• Bumble reported a 7.7% year-over-year revenue drop in the first quarter of 2025.
• Whitney Wolfe Herd, Bumble's founder and newly returned CEO, explained how it got off track.
• Wolfe Herd said Bumble's prior focus on growth "came with a hidden cost."

Bumble's CEO knows you're not happy with dating apps.

The dating app company reported its first-quarter earnings on Wednesday, and Bumble's founder, Whitney Wolfe Herd, was blunt about how the company's focus on growth "came with a hidden cost."

"What we learned is that just adding more profiles does not guarantee better matches," Wolfe Herd added. "In fact, it can lead to the opposite — more mismatches, more fake or low-quality profiles, and a frustrating experience. As mass quality dropped, some members got discouraged, found fewer successful matches and dates, and fewer people recommended the app to others."

Wolfe Herd also said Bumble's pivot from word-of-mouth marketing to performance channels hurt the app's user experience.

Bumble — and many other dating apps — saw rapid growth during the pandemic. Riding the wave, Bumble had its IPO in 2021. Since hitting its all-time high in February 2021, however, the company's stock price has dropped by more than 90%.

In January 2024, Wolfe Herd stepped down as CEO, and that February, the company laid off hundreds of staffers (about 30% of the company) ahead of a relaunch of the app. Wolfe Herd returned to Bumble as CEO this March.

The company reported a 7.7% decline in total revenue for the first quarter, decreasing from $267 million in the first quarter of 2024 to $247 million in the same period in 2025. Bumble app revenue also dropped 6.5%.

But Wolfe Herd said she has a plan to get Bumble back on track.

In addition to pulling back performance marketing spend, she said the company would double down on removing "bad intention members that have degraded match quality and member trust," while also building out more technology like a "personalized matching algorithm" using AI.

Bumble's not the only dating app company looking for new lanes. As dating app giants face headwinds, a slew of new startups have emerged. Some have attracted the attention of both users and investors, particularly with new AI-powered features like matchmaking.

Meanwhile, Bumble's primary competition, Match Group — which owns Tinder and Hinge — announced Thursday that it's planning to lay off 13% of its staff, and also reported a 3% year-over-year revenue decline in the first quarter. The company said this was driven by a 5% decline in paying users.

Match's new CEO, Spencer Rascoff, also discussed the challenges dating apps are facing.

"The category challenges have been due primarily to a lack of innovation and our failure to recognize and respond to changes in the younger demographic, especially Gen Z and what they want," he said.

• Sitch, an AI matchmaking app, raised $2 million in pre-seed funding led by A16z Speedrun.
• The startup launched in New York City in November and has plans to expand to other US cities.
• It's also rolling out voice-based AI tools, a buzzy topic in the tech industry.

AI is fueling renewed interest in consumer tech, including online dating.

Sitch, a matchmaking app that uses AI to connect singles, raised a $2 million pre-seed investment, the startup revealed exclusively to Business Insider. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz's startup accelerator, A16z Speedrun, and includes the angel round Sitch raised in 2024 from investors like Jeremy Liew, who wrote Snapchat's first check.

Fresh out of Speedrun's most recent cohort, Sitch cofounders Nandini Mullaji and Chad DePue are hiring full-time engineering and growth staff, planning to expand to new cities, and introducing voice-based AI.

While many dating app users feel burned out by constant swiping and rampant ghosting, and dating industry giants like Tinder and Bumble face headwinds, new startups like Sitch are trying to shake up the dating app experience.

"We understand people have been burned in the past," Mullaji told BI. "We are coming in and saying, 'Hey, we have a business model shift and we have a total platform shift.'"

The platform shift? AI.

Sitch's AI matchmaker chatbot — built using OpenAI — is trained on the hundreds of real-life introductions Mullaji has made as a part-time matchmaker.

Mullaji sees AI as a way to "democratize" the matchmaking experience (which can cost individuals thousands of dollars) and bring it "to the masses."

When signing up for Sitch, users answer a slew of questions about their dating priorities, values, and backgrounds, which Sitch uses to create a profile and curate potential matches. It presents users with a maximum of five potential "setups" each week. Users have to pay up front to access the setup features. Sitch offers three tiers of packages: $90 (for three setups), $125 (for five), and $160 (for eight).

Once Sitch's AI matchmaker presents users with someone it deems may be a good fit, users can ask the chatbot questions about the other person, and the AI responds using information from their respective profiles. If both parties are interested in meeting, the AI introduces the two in a group chat. However, if an introduction occurs and you get ghosted, Mullaji said you'll be refunded.

Sitch manually reviews new user applications, which Mullaji said is the "one part of our process that's still completely human-driven," as a quality control and safety measure while the platform grows.

