barry Diller and Joey Devine. This is the home network shopping people, and they own Ticketmaster and a whole bunch of other companies. IAC owned the Match network of dating websites up until July 1st, 2020. So although IAC no longer controls Match, the lawsuits between Match and Bumble were being orchestrated by IAC. And so if you guys don't know, Match owns Tinder, OkCupid, as well as like 10 to 12 different other dating websites. Basically, Match owns everything but Bumble. And the IAC incubator that Tinder was a part of was where Whitney Wolf would join.

And this is where the story of her and tinder begins that's so funny that you in your head you'll be like i don't want to support tinder that's owned by an evil company i'm going to support bumble that's owned by the blackstone group yeah the largest corporate landlord on earth there's no getting away if you want pussy on the side you have to go through an evil corporation yeah i'm sorry i'm sorry to break it to our audience but if you really want to destroy capitalism you gotta stop fucking but yeah we'll do a future episode on barry diller but he's also was the owner of the daily beast and he gave chelsea clinton a bunch of no work jobs on various corporate boards for like half a million a

year or something stupid like that so he's a connected player but so as yogi mentioned uh she's working at hatch labs uh this startup incubator for startups in san francisco she worked on a series of projects including an app that would launch four months later and eventually be called tinder she's credited for coming up with the name Tinder. I believe she was a VP of marketing for a while at it. But then eventually in 2014, she leaves Tinder and sues the co-founder as well as her ex-boyfriend for sexual harassment. That's a guy named Justin Mateen. And I'm sure that we are shocking all of the listeners that the founder of tinder is a scumbag yeah i looked at like the tinder lawsuit between whitney wolf and uh justin

as well as uh sean rad yeah his name is sean rat what a stupid name sorry um and like basically the you know there's a lot of nda So in any interview, she doesn't talk about it, but her payout after Tinder was about a little over a million dollars. And you can see the text messages that were sent between Justin Mateen and Whitney Wolf. Um, from the text, you get a pretty clear, uh, window to the fact that Whitney Wolf broke up with Justin Mateen and Justin Mateen just kind of flipped out, you know, these behaviors that Bumble banned in their app. Basically, Justin Mateen will say shit like go talk to your 26 year old fucking accomplished nobody. I will shit on him in life.

Let's see. Funny, like the founder of Tinder behaved exactly like a guy who just got rejected on tinder yes just reflecting his customer base um some of this is a little gross but a lot of most of this is gross i just want to give the audience a warning uh let's see and so he's talking about a guy that whitney's uh dating at the time who i think is a muslim uh let's see if that homo can make money without daddy i have five wins under my belt and in hungary as fuck and i'm the best father the best husband so pathetic i even imagined a life w you i actually thought you would be a good mother and wife i have horrible judgment he can enjoy my leftovers yeah fuck you you are abuse um it goes on this is like real narcissist vibes

hardcore narcissist discarding yeah anyway um yeah it goes on to say things like and hung out with muslims that are not loyal who tried to do shady shut to me. I mean, the weird thing is you look at these texts and they're from mid-20-year-old Silicon Valley people, and they're misspelling words. I know they're texting one another. They didn't expect these messages to be out in the public, but it is literal teenage high school level text messages to one another. It is literal teenage high school level text messages to one another. It is pretty gross.

Now, when he says Muslims that are not loyal, does he mean like, I think they're taking flight classes without learning to land? Okay. All right. That seems to be what he's implying. Maybe. Regardless, after this, she notifies IAC as well as Sean Rad. She lets Sean know that she wants to quit, but she doesn't know if she's going to get equity out of if she quits. And in the last text between her and Sean that are on this Gawker piece, it mentions that she's like, I've never quit before or even been fired.

And Sean says, you don't get any severance. And then she says, well, I need to tell my parents first to make sure they will support me. This is why I want to talk to you. I need to do this rationally. Don't you get it? Like, I might have to work one more month if my dad won't pay my rent.

