Pivot - Whitney Wolfe Herd at Code 2023

Episode Date: October 4, 2023

Bumble Founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd speaks with CNBC Correspondent Julia Boorstin at Code 2023. They discuss the power of AI, and whether it could play the role of a digital matchmaker. Recorded on September 26th in Los Angeles. To join the waitlist for the 2024 Code Conference, visit https://voxmediaevents.com/code2024. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher. We have another bonus episode for you from the Code Conference today. Julia Boorstin and founder and CEO of Bumble, Whitney Wolf-Herd, talk about the power of AI and whether it could play a role of a digital matchmaker. Enjoy the episode. I'm really excited about this next interview. Whitney Wolf-Herd is the CEO of Bumble Inc. Just so you know, that's partially Bumble, but also a number of other companies, including Badoo, Fruits, and a recently acquired app called Official. Now, she was an original co-founder of Tinder. She turned dating on its head by, of course, reversing who has to make the first move on Bumble Women Make the First Move. Now, just to put this all in context, I first interviewed Whitney in spring of 2015. She

had just launched Bumble a couple months earlier in 2014. We were standing on the sidewalk in Austin at South by Southwest. She was just trying to get this new app off the ground, and she's certainly come quite a long way since then. When she took Bumble public, she was the youngest female CEO to take a company public. I also had the opportunity to interview her for my book, When Women Lead. In the book, I talked a lot about her efforts to reform the industry and push through regulation, and copies of the book are in the lounge over there. So if you don't have it yet, I suggest you check it out. But today, we're not going to be talking about regulatory change, but starting off talking about AI, and there's a lot to talk about in the dating space.

So please welcome Bumble CEO, Whitney Wolfe-Hearn. Whitney, thank you so much for being here today. There's so much going on in your world of digital dating, but we've got to start off with AI. Oh, yeah. There was a presentation earlier today of an AI dating game, but you're already integrating AI into what's happening at Bumble. Tell us a little bit about your vision for AI. So I think AI has been a big piece of our business for years. I think this is something

that is lost on the general public maybe because our matching algorithms are AI driven. This is machine learning. This is how we understand relevance and compatibility. But what's really exciting beyond the safety measures that we've already powered with AI and machine learning, what's really exciting is the future of AI. So I would really think about AI as a supercharger to love and relationships. And I want to be very clear, we are not intending on replacing humans with bots. We are not intending for people to fall in love in the sci-fi version of a digital boyfriend, girlfriend, partner. What we will do, however, is we will really lead with the customer's pain points and reducing friction, reducing things that stress a customer out. If it's a woman who says, I just don't have time for this, or, hey, I'm going out

on these dates and this person's actually not compatible. How can we leverage AI to better detect relevance, so to supercharge the machine of compatibility? And then how can we actually build confidence? So similar to the demo you all had earlier, you know, dating confidence is a huge issue. Actually, a lot of people that don't join a dating app, it's because they're scared they're going to be bad at dating. So we can actually leverage AI to train people to interact in a way that makes them feel positive so that they can then get to the human. The second bucket is safety and moderation.

So Bumble, since day one, has always been about instilling a safer ecosystem. since day one has always been about instilling a safer ecosystem. How can we put guardrails in place to get people to behave in a kinder, more accountable way? And I see AI as the next horizon for this. So being really intentional about the ethics and the manifesto, if you will, of how we will engage with AI, women at the forefront of that. And then, you know, the third piece is innovation. There are so many ways to really supercharge relationships with things that haven't been built yet. And so I think that's where I'm spending a lot of my energy and time. I'm quite obsessed with AI at the moment. Yeah, AI is certainly the hot topic. and time. I'm quite obsessed with AI at the moment. Yeah, AI is certainly the hot topic.

It's interesting because so much of what your business is about is getting people to use the app, but then getting them off of the app. And with AI, as we saw in that demo, you could chat with an AI bot, you could chat with a person seemingly forever. How are you using AI to transition to this in real life experience, the IRL version of this? So the guiding principle for our product team right now is go online to get offline in the quickest, safest way possible with the most relevance. So we are definitely not the business of keeping you in your phone forever. And this is the most critical time for that.