AI in dating is still nascent. Other early-stage startups, like Gigi or Amori, use AI to coach singles and help curate matches. Meanwhile, larger dating apps like Tinder and Grindr have introduced AI wingman features.

Can AI make dating feel more … human?

"This is not about building AI girlfriends or trying to replace human contact and connection with AI," Mullaji said. Instead, she thinks AI can be used to help better connect people.

To give Sitch users a more "human-like experience," it is introducing voice-based AI features, Mullaji said.

Starting this week, Sitch is rolling out a voice-based AI onboarding experience for new users as the app plans to expand into more US cities. Mullaji said San Francisco and Los Angeles will be added in May, and Chicago and Washington, D.C. will quickly follow. Users will otherwise be added to Sitch's waitlist, and if a particular US city reaches "critical mass," which Mullaji defined as between 2,000 and 4,000, Sitch will begin to admit users.

When new users call the number listed on Sitch's website or in its app, they chat with an AI version of Mullaji who walks them through onboarding questions.

It will also soon expand its voice AI tools to current app users. Instead of texting the AI matchmaking agent on the Sitch app, users will be able to talk to it on the phone with feedback about setups.

Voice AI tech has become a hot category among venture capitalists. In 2024, voice AI startups raised over $398 million from VCs, according to PitchBook data.

Sitch is using ElevenLabs, a voice cloning AI startup that announced a $180 million Series C round with a $3.3 billion valuation in January, to clone Mullaji's voice.

"We spent a lot of time recording and re-recording my voice to see how we could actually have it sound human," Mullaji said. "The one thing you do not want this to feel like is a customer support bot."

• New social-networking and dating startups are coming onto the scene.
• VCs and angel investors are funding some of these promising startups.
• Here are the pitch decks nine startups used while raising Series A and seed rounds.

A new generation of consumer social startups is emerging.

From social networks focused on getting people to meet IRL to dating apps taking on Tinder or Hinge, startups are disrupting the digital social scene.

Founders of these startups are tackling problems like loneliness, dating app fatigue, and general dissatisfaction with the current social-media incumbents.

Meet the founders behind 18 new social startups

Some founders come from Big Tech backgrounds, like the Instagram-heavy team behind photo-sharing app Retro, or the ex-Google employees building the social-mapping app PamPam. Meanwhile, Gen Z founders are also throwing their hats in the ring, like Isabella Epstein's IRL-focused app Kndrd or Tiffany "TZ" Zhong's Noplace app.

Investors are taking notice.

For instance, the IRL-social app 222, which matches strangers over dinner or activities with a personality quiz, raised a $2.5 million seed round from venture capital firms like 1517 Fund, General Catalyst, and Best Nights VC in 2024.

Then there's Series, a professional networking AI chatbot for college students, which announced a $3.1 million pre-seed in April.

"We're entering this new wave of social where people are trying to revert back to what people really use these platforms for to begin with — which is connection," Maitree Mervana Parekh, a principal at Acrew Capital, told Business Insider last year.

Some funds — like French firm Intuition VC — have made tackling loneliness part of their investment theses.

Dating apps are also "very disruptable in this moment," Daybreak Ventures founder Rex Woodbury told Business Insider.

Meet the founders of 11 startups competing with dating app giants like Tinder

Other startups, like Diem and Spill, have opened up investment rounds to include users themselves using the platform Wefunder.

It's not yet clear how many of these investments will pan out. Some startups are pre-revenue, while others are experimenting with monetization methods (such as freemium models).

"Founders have to be honest with themselves," said Marlon Nichols, a founding partner at Mac Venture Capital. "Some of them aren't really venture-scale or venture-type investments. We're looking for the next big thing, the next category leader."

Meet 12 VCs and investors eyeing new social startups

BI spoke with several social-media and dating app founders about how they are raising capital — including the pitch decks they used to raise millions of dollars.

Read the pitch decks that helped 9 social-networking and dating startups raise millions of dollars:

Note: Pitch decks are sorted by investment stage and size of round.

Series A

• Posh, an event-based social network based in New York City: $22 million Series A (12 pages)
• Spoon Radio, a social-audio startup: $17 million Series A (15 pages)
• Pie, an IRL social startup founded by Bonobos' Andy Dunn: $11.5 million Series A (31 pages)
• Howbout, a social-calendar app to help people make plans with friends: $8 million (12 pages)

Seed

• Hangout, a social music platform: $8.2 million Seed (26 pages)
• First Round's On Me, a dating app that prioritizes making plans over swiping and DMs: $3 million seed (16 pages)
• Seam Social, a Web3-inspired social network that lets users make mini-apps: $2.5 million (10 pages)

Pre-Seed

• Series, an AI professional network for college students: $3.1 million pre-seed (10 pages)

Other

• Rodeo, a social shopping platform, shared the pitch deck it used to get accepted into an A16z startup accelerator (11 pages)

• I tried Tinder's new AI chatbot to practice my charm. I can't take it seriously.
• Users try to flirt their way to a date, with AI dishing out feedback and ratings.
• Match's new CEO said last month Tinder and Hinge feel too much like "a numbers game."