So could we discuss this exactly? I leave tomorrow but i'll leave in peace for you soon and sean's like your employment continuing is not likely an option at this point um so these texts as well as um things that we don't know from the nda is what lead to her suing tinder and receiving one million dollars and the main thing from this lawsuit is that they don't set up a like anti-competitive clause with whitney wolf after this because she then starts bumble shortly after this and then kind of blows them out of the water and so it's crazy how much of a gaffe this is that like hey maybe don't have a former employee that's helped you found the

company let you found a company that directly competes with your audience yeah it's like he didn't take her he he he had no uh ability to think that she would even you know do something with it right right oh yeah one last thing like so she like was she wasn't listed as a founder originally and then later on was in internal email documents but then in like news articles she wasn't being called a founder and when she asked hey why am i not being referred to as founder uh justin and sean would say if we have a woman as a founder we'll look weak like just blatant misogynistic we can't have a woman founder what year is this that does sound like something i would say though i mean like you know if you look at what she does at tinder she basically goes to her former uh sorority uh kappa kappa gamma and she takes photos of like the people that are at

the sorority takes those photos to kinkos with like the tinder ui and then prints off a whole bunch of copies and then tells kids hey i'll go distribute this at frats and i'll give you 20 bucks and that gets tinder exploding at college campuses so in a weird way it's like its own mini facebook where it's just like hey you want to have sex with these girls that are on this Kinko's printout? Join this app. Yeah, from Ellie Magazine, her actual job at Tinder, I misspoke earlier, she was the marketing director, and she did that for about two years. And kind of what Yogi mentioned there, she was kind of instrumental in helping it spread on in college campuses.

And just a couple more things from the Justin Mateen lawsuit. He apparently called a mutual acquaintance of theirs a, quote, liberal, lying, desperate slut, unquote. And he threatened that Wolf would, quote, regret breaking up with him, quote, once my tenderness for you wears off from your behavior, unquote. I like that he threw in tenderness for you wears off from your behavior, unquote. I like that he threw in tenderness, right? Because it doesn't seem like a word that that particular guy would know.

He Googled it before. Yeah. We got to work on the brand name somehow. Yeah. If you know that this might be released in public legal documents, you want to kind of work in some name dropping. Tenderness. Wait, also, Sean, did you call it Ellie Magazine? Are you sure it's not Elle Magazine?

Yeah. Well, it's, the thing is there is an Elle Magazine, isn't there? Yeah. Like it's spelled E-L-L-E, but I would assume the Elle Magazine would be referred to as something differently as the Ellie Magazine. Oh, okay. So there is another, there is an actual Ellie magazine.

I didn't know if this was just like the dude pronunciation of Elle magazine. It's entirely possible that I'm completely incorrect here. Look, this is why we had you on today, Kate. For feminism. So that somebody, yes, somebody would be able to call me on my pronunciation of Elle magazine. Well, I'll have to check out Ellie. I haven't heard of that one. Yeah, it's founded by Justin Mateen.

Yes. Rebrand his image. People are like, this is like Elle magazine, right? It kind of reminds me of when Andrew Cuomo started the women's party in New York. The women's equality party. Politics for girls. That vibe. WEP was not as popular as WAP.

Yeah. So this is around 2013 when she's suing Tinder. And although Sean said the worst part of her life was when she was 12, she in later interviews says that the harassment online from people uh, people calling her, uh, you know, just basically online, uh, harassment at her being a Yoko of Tinder is what occurs at this point.

And she then marries Michael Hurd, who is a Texas oil air. Andy, what are you laughing about? That she's called the Yoko of Tinder. Well, I mean like that is what like, you know,

cause like it had hurt their, I, uh, their brand at that time, I think is what yeah just got the tinder revolver okay all right she she fucked up the tinder brand by tempting that totally innocent co-founder a real snake in the garden right right um but she meets uh michael hurd in aspen on a skiing trip. Here's what's interesting. She says this is the worst time in her life. She was just in a closet doing nothing. But then she also is in Aspen on a skiing trip where she meets Michael Hurd, who then becomes her now husband. Uh, the story with her in Aspen is she goes up to a guy eating lunch at the lodge and he's like, I don't

know how to ski. And she's like, like i'll teach you and then she skis down the mountain as fast as she can to show off and he skis next to her backwards going just as fast i don't know how true this is i don't i don't really trust it but the weirdest thing is that the way that's really relatable though that kind of meeting an aspen skiing origin story i think we've all been there yeah i mean so a few months later though or about a year and a half later he this is how he proposes to her which i find very odd they are meeting in texas and because he doesn't have his regular truck they have to take an older one with no ac and they do a four hour drive in the Texas heat. They stopped and got fast food.

And then they got to his parents ranch. And then he's like, let's go on a hiking trail on horses. And she's like, I'm, I'm not that good of a rider. He said, it's going to be fine. I'm going to take a quick shower, but you don't have to take a shower. You should just put on this fishing shirt and button it all the way to the top for bugs. And then they go on this horse ride. After an hour, they got off to stretch their legs and he gets on one knee and proposes to her.