I mean, technology has been phenomenal, but it has led to a very isolated, very lonely world, a global world. And the youth are suffering at extreme levels due to isolation and disconnection. So everything we do is about getting you online so that you can then match with people outside of who's just around you or who's just in the room with you and then get you offline. So that's a big piece of our future strategy right now. We're really obsessed with the idea of reducing the match to meet portion. So how do you actually get away from just chat? We don't want to keep you in a chat room forever. That's absolutely the opposite of what we're trying to do. However, relevance is such an important trigger here. So give us a vision for how AI might look in Bumble

and your other apps in the future. You know, we've seen more and more tools, whether it's from Meta or OpenAI that are these chatbots that people are talking to, but how would an AI dating coach work? Yeah, so how wild do you want to go? Because I can make it really crazy. So I think something that is actually not out of the realm of possibility,

it's certainly not launching tomorrow, but it's very realistic is Julia, if you were single, you could have a Julia bot. Okay. It's your personal matchmaker. It's your personal dating coach. And you tell your Julia bot everything you want it to know about what's important to you. Here are my non-negotiables. Here are the value sets that must exist in a partner. Here are the things I want to go do. Here's my dream summer. Here's how I want to spend a Sunday morning. Here's what I want to do on a Thursday evening. This person has to be like this. It can't be like that. So you basically give it all the information and data you're comfortable sharing with your own personal matchmaker. And instead of your matchmaker just, you know, kind of replacing you,

it would go in at speed, save you a bunch of time because it could go then talk to a lot of other matchmakers, digital matchmakers. And only if those other matchmakers triggered a certain level of compatibility would it bring it back to the human. So now instead of you having to swipe and match and chat with dozens of people to find someone who's compatible for you, you can in fact only talk to the three people that came back as qualified individuals for what you're looking for. So you can really leverage AI to supercharge compatibility. And that's just on the matching side of things. That's not even getting into image recognition, where you can see that someone likes to eat at the same restaurants as you or likes the same brands as you.

And we're not talking about the chat opportunities either, or the, how can we leverage AI to actually set you up on a date, get you the reservation? I mean, there's so much here. And I think the most important piece is we all still want to be in the same room together. You're all here. You're not just dialing. I know a lot of people are coming by, you know, video. But the reality is nothing will ever replace this. And if it does, we have bigger issues, right? So I think that we are in a really interesting opportunity and a moment that can leverage AI and human connection. And the intersection is really Fox Creative. This is advertiser content from Zelle. When you picture an online scammer, what do you see?

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sure people aren't manipulated to think they're falling in love with a person, but they're really falling in love with a bot? Absolutely. So I think the short answer is yes, there needs to be regulation. I think that's a unanimous agreement amongst the AI community as well. I know a lot of smart people are hard at work on that. And we are actually working on our own set of terms and conditions, if you will, how we intend to use AI, what we're using AI for. So starting with a very intentional point, I think this is absolutely imperative for every founder, every company leader to know why they're using AI. You can't just want to do

AI because it's trendy and it's cool and you're scared you're going to become irrelevant. So for us, it is enhancing the experience for the customer, helping the customer have a safer experience. So if you start with these high level non-negotiables, then all of the double clicks start writing themselves, right? We cannot let people be misled by AI generated images and so on and so forth. Also getting involved in the broader AI policy discussion is something we feel we should be, you know, taking a stance on. Bumble has always been pro-women and pro-safety digitally. We've passed laws. We're working on a suite of other initiatives in the legislation kind of effort world.

And so AI will definitely be top of mind there. I want to shift gears over to your business. And I'm going to compare you to Tinder here, another dating app in the same world. And Tinder's growth is slowing. Tinder's growth was 6% in the second quarter. The Bumble app had 23% in Q2. But I'm wondering if what Tinder saw in that slowing growth indicates a broader issue in the industry, maybe because of economic uncertainty or other factors. Are you seeing a downward trend? So I think it's very important that, you know,

our teams really never directly compare ourselves to Tinder. It's funny. I think the broader community sees us as a peer directly, but everything we've been doing has actually been quite opposite from day one. You know, our entire mandate from the moment of founding this business was let's build a relationship economy, right? We now have BFF. We have these other platforms for connection beyond love. And we still think there's huge TAM. So when you look at the global base of just daters, right, people that are just single,

we have not penetrated that to any degree of a ceiling. So when you think about how much growth there still is to be had in the world of relationships more globally, we haven't scaled around the world. We haven't even gone deep into our core markets. And the most important thing I can say around growth is growth is a derivative of building for the customer, listening to the customer, and really working backwards from what they're struggling with or what they wish they had more of. And so we think as long as our guiding principles are always customer-centric, brand, we've got a good brand and making sure we're reinvesting in the brand, and then AI is going to be something that really can supercharge us in the long run.