In a craft store in Lahore, I reached for the same quirky handmade lamp as Isabella, a scientist "with a spark of curiosity."

Sitting in my Singapore office — not on a K-Drama stage, or in Pakistan — I played Tinder's new game to practice my charm.

Called The Game Game, this new in-app feature uses speech-to-speech AI technology to create "over-the-top, meet-cute scenarios," Tinder said in a statement on Tuesday.

Users try to flirt their way to a date, while AI dishes out real-time feedback and rates their game. I used my editor's US phone in a private room so my colleagues didn't overhear me talking to Isabella.

Flirty wins earned me points with labels like "delightful," "charming," and "victory." Rack up enough, and it'll secure you a date with the AI.

I was given about five minutes to flirt in each scenario. And I had 10 scenarios to play with in the free account.

The game is powered by OpenAI's GPT-4o and GPT-4o mini, and Tinder says your awkward pickup lines won't be used to train any AI models. It's only available to iOS users in the US for a limited time.

A spokesperson for Tinder's parent company, Match Group, said the company is using the game "to learn and explore what future rollouts in other markets might look like."

The game comes as Match struggles with lower user numbers. The company's new CEO has said he wants to bring the focus back to users.

"This project gave us a chance to experiment with how AI can make dating a little more fun and a little less intimidating," said Alex Osborne, Match's senior director of product innovation.

Match's stock is down 10.8% in the last year, while rival Bumble is down 61%.

I tried flirting (and failing) with Tinder's AI

My first scenario was labeled "Easy," and I brought my usual self to the scenario.

Isabella started off strong, asking what brought me here. I complimented the lamp and said I liked crafts. I asked her what her favorite item in the store was, and she launched into a monologue about a handwoven carpet.

Without a visual, it was hard to relate. And she sounded robotic.

Hoping to steer flirtier, I asked what else she liked. She listed pottery, then asked if I was into it. I said yes — cue her AI-generated wisdom about the joy of surrounding yourself with things you make with your own hands.

I took my shot: "What do you like making with your hands?" (Cringe.)

Her answer: Custom lab notebooks and DIY molecular models. Hot.

I feigned interest, the conversation fizzled, and I didn't score a date. Tinder handed me some generic flirting tips, like "ask more about her favorite crafts." Thanks, AI wingman.

Next, a shot at romance with Jackson, a photographer at a lively block party. We were manning the grill together — prime flirting conditions, and I dialed it up.

When Jackson suggested a "nice, sweet tea to cool off," I leaned in: "I've never tried that… but I do want someone to cool me off."

"Well, now, a glass of sweet tea is perfect," he said. (Dodge. But Tinder awarded me points.)

So I upped the ante. When he asked about challenges I've faced, I dropped: "Not being able to keep my eyes off you."

His reaction? "Well, now, that sure is kind of you to say." Then he suggested we find a comfy spot to chat.

If a real person said that, they'd either be deeply into me or deeply uncomfortable. But Tinder? It just kept handing out points — until I actually scored a date.

So, the lesson? Be bold, be flirty, and apparently, AI won't call you out for being too much.

Lastly, I stood in line at a food truck in Venice. Paisley, an architect, struck up a conversation with me about culinary adventures.

This time, I was the human equivalent of dry toast.

Paisley kicked things off, raving about a truffle mushroom pasta —"a masterpiece."

Me? "Never tried it."

She asked what cuisine I liked. I hit her with the dullest answer possible: "Chicken."

Paisley chirped: "Versatile and always delicious!" (In real life, this is where I'd get ghosted.)

Still, she pressed on. "Have you tried any Indian or Thai chicken dishes?"

"No."

She tried again. "Do you like exploring new recipes?"

"I don't cook."

At this point, I was sure she'd give up. But nope: "Let's plan a little food adventure! What do you think?"

"…Okay."

No surprise — I didn't score a date. But Paisley's enthusiasm never wavered. No matter how boring I got, she stayed locked in.

Tinder's AI might handle flirty, but it refuses to acknowledge flop energy.

All in all, I couldn't take this game seriously.

Correction: April 2, 2025 — An earlier version of this story misstated the day Tinder announced its new game. It was Tuesday, not Monday.

• Bumble cofounder Whitney Wolfe Herd was "obsessed" with Walt Disney as a child.
• Wolfe Herd resonated with his creative abilities, imagination, and execution.
• Last week, she made her return to Bumble as the CEO.

Whitney Wolfe Herd is a Disney adult, but not in the way you might think.