So he tells her after a four hour long drive of just being hot and sweaty, put on a giant fishing shirt and then I'm going to propose to you. Just an odd way. She has like McDonald's diarrhea too while it's happening. And like he takes a shower and she's like he takes a shower and he's wearing a nice white button-up and jeans and it's like i don't know there's things like this and i'm like i i don't

trust this guy i'm not i just okay i don't often accuse people on the show of of being gay but i think this guy might be gay it's just a really weird way to be like, hey, I'm going to propose to my girlfriend now by making her miserable for seven hours and then being like, here's a ring. We're getting married. Actually sounds very heterosexual to me. Yeah, he's like, I'm going to take a

shower. You don't need to. He's like, maybe I will. And I'm like, no, really. Yeah. But yeah, he is, as we may or may not have mentioned so far, a oil heir from Tyler, Texas. Heard's grandfather, Bob Heard, started Heard Producing Co. And they own and operate more than 400 oil and gas wells. I have not found any official heir net worth. But as of right now, from his restaurant in Tyler his

net worth is between 10 and 15 million he goes back to like great-grandfather is like Texas oil right or yeah I don't know if it's a great-grandfather I think it's just Bob heard his grandfather started herd producing Co and I mean he's got oil in Texas he's linked to money for till you know his his kids kids kids kids are gonna have money if you know what I mean he's got oil in texas he's linked to money for till you know his his kids kids kids kids are gonna have money if you know what i mean he's descended from a character from there will be blood sure yes he uh he charmed whitney by telling her the story of how his grandfather met with lbj in texas the night before jfk was assass Yes, that is the level of money this guy comes from. Damn.

Operation Mongoose Money. I liked this anecdote from either Elle or Ellie magazine by Amanda Fitzsimmons. Whitney Wolfe gives this quote, which is like not necessarily wrong, but kind of hypocritical here. As Wolfe will tell various reporters and influencers throughout the day, which is like not necessarily wrong, but kind of hypocritical here. As, as Wolf will tell various reporters and influencers throughout the day,

Bumble's ultimate mission is quote, empowering women to correct the fact that connecting is broken. She says, quote, misogyny is the epidemic of our generation gesticulating for emphasis such that it's hard not to notice the rock on her left hand. Her intended whom she'll marry a week later in Italy is Texas oil scion, Michael heard.

Of course, there are lots of diseases and really horrible struggles outside of that, but I see misogyny as a world issue. It's what creates and sustains wars. It propels some of the most atrocious behaviors. What makes me excited is that we can do something about it. And I just like a woman married to a Texas oil heir talking about what creates and sustains wars. Yeah, that's very true.

This will be the interview where I am really giving ammunition to all the critics of feminism. Okay, great, great. But to jump back into her post-Tinder story and to jump back into the Austin's Woman's Magazine article. Following her departure, Wolf found solace in her experiences with the people she had met in places like the orphanage

in northern Thailand. I would imagine slightly different life experiences, but she found solace with those people. And talks about, you know, why would I feel sorry for myself when I'm healthy, I don't have a terminal illness, I have a roof over my head and, you know, pretty big roof, I would imagine. She returns to Texas and she's kind of in the middle of a PR storm at this point because of her lawsuit against Tinder.

You know, she's getting hit up by the Daily Mail and all that. But as part of this, she gets hit up by a Russian billionaire we mentioned at the top, Andrei Andreev, the CEO of Badoo, which was at the time the world's largest and fastest growing dating platform. And he emails her and wants to start another dating platform with her. I think initially, according to l magazine she uh she wanted to start like post uh tinder she wanted to start like a twitter type thing that was like anti-internet bullying oh yeah we mentioned mercy this was her original idea to start a uh a platform where instead of hurling 140 character insults, users would compliment each other. But I guess,

I guess there was no money in that. Yeah, that was going to become the like business networking platform, which was female focused and more built on compliments than Twitter insults, as we currently see today. And then Andre, this Russian billionaire who founded Badoo, the European dating app, tries to get her to work for Badoo as their CMO. And she's like,

I don't want to do that. I'm dealing with this Tinder storm lawsuit. I don't want to join another company. I want to focus on my own thing. And so she kind of gives him the blueprints as to what she's thinking about. And he's like, wow, that's great. We should make that a dating app. And then helps her found Bumble through those meetings. What's CMO? Because all I can think of is chief medical officer from Star Trek. Chief marketing officer? Yes, that's right, Kate. I was going to say, I don't know, and then Kate said chief marketing officer. I'm like, yes, that's right. I've always known it the whole time. Yeah, that's exactly what Yogi was going to say if he kept talking there.