And I should note, you are in a quiet period, so you can't answer specific growth-related questions. Right, I'm trying to be slightly vague. But I guess more broadly, there is this question about economic uncertainty. Obviously, consumers have been grappling with inflation. You're a service with subscription options for primarily subscription driven. Is a dating service something people are going to be willing to pay for, especially if the economy does not have a soft landing? So what's fascinating about the price for love offline is it's super expensive. I mean, I'm sure two drinks at this hotel in the bar are like $45 or something. That's the cost of our monthly subscription.

So I really highly believe in our model because the fact that you can have unlimited access to individuals that are compatible to you, You can filter, you can travel, you can do all of these things on our platform for the cost of two drinks at a bar. People, irrespective of economic downturns or war or any macro circumstances, they still date. Humanity has continued and dating is at the foundation of that. So the other point is, if you look at a lot of the survey data, Gen Z is spending thousands of dollars that candidly they don't even have on subscriptions like gym memberships and activity clubs and social clubs because they want to have community. They're lonely.

They need connection. The subscription model that I think has been more threatened are the ones that isolate you more, right? You've seen a lot of the reports from some of these subscription businesses that don't get you offline. You mean like streaming video? Correct. So I think, you know, we can't compare online to offline subscription that really encourages community and real relationships to maybe something that just keeps you isolated in your room. And so, so much so that we're actually exploring higher tiers, right? This is something that we hear time and time again.

I hear from women, friends of mine, I don't have time to get on this dating app and swipe for an hour. I do not have time. Can Bumble just do it for me? I'll pay whatever you want. So that is like such a consistent feedback stream. So we are actually currently, we announced this in our prior earnings call, exploring higher tier offerings because we think there's still money that's probably being left on the table from very eager and willing daters. So Tinder announced that it's going to do a $500 a month plan. You're currently at $60 a month, I believe. Less than that, yeah.

Less than that. But so what is sort of the, if 60 is the highest, what is your current highest here, and what could you imagine it being? Is it $500 a month? You know, I can't put an exact price out there because of the fact that we haven't announced yet. I think what you will see is a AI supercharged version of the product

offering that feels very curated, very selective, and it will definitely be at a premium to where we are now. And that is not to say that will be the only model that we explore. I think there's, because of our brand, there's a lot of IRL demand as well to engage with Bumble offline. And so that's also an interesting thing we're exploring in terms of a more premium offering. I remember as the pandemic waned

and people started getting out and about more, I mean, during the pandemic, you launched video dating and all these different features, but as people started getting out and about more, there was this concern that people are going to be meeting in bars. They don't need to rely so much on dating apps. Do you see any sense of that? I mean, as people are spending so much more on experiences, travel, et cetera, Taylor Swift concerts, whatever it might be, do you see people having to make a choice and saying,

is this something I could do on my own when I'm out in the real world? You know, they do both. They do both. And the reality is it's a flywheel for us if people are back in the real world. So being back in the real world means more Bumble dates, more Bumble success stories, more Bumble marriages, more Bumble babies. The Bumble wedding that's going on every weekend, there's 60 single people at that wedding.

And the groomsman is talking about Bumble in the speech. Now you've got 60 new downloads. So you really can't compare and contrast because there's such a benefit to the dating world being turned back on offline. It certainly does not work in the way of people can date in the real world, now dating apps are dead. That's not the case. It's the same way as you go out with your friends, you still have an Instagram account. You might still have a TikTok. It's a dual model. I want to talk a little bit about your two other apps, Bumble Biz and Bumble BFF. And you've been talking about these for a while. You recently sort of spun them off from the core Bumble app. What is the real potential here?

And why haven't they fully taken off? So Bumble BFF is an incredible use case for ending loneliness. The amount of women in particular that are finding roommates or new friends when they graduate and move to a new city it's really remarkable the reason why we haven't scaled them to super super large numbers is because dating and we said this as we went public dating is the first priority you know we need to land our priorities here while we simultaneously start to build this LTV of relationships and love. We have successfully launched Bumble BFF. It's doing quite well. We're very excited with the early results. And

I think as the product becomes more community-oriented, we'll feel more comfortable with scaling it even more broadly. We're still kind of watching and learning, but we're very confident in friendship and there is no lack of, of loneliness, unfortunately. So we feel like we have huge champ there. But for Bumble BFF, aren't you really competing with Instagram or TikTok or these other apps? I mean, you know, people talk about sort of becoming friends with their Instagram friends. Is there, is, is that who the competition is there for that product? You know, it's interesting. I think the general consensus still from the surveys and from the customers we talked to is they don't feel like these social products give them a platform to form offline friends. They have Insta buddies, right, where they might chat or respond to each other's photos,

but they're not really going on a hike together or getting offline. I'm going to stay stuck in this digital friendship land. And so what's so interesting about BFF is the intention is so clear. They know they're going there to make friends, to then go out. They set what they're looking to do. I want someone to go out with this weekend. I want to go for a hike. I need, you know, a dog walking buddy.