The Tinder and Bumble cofounder said she "wasn't obsessed with Disney in a traditional sense."

Instead, it was the man behind it all, Walter "Walt" Disney, whose life and career she was "fascinated" by. Wolfe Herd appeared on a Tuesday episode of the "Jamie Kern Lima Show," where she gushed about Disney's creativity and ability to bring his dreams to fruition. The "dream world" he co-created sparked what would become one of the most revered companies in the world over a century later.

Although she didn't say her love for Disney (who died before she was born) sparked her dating app ideas directly, his imagination and ability to create a product that brings joy to people inspired her to dream.

"I was completely mesmerized by the capability of the human mind and then the ability of someone to execute on that," Herd said.

She was so mesmerized, in fact, that she copied his handwriting to sign her name in school. Her yearbook quote in high school was inspired by Disney's accomplishments in his lifetime and beyond.

The 35-year-old estimated she has "a thousand notebooks" of her using "the same W as Walt Disney for my name, for Whitney Wolfe." The current Walt Disney logo is a stylized version of Disney's handwriting.

Now, as she makes her return as the CEO of Bumble, Wolfe Herd said she relates to Disney in a different way than her younger self. Similar to the man who inspired her, Wolfe Herd said her role in creating two of the most popular dating apps helped bring joy to people.

"Inspiration and mentors matter. Seeing things around us that inspire us matters," Wolfe Herd said.

As Disney did with iconic characters, like Mickey Mouse, Wolfe Herd said she took her dream to "harness technology for good" and created Bumble.

• I went to a dating app conference in New York City.
• AI's role in dating was a hotly debated topic at the event.
• While some dating app leaders were excited about the potential of AI agents, others were skeptical.

What is AI's place in dating?

That was the big question this week at the Social Discovery and Dating Conference in New York City, hosted by Global Dating Insights, a UK-based publication covering the dating industry.

In a room with about 50 attendees and several virtual speakers, dating app executives, startup founders, and partners discussed the state of the industry. (Not present, however, were representatives from heavyweights Match Group or Bumble.)

The topic brought up in almost every panel: AI.

It's a tricky line to toe for many of these platforms. Dating is intimate, and dating apps have already faced criticism for the ways technology — like swiping — has left some users burned out when it comes to finding love online.

At the same time, AI could shake up online dating experiences.

We've already seen companies like Replika create AI chatbots that people can date. Meta has boyfriend-themed chatbots right within Instagram DMs. And other startups are trying to use LLMs to help people date more efficiently, such as AI dating assistant app Rizz or AI matchmaking apps like Sitch.

Alexandra Beaumont, CEO of the dating app Once (where you get one match a day), talked about the potential AI agents could have on dating during one of the panels.

These agents could learn how you communicate and what you want out of a partner, and act as a kind of companion through the dating process. Beaumont said future dating apps could incorporate these types of agents to match users with one another.

It's a topic that some investors have also brought up to me outside of this conference. One example of an app doing this is Gigi, a French dating app that pitches itself to users as an "AI wingwoman."

Ethan Martin, CEO of Slide, a UK-based dating app for 18- to 28-year-olds, said on another panel that AI could be useful for his company internally for tasks like building its algorithms.

Panelists identified a few other categories in which AI could help dating platforms: saving users time on the app, improving matching, trust and safety, and customer service.

Are users on board, though?

"I haven't seen it so far where someone has managed to create an AI tool that the users really want to use when it comes to dating," Martin said, pointing to examples like AI dating assistants. "I still think we're maybe a few years from that."

Other dating app insiders expressed concerns about how AI could undermine users' search for human connection, especially the concept of actually dating an AI avatar.

"I couldn't possibly unleash the world of AI on my widows or widowers," said Nicky Wake, founder of Chapter 2, a dating app for widows and widowers. "That would only end in tears."

When Em graduated from the Pratt Institute in May 2020, two months into the pandemic, there were simply no jobs for a sculpture major, even in New York. "That absolutely set the tone for the rest of my attempt at a career," Em, now 26, says.

So they took an intensive nine-month coding boot camp and started applying for tech jobs. After they got rejected from about 10 roles, the entire tech industry was besieged by mass layoffs in 2022, leaving Em even more dispirited. "It was just another pathway to shit," they recall thinking. Eventually, they found work as an office manager at a nonprofit for a while and quickly lost their coding skills. Last year, Em applied to more than 400 jobs across the communications, administrative, and service industries — and was rejected by every one.

"I am miserable, and it is breaking my body down," Em tells me over the phone from California, where they've been living at a relative's house scraping by on $700 a month from contract work. They add, flatly, "I am not living a life that I feel is worth living at this moment."