She initially turns down Andre. She's like, I don't want to do this. I want to get out of the dating game. Would you say she swiped left on him? Yes, she swiped left on him? Yes, she swiped left on him. He couldn't be less her style. But then she talks about it with Michael Heard, her husband, and he's like, that guy's rich.

He knows what he's doing. You should hear him out. And so then she eventually decides to go with Andre's ideas. And originally, Andre's cut of Bumble is 79% and Whitney Wolfe has 20. And then 1% is split to the two other Tinder executives that came along to Bumble. Yeah, very even distribution of wealth there. Yes, certainly. And it's like, so there's this very interesting Forbes magazine article that's published in August 2019 by Angel Ah-Yung.

I'm hopefully pronouncing her name right. But she investigates and writes an article called Sex, Drugs, Misogyny, and Sleaze at of a either irony or hypocrisy that the entire marketing campaign of Bumble is so built on, you know, feminism and empowerment and all this stuff. And the money is fronted by this kind of shady Russian billionaire we'll talk about in a second here who has a pretty toxic corporate culture at the London office to the point where he's eventually bought out. Um, and we can just go through this article a bit here. corporate culture at the London office to the point where he's eventually bought out. And we can just go through this article a bit here. Yeah, my favorite piece of dirt on Andre is this piece in the Forbes piece where it says, while Badoo's popularity grew in Europe and Latin America in the early 2010s, adoption was slow in the US. The American user base then was mostly Latino. Andre would complain when he saw too many dark faces on the app.

He believed it lowered the value of the brand and made it look cheap, says a former employee who worked on marketing campaigns. Andre was always making it clear that white was better, says the former high-ranking executive. If someone were to arrive a little bit late to the office and they were Latino or African, he would make comments like, well, what can you expect, as if people who are not white were not hardworking he would make comments like, well, what can you expect? As if people who are not white were not hardworking. Andreev denies this, saying, diversity is at the core of our brains and values.

So, this dude's a piece of shit. I think we should take him at his word. I mean, it is appropriate for the person with the number one dating app in Brazil to be extremely racist. You know, from interviews prior to Andreev getting kicked out of the Badoo and Bumble, you see Whitney Wolf saying things like, oh, he's great. He's really smart. And then even after it comes out that this guy is a misogynistic racist, still like he's always been nice to me and it's hilarious that a woman that was like tinder is uh abusing me fuck them but this guy that's doing

kind of the same thing at but do well i mean he's decent to me and owns a 79 of the company so i can't really go against him i don't know if this is a trend but it seems like one where in the post-soviet russia like the average person may not be racist, but the average Russian entrepreneur is wildly racist. Like somehow it just brings, it attracts that type of person from Russia. Or at least they haven't yet learned

like American entrepreneurs to kind of keep that to themselves in the office. Right. Capitalism isn't fully developed there. No. Learned the main key of capitalism is to not say out loud the fact that you want white faces on your dating app. Rest in peace, Prince Philip. But to talk a little bit about Andre Andreev, and we'll perhaps follow up with a future episode because details on this guy are

a little bit sketchy, as with many people who made their money in Russia in the 1990s. But just from this Forbes magazine article, he made a small bit of money in some shady web companies in Russia in the 1990s. And I couldn't find any direct evidence for this, but it's not a stereotype when I say almost certainly he was involved to some degree with the Russian mafia to make money in Russia in the 1990s. It's just a reality that, you know, there was so much chaos there that you had to have what was called a roof over your head to do business. And what a roof was, was a group of armed people who would protect you from getting extorted by either chechen or russian mafia or you know whatever criminal gang was running around at

the time so you know you would imagine he has some sort of shady connections in his past but regardless he makes his money on these shady uh web companies and then sean did you know that those very same people made donald trump the president that's true uh regardless uh according to forbes he was quote finally armed with some wealth and he decided to tackle the burgeoning online dating world in 2004 he launched mamba a bare bones desktop dating site for russian users at the time Match.com was the world's biggest online dating service, but hadn't yet launched in Russia. Mamba was free, but users had an option to pay in order to push their profile to the top of the site.

Finam Holdings came knocking and invested $20 million for a 90% stake. He then sold the rest to Finam in 2006 for an undisclosed amount. In 2005, he began spending more time in London. He then launched Badoo in 2006, a year before the launch of the iPhone with the intent to reach customers in Europe. He obtained citizenship in the UK and Malta around this time. In 2010, Badoo launched the iPhone mobile app. The following year, according to a former executive, the company went from 20 million user signups to 100 million in four months, mostly in Europe and Latin America, and had notched over 200 million in revenue. And this kind of overtakes Match.com at this time is doing like a pay to sign up model, whereas he is doing the freemium model that we're all so familiar with where you can use it for free, but you can pay more to like see who liked you or get your profile put at the top or whatever. Right. So because of the iPhone, he makes a lot of money on this Badoo thing.