And they're really getting offline and doing things. The issue with Instagram is it's not mutual, right? You might really want to be friends with that influencer, but the chances of that influencer responding to you and wanting to hang out, it's almost a shot in the dark. And then what about Bumblebiz? You're competing with LinkedIn? So Bumblebiz is really interesting

because basically when people meet professionally, they're kind of going on a platonic date, right? So we think there's a big opportunity for the professional connection space. It's not the highest priority right now. We're really good about being focused, decisive, and really measured about how much we're doing at any one given time. But I never started this company or took it public to be there just for a year. I think this is a multi-decade business. And so we've got a lot of runway ahead of us. And right now we're focused on really customer brand and AI as it pertains to love, as it pertains to our other adjacent businesses and friendship. Support for this show comes from Indeed.

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You need Indeed. You made an interesting purchase of an app called Official, which is for people who are already in a relationship to strengthen that relationship, be better partners to each other. Now, when you launched Bumble, people were already used to paying for Match or for eHarmony. That was an established business model.

But it's not like there's a big business out there right now for apps for people to be better spouses or better girlfriends and boyfriends. What do you see the opportunities being there? So official is remarkable. This is such a cool business and we're so proud to have acquired it. It's essentially where the new couples go together.

And if you think about being a new couple, it's such a vulnerable time. You're like, oh, do they like me? Like, they haven't responded to my texts in a while. What's going on? So it really captures that early life cycle of a relationship and checks in. It's a way, it's a companion, and AI is going to be huge here. It's a companion for relationship health, really candidly. to be huge here. It's a companion for relationship health, really candidly. It's helping you have a more communicative, open, transparent, healthy relationship. And those first several months,

first years are absolutely critical to the longevity and the health of those relationships. So why would we lose our dating app audience right when they meet? Why would we just say, okay, goodbye, best of luck. We really want to stay with you through your entire journey. And, you know, our mission is very clear. It's never changed. Create a world where relationships are healthy and equitable through kind connections. Official fits the bill perfectly for that. So it's a whole relationship journey. It's an entire horizon. And I think, you know, the singles world dating is just the kicking off point. Do you have any sense of how much people are converting from, you know, they make their match on Bumble and then they're signing up for official? Yeah.

So we've run a lot of surveys. We haven't released them. We plan to release them soon. But it's absolutely exciting to see that they're not just coming from our dating apps. So what's really interesting is a lot of the couples are coming into our ecosystem from other dating apps that are not in our group. So it's fascinating to bring them into the Bumble ecosystem because then they're really engaged in our products. But we do see that dating is a majority funnel for these folks. So they go and they delete their dating app and then they move over to official.

But word of mouth and friends are also a huge funnel for this as well. And the vast majority of your revenue is subscription revenue. Correct. At the moment. Do you see, we were just talking with Byron Allen about free ad-supported channels. Do you see an opportunity to move more over to an ad-supported business? So everything has been about protecting the customer, right? Never inundating the customer or making money at the expense of a customer's happiness or satisfaction. We do see a huge opportunity in advertising and partnerships across the group. It's definitely on the roadmap, but we've been very fortunate to have an incredibly healthy subscription model. And we don't even think that that subscription model opportunity is, you know, nearly at its potential right now. So it's definitely not one or the other, but it will be a parallel path over time. Interesting. Okay. Well, I have many more questions, but we are going to open up to

audience Q&A. So line up, please keep your questions brief and please introduce yourself. So line up, please keep your questions brief, and please introduce yourself. Hi, Pam Dillon, preferably. Assuming that you had an AI-driven piece of software that could power this, have you ever thought about putting together people based upon their preferences in wine, spirits, that sort of thing? Very specific preferences in wine and spirits. That's a great question. Yes. So we have already kind of started exploring how people want to connect over food, beverages, and very specific interests. And again, as it pertains to advertising, this is a very interesting opportunity, right? If you say your favorite drink is,

and it's brought to you by some spirit provider or some company. And then, you know, this is a big piece of the AI front that I led with. Why would you send someone to go do something with someone that is not on the same wavelength? We would never want to send two people out to a bar if one person doesn't, you know, want to go to a bar. So, yes, these are all different signals of relevance that we're exploring. Hi, Ben. I run a new site called Frame. I think I saw a stat, maybe I have the numbers wrong, but out of new relationships, let's say in the US, two out of three people are meeting their significant other on a dating