Em's experience with such unrelenting rejection may sound extreme, but their story speaks to a panic and despair pervasive among members of Gen Z. Lately, I find that the tone people over 30 most often use when talking about today's young adults is less a reflexively finger-wagging "kids these days" and more a genuine sympathy over (mixed with relief to have dodged) the particular set of historical circumstances they've faced as they've come of age: COVID-19, climate anxiety, the chaos of the Trump administrations, the internet's wholesale usurpation of IRL culture, AI's potential to upend entire industries. Gen Z has been called the most anxious generation, the most risk-averse generation, the most stressed generation, the most burned-out generation, and the loneliest generation. Last year, the World Happiness Report dubbed Zoomers the unhappiest generation.

But there's another superlative — one exacerbating all that stress, anxiety, loneliness, and burnout — that's so far been overlooked. By several measures, Gen Z may be the most rejected generation in human history.

Every cohort believes it has drawn the shortest straw; as Will Smith, a Gen Xer, famously groused, "Parents just don't understand!" But as Gen Zers strain to establish themselves, they face a uniquely fraught tension between unprecedented technology-enabled opportunity — infinite possibilities a click, swipe, or DM away — and an unprecedented scale of rejection. From education to careers to romance, never before have young adults had this much access to prospective yeses. And, in turn, never before have young adults been told no so frequently.

What does the experience of this new scale of rejection do to a young person's psyche, and to Gen Z's collective state of mind? And how will it reverberate through the rest of society as Gen Z eventually takes the reins of power — when the rejectees become the rejectors? In interviews with psychologists, therapists, guidance counselors, career coaches, and more than a dozen Gen Zers (most of whom, like Em, requested I use their first name only to not hinder their job hunt), the ascendant generation's worldview-warping experience of mass rejection in the dating scene, college admissions, and the job market came into focus. At stake is not young adults' egos or sense of entitlement but our expectation of agency in an increasingly mediated world.

Through the 1960s, most Americans got married in their early 20s to partners they met through their social circles. Today, they spend nearly a decade longer dating; the median age for first marriage is 31.1 for men and 29.2 for women. During that additional eon, they're also equipped with an arsenal of apps that can summon — and terminate — new prospects on a daily, if not hourly, basis. If we tallied up the literal sum of all the unreciprocated swipes, DMs, follows, or texts that create today's ambient mode of romantic rejection, it wouldn't be a stretch to say that a typical Zoomer on the apps is getting rejected by, and rejecting, more prospective partners in a week than a typical married boomer has in their entire life.

The paradox of online dating has been thoroughly documented: Despite having more access to potential partners than ever, young people have invented vocabularies to describe the endless purgatorial disappointments of "ghosting," "situationships," "breadcrumbing," and the hellscape of the apps themselves. Last year, Hinge surveyed 15,000 people about their dating views. Ninety percent of Gen Z respondents said they wanted to find love, and 44% said they had little or no dating experience.

"That was a surprising number for me," Logan Ury, Hinge's director of relationship science, tells me. Much of that gap is due to Gen Z's heightened risk aversion, Ury says, something she attributes to a social-media-augmented awareness of the world as a scary place and widespread "overparenting," or helicopter parenting. "Rejection is intimidating for everyone, but Gen Z daters seem to feel it more acutely," she adds. Fifty-six percent of Gen Z respondents said that fear of rejection held them back from pursuing a relationship, compared with 51% for millennial respondents.

So as young people relentlessly reject each other, many are too scared to risk truly putting themselves out there in the first place. "It is so easy to get involved with someone and then detach," Catherine, a recent Barnard grad, says. "I have friends who have been texting with people that they met on dating apps for weeks or months, and yet they have never met in person. I actually had a friend who had a date all set up, and she went to the restaurant, and by the time she got there, the guy unmatched her and blocked her on everything before they even had a date."

Gen Z has normalized mutual risk aversion, says Jeff Guenther, a licensed therapist who counsels millions of lovelorn Gen Z TikTok users as @therapyjeff. "It's this funny situation where it's OK to not get back to people, he says. "Sometimes that's empowering, but then there's the negative effect of all these little mini rejections that eventually cut so deep that somebody might not decide to be vulnerable." No wonder that breakup coaches who talk in therapy-speak and dating influencers who claim they can definitively discern "green flags" versus "red flags" have proliferated, each of them promising to demystify the romantic ambiguity plaguing Gen Z.

Guenther says today's young adults seem quicker to discard connections in favor of the seemingly unlimited reserves of suitors awaiting just a swipe away. "There's the resilience that comes from the frequent rejection that makes them great at moving on, but then they're less equipped for the real-world relational challenges that require compromise and patience," he says.