Wait, Kate. So the guy that said he was inspired by mayor pete you met him on hinge i met him on hinge yeah he was an entrepreneur as well um i was i'm not surprised but he was like a yeah he was like a brooklyn guy who i told him you know he said biden was doing a good job i told him that i was a leftist so i didn't really think so and then he was like you don't think biden's doing a good job at all and it's like no not really and he's like you know who i think is really great mayor pete and i was just like this date and like honestly i've been on first dates with people that they're like yeah i'm addicted to

drugs and i'm like we can definitely work with that this pete thing was a little too far you know if it weren't for mayor pete you probably never would have met him because have you seen how many times like pete and uh what is his name chaston have talked about how they met on hinge oh really i haven't seen that i know about chasing what i know about him is that he is an improv gay um he's oh really really cb classes yeah and um it's apparently a good improviser and cool um we gotta get him on the show much sweeter than a pete so i don't know their their marriage seems very like, not to be on too much of a tangent, but their marriage seems like Jason is a person who maybe sees the best in people,

to the extent that he does not see that Pete is a sociopath. That's my theory. Kate, you know, if you had taken that Mayor Pete fan home, it would have been an interesting experiment to see that if your cat would start attacking him? Well, actually, the guy that I went out with after him was afraid of cats. Not allergic. Afraid. Phobic. And cats are very small.

So I was honestly turned off by his cowardice. I decided to take a break after a double whammy of those two guys. Makes sense. Whiplash. Yeah. It was just too much. He had a childhood traumatic experience where his parents dressed him entirely in cheese. And he was swarmed by both rats and cats.

I asked him if he had ever been attacked by a cat or something. He said no. And I was like, well, what are you afraid of? And he's like, I'm worried that they'll steal my soul in my sleep. You know? And I was just like,

this is, I don't know. I believe in some cultural thing. I mean, some shelter cats do that. They're just, my cat's like up here right now. She's so tiny.

She's just like, even if she wanted to steal a soul, she could not carry it you know the guy the guy had epigenetic trauma from being an ancient roman soldier fighting against the egyptians yeah exactly uh but to kind of talk about the forbes article the two main uh contentions of it are an environment of sexual harassment and racism at the London office. So we mentioned, you know, Whitney Wolf Hurd is working in Austin, Texas, but she's talking with Andreev in London two to five times a day. And it seems like most of the main decisions for the time that Andreev is there are being made out of the London office because office because again he's the 79 owner of this thing

so there's a environment of sex harassment and racism but also the corporate structure of the parent is set up entirely around tax avoidance like basically every multinational corporation on earth you know having all these uh subsidiaries and parent companies in malta and shit so we'll just kind of talk about that a little bit here before we wrap up uh i guess to start with the sexual harassment this one gets you laid with dead-eyed professional managerial sex the uh the forbes article interviews a lot of former badu employees um it quotes jessica powell who said she served as the company's CMO.

I was told to act pretty for investors and make job candidates, quote, horny to work for Badoo. She was asked to give a designer candidate a massage. She says female employees were routinely discussed in terms of their appearances. She says, if you disagree with Andre, you were called a sicka

which means bitch in russian c-y-k-a uh so there's like you know a lot of different stories along that kind of uh of that nature yeah today when i was like researching um we're doing some like research for the episode and reading up the the forbes article detailing all the um sexual harassment and badu offices like i had also just read um that that telegraph article about inside the sex cult um the the orgasm sex cult and i was having trouble like i was losing track of my mind like which behavior was badu offices and what was the sex cult behavior which orgasm sex cult was it one taste one taste yes one taste i know a lot about that not gonna tell you on the podcast but oh it's that kind of you know a lot about it

yeah a lot of friends in there. It's not like you just did a lot of research and you know some facts. Okay, cool. Yeah. I'm excited to hear this. Alice Bonazio was Badoo's Director of Communications and Public Relations. She says that for female employees to get ahead, they needed to, quote, play the game. And the article continues, playing the game in one case meant watching a video of an employee receiving oral sex from a prostitute. Four former employees mentioned knowledge of this video, and one of them says she watched it at the urging of co-workers. Spokesperson for Badoo dismisses the idea that a video existed. So it's kind