app. I'm sure you have the more updated data, but it's something large. And I'm just curious, when you zoom out and think about like, what are the large knock on effects of this gigantic change in society, where 50 years ago, you met somebody at a bar through your family. Now we're meeting them through algorithms. It just seems like in terms of the history of human civilization, this huge change that's happened in 15 years. I wonder, like, when you're up at night thinking about this stuff, like, what are how is that changing our society, our relationships? Are we sort of overall selecting people in a different way? Because, you know, when you're looking at someone in the app,

there may be different filters. I'm just curious what you think the big humanity scale effects of this are. We could have like a nine hour chat about this. This is like a whole different thing. You know, at the end of the day, from both surveys and, you know, just hearing from customers, it's empowerment. You know, historically people were stuck with who they were assigned to, right? If you actually want to go back through history and look at particularly how it's worked for women, you felt someone assigned a relationship, whether it was through church or friends and family. And I'm not saying those relationships didn't work out, but had people had more choice, had people had more deliberate

access and optionality into who they want to love and to actually say, hey, you know what? who they want to love and to actually say, hey, you know what? This is important to me. I'm not going to settle for whoever my aunt wants me to marry. So overall, I think it's been empowering to people to love who they want to love. Now, I'm sure we can go and debate this a lot further, but overall, I would say that options and scale are beneficial. The one point I'll end on, and I know we're out of time almost, but the amount of stories I've heard of people that lived in the same building or grew up on the same street, and they are soulmates. They are literally happily in love.

I've met their bumble babies, their greatest couples. One took a left out of the building. One took a right. Ten minutes apart. Four years. One took a left out of the building, one took a right, 10 minutes apart, four years. So the way this has almost skipped fate, in a way, is quite remarkable. I mean, it's really given us access to the people that we were destined to meet, but in ways that we were otherwise missing them.

Last question over here. Well, on that note, I met my husband and the love of my life on Bumbles. So thank you. Thank you so much. That's amazing. So Emily Sherworth with APCO Worldwide. You know, 10, 15 years ago, there were a lot of dating apps that were creating content to keep the couples on the apps after they had met, right?

So relationship advice, things like that, probably a lot of the reason why you acquired Official. But one area that I think, and I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this, where keeping, you know, couples on Bumble is sort of crowdsourced advice, right? So the official is like the couple, you know, interacting, but I can't tell you how many of my social media feeds are filled with like, what does it mean when he's ghosting me or this or that, right? But being able to provide a safe forum for women and men to seek advice from each other on their journeys on that. I think that's phenomenal. That's what BFF is.

So what you'll see in BFF and the future evolution of the product is hashtag breakup. Who's going through a breakup? Who needs to understand if this is normal? Am I in an abusive relationship? How do I know what the red flags are? It's really about the relationship journey, if you will, no matter where you're at in it. And we can't do it alone. We need friends. We need community. BFF was largely driven by the need for the ancillary community around love, right? We can't just love in silos. We need our friends. So I think what you'll see in the coming future is really a community-driven approach to exactly what you're saying. Thank you. And congrats. So happy for you. We have one minute left. So this has to be a 10 second question and a 45 second answer. Yeah, this is fast. So the Roblox person was here, our CEO was here yesterday. He talked about people

meeting and dating in Roblox. Is that something you think might be a reality? And not maybe Roblox specifically, but kind of these virtual experience platforms? and not maybe Roblox specifically, but kind of these virtual experience platforms? You know, again, maybe that is how people will originally connect. I will be quite sad and out of business, but hopefully that doesn't happen.

But I will be much more sad for humanity than myself if people just stop really meeting in real life, right? So there is a world where people might connect digitally over something, which is what I'm talking about, you know, using AI to actually go out and find whoever's compatible for you to save you time and energy and money and all the things, but you need to meet in real life. So I was never a metaverse fan personally. It was, is not, it's kind of contrary to everything I believe in, in terms of getting humans to look each other in the eye. So, you know, I think we're just doing things differently.

Huge fan of him and his business, but I think we're doing different things. That's a perfect note to end on because this is a tech audience that chose to all come together in real life. Whitney Wilford, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Thanks, Julia.

It was great. Thanks, Julia. It was great. Obviously, you need to be at Code next year. To get on the Code 2024 waitlist, go to voxmediaevents.com slash code 2024. That's voxmediaevents.com slash code 2024.