But Natalie Buchwald, the founder and clinical director of Manhattan Mental Health Counseling, says she sees a distinction between healthy resilience and the blasé, noncommittal attitude she sees many Gen Zers deploy to cope with rejection. "I'm finding there's more of a pervasive numbness that looks like resilience," she says. "But that's not resilience; that's disconnect."

Meanwhile, more technology-augmented opportunity has also bred much more rejection in the college admissions industrial complex. Until 1960, more than half of all college applicants applied to just one school. In the 2023-24 admissions season, the average applicant applied to 6.65 Common App-affiliated schools alone, up 7% from the previous year. Just in the past two decades, the number of applications to the country's 67 most selective colleges has tripled to nearly 2 million a year. Gen Zers are knocking on more doors to their future than ever and, in turn, having more doors slammed in their faces. For some, this is shaping their core beliefs on motivation and merit.

Dylan, a 22-year-old New York University student whose high school credentials included varsity rugby and a 4.7 weighted GPA, tells me that he applied to roughly 20 schools — including most of the Ivies and Stanford — a number he felt "insecure" about compared with his peers. "I know a lot of people who applied to 20 to 40," he says. In the end, he received only three or four acceptances, which was demoralizing. "I just remember feeling like it wasn't necessarily our qualifications that mattered, that it was just like, hopefully, the right person read it on the right day."

Ella, a 20-year-old from Allentown, Pennsylvania, applied to 12 colleges and got rejected from 10. "I had so much hubris and unfounded confidence," she says. "I just thought, well, I'll only want to go to college if I can get into a 'prestigious school.' They ask, 'Why us?' obviously, and I couldn't tell them why besides it's Harvard." In a Substack post she published before her high school graduation, she described how at odds her tenfold rejection was with her belief in simply working hard to succeed. "I thought that I was going to be someone," she wrote. While she's now a junior at Bryn Mawr, Ella tells me she still hasn't gotten over the sting of going to a seemingly less elite school.

Others have taken rejection to court. In February, an 18-year-old from Palo Alto, California, who applied to 18 schools and was rejected from 16, sued the University of California system and the University of Washington, alleging racial discrimination against "highly-qualified Asian-American candidates." "When the rejections rolled in one after another, I was dumbfounded. What started with surprise turned into frustration, and then finally it turned into anger," the student's father told the New York Post.

As a millennial and former teenage overachiever, I also call up the best expert I personally knew: my high school counselor, Kim Klokkenga, who has helped wrangle the collegiate aspirations of the student body at Central Illinois' Dunlap High School for the past 30 years. In her view, the commercialization of college applications is as much responsible as a new generation of helicopter parenting, along with the technologically mediated literal ease of application.

"Back in the day, I would literally ask a student how many envelopes they wanted," Klokkenga says. "I didn't have people applying to 20-plus schools, like now. It might've been 10 or 12, and that was outlandish!" (In case you were wondering, I'd been one of her favorite nut jobs, with a total of nine applications in 2010.)

When I ask if she thinks Gen Z students are handling rejection better or worse than previous generations, she says she can't say for sure. "I have fewer students come in devastated that they didn't get into their schools," Klokkenga says. Perhaps they were already steeling themselves against rejection — another shade of disconnect. "I am hearing students say, 'Well, I wasn't expecting to get in; I just wanted to apply to see,'" Klokkenga adds. "I think they're just throwing them out there sometimes to see what'll stick."

Barry Schwartz, a psychologist who famously observed the relationship between consumer choice and satisfaction in his 2004 book, "The Paradox of Choice," distinguishes two types of people: the "maximizers," who want the absolute best option, and the much-happier "satisficers," who go with the "good enough" option. Today's perceived infinite-choice standard seems to have given rise to legions of maximizers among Gen Z. Per Schwartz's central argument that overabundance of choice tends to lead to more disappointment, this does not seem to bode well for their general well-being.

But what happens when one's choices are preemptively limited, perhaps relentlessly, via rejection? "It's possible there's a kind of resilience that people develop when you're applying to 50 schools and it doesn't hurt anymore to get rejected by 47," Schwartz tells me. But, much like Buchwald says of rejected romantics, he sees the "whatever" reaction among rejected applicants as a "very self-protective response."

"If you minimize the significance beforehand, then the pain of failure will be less consequential," Schwartz says. "It kind of drives me crazy to see people doing this, especially if it's a reflection of their effort to protect themselves rather than just their cynicism about living in modern society."

College is its own gauntlet, but the scale of rejection in the job-hunt is an order of magnitude more hellish. Via LinkedIn, Workday, and the ubiquity of other online job boards, many Zoomers apply to more jobs in a day than many lucky Boomers have in their lives. In February 2025, the average knowledge worker job opening received 244 applications, up from 93 in February 2019, according to data the hiring software provider Greenhouse shared with BI. That's 243 nos — or ghosted applications — for every yes. This scattershot reality is not specific to Gen Z, but it's the only reality that the incoming workforce has known.