of like this very fratty party culture in London, which, you know, a lot of London startups and financial companies have this cocaine and hooker culture. At this point, that's like, that's 50% of like London GDP. Yes. Is, is, is a trendy startups that force people into those things so looking at this it's kind of a he said he said she said scenario where it's you know on one hand there's a very specific um my employee my co-workers male co-workers pressured me to watch a video of another co-worker uh getting a blow job from a prostitute and the counterpoint is no we didn't yeah yeah basically and like at the end

of the forbes piece uh wolf heard is says like she stands firmly behind andre he's become my family and one of my best friends uh flying to london from texas around 15 times in four months uh she's never witnessed toxic behavior in the badu headquarters and if she doesn't see it it's not happening you know i mean like obviously that's the case obviously um and then just to kind of continue with the uh internal party culture um simultaneous with the growth but do began earning a reputation for wild parties one former employee recalls seeing photos of a gathering at a person's house encompassing quote half the company everyone was naked and doing lines of coke and they were sending these photos over the internal email system uh the photos and

videos were shared by an internal email list dedicated to quote non-work party stuff they became a regular occurrence a private facebook group of about 200 badu alumni also contains references to the gatherings. Quote, I wonder if current Badooers know of the after parties with prostitutes and cocaine in all their offices, reads one message in the group. Quote, I miss the days of ketamine infused after parties in Badoo, writes another former Badoo employee. Yeah, it's so hard when you're at an office and you know that like the golden years of that office are behind you.

Yeah, I mean, it's kind of tough for me to land on a side here because, you know, on the one hand, I'm extremely against sexual harassment. On the other side, I also really miss ketamine infused after parties. So I just feel really torn. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there has to be an office that finds a happy medium of like, you know, non-abusive ketamine infused after parties. Exactly. Feminist ketamine after parties, you know? That's right. The woman is the one offering the ketamine to people.

She pays for the ketamine. Yes, exactly. Imagine seeing the calendar invite on outlook pop up for that k-hole yeah happy hour k-hole by friday yeah it has like 5 p.m to 4 a.m oh it's on a wednesday you can't do a you can't do a an after work k-hole on a on a on a weekend because people people tend to have their own plans. Yeah, exactly. I'm so sick of these mandatory office happy hour K-holes.

Yeah. I have an existential crisis and forget that I'm alive. Yeah. But yeah, that's why you need a union at your workplace to ensure that your cocaine and Russian hookers are not done in a responsible manner. Right. Organic fair trade. Exactly. And then just last thing from this particular article to talk about the tax avoidance of Bumble. And as far as I understand, they're still doing all of this stuff, you know, like they pushed out the founder founder but there's no indication that they've stopped with this particular uh structural setup uh so on

uh he from the very beginning established badu's corporate structure and numerous offshore entities in october 2007 he established worldwide vision ltd which was the parent company in bermuda presumably to reduce its tax bill. Worldwide Vision and Ondrive then created a dozen subsidiaries in the US, UK, and Cyprus, the majority of which controlled his four dating apps, Badoo, Bumble, Chappie, a gay dating app, and Lumen, launched for the over-50 crowd. In June, he created Magic Lab as a holding company for the dating apps. Ondrive at first says board meetings for Worldwide Vision are held in Malta, where the corporate tax rate can be as low as 5%, then later said they were in Bermuda.

His explanation, Malta is where the company develops intellectual property. The article quotes Tommaso Fazio, a tax expert at the Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation. He says it's a fairly common tax avoidance structure. Unless there was a tax angle to this, why would you strategize your business through Malta? Incentivizing, you know, employees. Everyone wants to move. Yeah, right. I mean, the Mediterranean is beautiful.

And I hope we're not alienating our one Maltese fan, Luca, because he's a cool guy. Badoo documents filed with the British government also show yet another entity, RIMBURG International Corp., based in the British Virgin Islands, where there is no corporate tax, with Andreev as the ultimate owner. So, you know, they just set up we we did an entire episode on uh shell companies and offshore money that you can listen to in more detail but they're just you know it's just always the the bullshit with all these we're giving back through corporate philanthropy all these types of stories or you know whitney wolf talking about feminism or

whatever else they're engaged in massive tax avoidance that result in the underfunding of social services that people rely on and uh this is the game that they all play all these billionaires with their multinational corporations yeah and from various sources whitney has said uh andre've took a chance on her when no one else would and that without him the Bumble journey wouldn't have been possible. I'd found from one source that to develop Bumble into what it was, it would have cost around $10 million. But since Badoo and Andreev had invested into Bumble, they, I think, took care of the back end i mean i know that the uh austin texas team must have worked on it but i think that a majority of the coding in the back end was done via the badu uh core group that was brought on by andreev yeah yeah the um uh forbes article seemed to indicate that it was kind of a hostage situation

where uh in order for them both to be developed they They had, there wasn't an engineering team really in Austin, or there's just like a skeleton engineering team. And most of it is components that were developed for Badoo get repurposed for Bumble. But as kind of a power play, they keep all of those engineers in London. Oh, interesting. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, it seems like he really kind of, Andreev kind of threw this all together. He had his like corporate office in London. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it seems like he really kind of on dream kind of threw this all together. He had his like corporate office in London. He gave Whitney the money to start this thing up. So, you know, I don't want to, I don't want to come off as sexist by saying Whitney didn't do any work to earn her billions because really no billionaire did any work to earn their billions. And she's quoted in this, this Forbes article talking about, you know, how Andreev leveraged Badoo to allow Bumble to launch into the market with

force. So he like really put up a lot of the capital that, that went into this thing. And she says, quote, I don't think I could have stomached a bunch of men judging me at that time. Like if she had had to go on, go on the road and like do a venture capital raise to get bumble off the ground i could have done a friends and family raise and gotten the money quote this was more

about his knowledge and infrastructure so a comment i'd rather deal with just one incredibly disgusting man than several well or, friends and family raised. I've done that. Gotten a fucking I used to sell See's candy bars for my show choir trips.

They got raised up to $200 once. Right. Yeah. Just below the $10 million launch cost that I'm sure went into Bumble or whatever the exact number was. And so because of this Forbes article detailing the sex harassment in particular, Andreev is forced out. You know, it is like a PR black eye for Bumble, this company that markets itself as, you know know feminist and female focus to have a toxic

sex harassment culture in their london office so he's forced out and he actually sells his 79 stake to the blackstone group which is like kind of a small irony or whatever you want to call it because blackstone just happens to be one of the most evil corporations on earth so they fixed their pr problem by getting rid of this like skeezy russian sex harasser and replacing him with uh the biggest corporate landlord on the planet that is engaged in you know massive theft of wealth from uh people who've been originally victimized by the 2008 financial crisis and they're already uh according to news reports blackstone is salivating at the idea of buying up all these potential foreclosure homes that might come whenever they link the uh whenever they lift the eviction moratorium for the coronavirus right yeah but like are their internal emails respectful oh yeah no k-holes at blackstone

a different type of k-hole over there. in the financial crisis. He says it with regards to Europe, but you can apply it to the US as well. He says they're, quote, waiting to see how beaten up people's psyches get and where they're willing to sell assets. You want to wait until there's really blood in the streets. And what he's saying is, you know, Blackstone is sitting on like 1.X trillion dollars of quote unquote dry powder.

They have all this cash on hand and they're just waiting for people to be desperate, to be forced into, you know, a fire sale where they're having to sell their assets to Blackstone for 10 cents on the dollar. And how they became, you know, the largest commercial landlord in the world was during the original 2008 financial crisis, where all these foreclosures, all these illegal foreclosures took place, Blackstone would buy up these single family homes and then turn them into single family rentals. And then they actually took those single family rentals and turned them into securitized rental backed securities. We've covered them before. Yeah. The rent backed structured securities. And then when those securities saw a big drop in rental income,

Blackstone managed to convince the Obama administration to bail it out by providing explicit government guarantees for the higher rented rated tranches. So and this is Nick Corbishley writes in truthout.org about Blackstone a bit. I was just quoting from that article there. But it's like they get so much money from the Federal Reserve, from the federal government, you know, the CARES Act bailout. They've been one of the main recipients of it.

They just get all this fucking money from the government and they can just sit there and wait for everybody else to get desperate and have to sell to them for pennies on the dollar. But these are the ethical corporations you're supporting when you swipe right on Bumble now. That why you always swipe left never have sex never just don't just do what i do support blackstone look at someone's look at someone's profile judge it if it has anything

resembling a cliche in it and swipe left and then um go on with her sad life yeah makes sense that's fair don't fuck anyone who says my life is exactly like larry david's don't fuck anyone who don't fuck anyone who so much as mentions the office no oh yeah um someone who's still looking for a partner in crime in 2021 no No. No. No. Yeah. If you want to. Don't date criminals, guys. Yeah.

If they're looking for a strong female, they're actually looking for the opposite of that. Strongly traditional. Yeah. I'm just glad there are guys out there to match up with the profiles that say, I'm just looking for Larry David. Yeah. Well, it's just funny because everyone it's like the office everyone puts it because they're like oh i'm so original but it's actually like every five profiles my favorite one was uh fluent in sarcasm oh really yeah great sarcasm that's another classic yeah If you want to support ethical corporations, don't date. Just watch pornography. Yeah.