Among the Gen Zers I talked to, their "body counts" of submitted job applications were regularly in the hundreds. Christopher, a 24-year-old who graduated with a finance degree, says he'd applied to 400 jobs in finance and 200 in merchandising before finding a job that still wasn't what he really wanted. His computer science grad friends have been sending applications in the thousands, he says.

Even though the logistics of applying are more or less streamlined, Gen Zers note the disconnect between the effort they're expected to make versus the consideration given in return. Colleges at least have to formally tell you no, while jobs, like a dating app match, tend to ghost at any point in the process. Is it really a mystery why some Gen Zers have started ghosting employers back?

Since graduating from Barnard last year, Catherine has applied to 300 jobs and interviewed for 20 of them. The 23-year-old says her college counselor's advice to deeply invest in her job applications — via networking, seeking referrals, getting personalized feedback on résumés — has come to feel ridiculous, given the fact that you could sit through six rounds of interviews, a practice test, and more for a single role and then, after months of waiting, not even get a proper rejection email. For her, the resounding lesson is hard to ignore: It's better not to hope for too much or to try too hard.

"You have no idea if you're even doing it right," Catherine says of the impersonal process, which is often mediated by an unknowable (and highly fallible) screening algorithm. "You don't have any ability to get feedback. It feels like being in a hedge maze, and there's probably a path through, but you feel like you keep running into walls and you're like, 'Man, if I could just talk to the person who built this.'" She adds: "I worked so hard for four years, and I built this great network and support system, and now I'm just sending applications into the void."

For Gen Zers, the disenfranchising reality of chasing entire flocks of wild geese has diminished their self-esteem. Lanya, a 22-year-old who graduated last year with a degree in media studies, tells me she thought she had done everything right as a first-gen college student who counted a Nasdaq internship among her achievements — and feels incredibly guilty that she has yet to find a job. "Self-worth-wise, this is the lowest I've ever felt," she says. "This is my time to say thank you and pay them back by showing them what they sacrificed was worth it, but I can't help them the way I want to."

Dylan, the finance grad, says the job hunt made him modify his expectations for the future. "I just remember applying to so many and feeling like: I don't care what I get. I just need to survive. I'm not scared of failing; I'm just scared of dying."

For others, mass rejection can be liberating. Several Gen Zers tell me their collection of "we regret to inform you's" in their inboxes has inspired them to invest more deeply in passion projects, move abroad, or start their own businesses. For many Gen Zers, the influencer economy is the one job market that seems legible to them — and it's always hiring.

As Gen Z grows older, the rejection and risk they face could easily compound. If you're starting out with a high degree of risk aversion, any pedestrian experience of personal rejection might harden that stance — which means we could end up seeing Gen Z calcify into incredibly risk-averse adults (and parents). Those who are resilient enough to weather the new standard scale of rejection — those who continue to shoot their shots — will eventually gain a firm foothold. But in college, careers, and romance, it's often less a matter of perseverance or merit than it is pure luck. For much of Gen Z, success is increasingly boiling down to a numbers game.

Is the real problem simply the overabundance of options, which puts Gen Zers' expectations on a collision course with reality? No help, of course, is the 24/7 firehose of comparison and fantasy provided by social media — which has shaped Gen Z's construct of reality pretty much straight from the womb. Schwartz, the psychologist, acknowledges that a zillion potential mates, schools, or careers that are seemingly so accessible are liable to make us all feel disappointment. "Some of us live in such a culture of abundance that even if you find some way to limit the options, you are thinking about what's out there," he says. Here, I think of a line from Tony Tulathimutte's aptly titled 2024 book, "Rejection," an interlocking series of horror-esque stories of young people who are puzzled by and rage at the world for their arbitrary exclusion: "His sadness, he knows, is a symptom of his entitlement, so he is not even entitled to his sadness."

But Schwartz also believes that the experience of rejection is markedly different from that of disappointment. When you're underwhelmed by your Netflix selection, or when you order what turns out to be a disappointing entrée, it's easy to have order envy for your table mates' more tantalizing plates. But while making that choice was a matter of your own agency, "a rejection is a comment on you," Schwartz says. "It's very hard to just say to yourself, 'Well, Stanford rejects 96% of its applicants. It's impossible to get in," he adds. "It's not a statement about me; it's a crapshoot.' You can say all that stuff, but my guess is you don't really believe it."

This, for me, is the most tragic element of Gen Z's rejection arc. We can expect experiences with personal rejection to trigger material consequences and a formative reckoning with one's self-worth or belief systems — taken as a collective, it's what shapes each generation so that they can turn around and bray at the next one about what they've survived.