I only fuck people I meet on Twitter. I want to make sure that my partners have full brain poisoning. That's right. Do you want to plug that, Kate? Yeah. My Twitter is

at Kate Willett, two L's and two T's. Again, that's for you to go if you would like to fuck me. If you'd like to fuck Kate, say that again. If you'd like to fuck me, yeah. But if not, if you like The Office, I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

Yeah. And Kate.Willett on Instagram and listen to my new audiobook called um dirtbag anthropology um on audible if you don't want to give money to amazon you could just do the free trial and listen to it there but it's good i got some i got some socialist stuff in even on that platform so um yeah um so yeah it was that was a fun thing to write and i also have a leftist feminist comedy podcast called reply guides and um last thing i want to mention before we close out here is just how bumble exactly makes money we've we've kind of only alluded to that they do the freemium model but they sell for 7.99 a week a variety of

premium options which allow users to see like who liked them and increases their chance uh to you know match with somebody apparently they've got about 1.2 million users on this uh premium model uh and as i mentioned earlier it's about 73 percent males on bumble still so that's like primarily the demographic that's that's paying for on bumble still so that's like primarily the demographic that's that's paying for it here uh but in addition to like the the freemium model though it should be noted they've uh settled two class action lawsuits about how they made it impossible to unsubscribe from the premium model where like there's apparently one in california and one in new york where people were like they didn't explain to us that it auto renews our premium. And then they made it extremely

difficult to cancel. And they settled those for about 22 million. Yeah. On Twitter, if you look up Bumble lawsuit every now and then you see a person like outside of the Tinder and the other ones that was like, I just got $37 from signing up for Bumble four months ago. Why is this going on? Like they have no idea what the reason they're getting a payout is and then what i what i kind of wanted to mention was like the last note of caution for everyone out there using bumble is now that blackstone has like 79 or whatever it is at the current moment uh from this same truth out.org article i was quoting earlier uh they quote a bloomberg article which says blackstone is quote exploring ways to monetize the client data of the almost 100 companies it has acquired over the years. Blackstone apparently owns Ancestry.

Over 3 million people have sent samples of their DNA to Ancestry so that the company could tell them where their ancestors originated from. Now those samples belong to Blackstone. So they could use your DNA if you submit to Ancestry. Blackstone has your DNA for data mining purposes. But also now that they own Bumble, I would imagine in addition to the freemium model, they're going to do the same kind of data harvesting you get from Facebook or Google or wherever on your Bumble profile and the people you're talking to, the things you're saying. So, I mean, this is just kind of the reality of the modern Internet age. You are the product.

I mean, maybe they'll use it for a good thing, like using the DNA to do that Conan sketch if they made it. Do that with your matches. Sure. Yeah, they definitely won't use it to do Gattaca in real life. Oh, no, no. Only good uses, I'm sure. But we'll see what continues to happen.

I'm sure, you know, Whitney Wolf Hurd, her net worth will probably go back up as we head into white boy summer and the pandemic ends, go above the 1.3 billion. But I want to thank Kate Willett so much for being here with us and providing a feminist perspective

on this feminist dating app. And perhaps just one more time, you could, if you have any last thoughts, you could certainly share them with us, but also just tell people where they could find you. And we will certainly provide links to everything that Kate

has been involved in in the description for this episode. Yeah, just, you know, Twitter, Insta, or my audiobook. Also, you can check out, I have a special on Netflix on the comedy lineup, but you can probably also find me on Hinge.

I'm on there. I'm still looking. But I want you to message me first. I put up with enough as a woman. I am not extending myself. Yeah. Right. This episode got many people to uninstall Bumble just so they can find Kate on Hinge.

Yeah. on Hinge. This was really just like Kate came on here as kind of a way of watering down the number of people on Hinge inspired by Pete Buttigieg. Yeah, totally. Look at this. She just came and sat on my lap.

She's so mad. Thanks again so much, Kate. This has been a lot of fun. And thank you to the listeners. You can always check us out on patreon.com slash grubstakers. I'm Sean P. McCarthy, and we'll see you next time. I'm Andy Palmer. I'm Steve Jeffries.

I'm Yogi Poliwog. Always swipe left. We're very casual on this show where we talk about some of the darkest things in the world hey man yeah yeah i need to go to the bathroom we can't be casual talking about through the armenian genocide is everyone is everyone clowning on me what's going on we were but but you're good now all right i'm listening to the raw files