But for Gen Z, their fates are increasingly shaped by the uniquely depersonalized, and depersonalizing, forces of technology, primarily the algorithms that pervade modern dating, college admissions, and the hiring process. These algorithms set the rules of engagement for nearly every aspect of Gen Zers' lives, making once analog processes utterly streamlined yet mystifying. No wonder various corners of the culture have responded with cottage industries of layoff coaches, résumé consultants, professional matchmakers, emotional "courses" and boot camps, and countless influencers who espouse how to "hack" life's algos. For now, the onus is still placed on the individual Gen Zer to buck the system and learn the hacks; it remains to be seen whether Gen Z will collectively reject the very sorting mechanisms that are failing them.

"There's this technology, whether it's the algorithm or AI, that's sort of against you, and that's something to take into consideration," says Guenther, the TikTok-famous therapist. "You're not being rejected by actual people, but you're being filtered out or rejected by technology. And maybe the anger should be directed at Apple and Google and Tinder and Facebook or Meta."

Yet this anger is curiously absent in all my conversations with Gen Zers. For one thing, they're savvy enough to understand that technology itself isn't worth blaming if you aren't addressing the human biases codified in the automation. Instead, the predominant mood was one of resignation, or perhaps acceptance. "It's a numbers game," one current college student says, or a "waiting game."

When we speak again several months after our first conversation, Em has a promising update: After applying to more than 400 jobs, they've found a position at a perfume shop in Oregon. Amid the grueling job hunt, David Graeber's book "Bullshit Jobs" dramatically reframed their view of careerism. "He talks about how humans feel when they can't make an effect on anything — it is not only psychologically traumatizing, but it creates physical problems," Em says, adding that the perfume shop was one of the best jobs they'd ever had. It's 35 hours a week with no benefits. But, Em says, "every single day in this job, I get the chance to make someone's day — to actually see my impact on the world, even if on a small scale."

Delia Cai is a writer living in New York. She runs the culture and media newsletter, Deez Links.

• Left Field, a new dating app, has launched in New York City.
• The app uses location-based notifications to facilitate real-life encounters.
• Left Field aims to use IRL events like parties to grow users, and expand to college campuses in May.

Another new dating app is hoping to appeal to users with swipe fatigue.

Left Field launched in New York City this week and is the latest startup trying to make inroads as industry heavyweights falter.

When Left Field's founders, Samantha Martin and Kate Sieler, moved to New York after graduating from college, they were met with the same qualms that many daters have right now.

Martin told Business Insider that endless swiping, lack of organic interactions, and a barrage of paywalls are just some of the "dating pains" the two felt.

The two began building Left Field in 2024 and have since quit their jobs in finance and consulting after raising a family and friends funding round. Sean Miller, a founding engineer at fintech startup Apollo Card, joined Left Field as its technical cofounder in 2025. The app officially launched on the Apple App Store in February.

Here's how Left Field works: The profile itself is similar to many dating apps (it has photos, biographical details, and some prompts). However, instead of swiping through a stack of nearby singles, the app will send push notifications of a potential match in the area if location services are enabled and a user crosses paths with someone on the app.

"We like to call ourselves the Pokémon Go of dating," Martin said.

The idea is that Left Field is a more passive way to date, where you can toggle location services on and off.

"If you're interested in meeting someone, you just turn on the app, and then you can close it and forget about it," Sieler said.

It's not the first dating app to try to capture the feeling of crossing paths with someone nearby.

Happn, a French dating app, launched a decade ago with a similar premise.

"Singles today are looking to bring back real-life encounters, like going to bars and restaurants," Happn CEO Karima Ben Abdelmalek told BI last year.

As of now, Left Field does not incorporate any paid features.

Growing a dating app with IRL events

Like many new dating apps that have launched recently, Left Field is turning to social media to build an audience. It's working with three comedy creators to make content across Instagram and TikTok.

It's also taking a page from Tinder and Hinge's playbook by throwing parties and focusing on college campuses.

Left Field plans to expand to several college campuses in May and introduce ambassador programs for college students.

In the meantime, to grow the app in New York, Left Field plans to partner with local groups and venues, such as running clubs, bars, and comedy clubs, and host singles dating events.

Left Field hosted its launch party on Thursday night at a crowded bar in Brooklyn, where I spoke with a handful of attendees about the state of dating. The general feeling at the event around dating — particularly in New York — was exhaustion with the apps.

Dating app giants like Bumble and Match Group have seen stock prices decline since reaching all-time highs in 2021.

"It's the prime time to have a dating app startup because people are clearly so frustrated with the current offerings," Martin said. "The Catch-22 is that simultaneously, people don't like dating apps, but it's also harder to meet in real life because people are dependent on them."

• Yoel Roth is leading Match Group's initiative to curb inappropriate messages on dating apps.
• The company uses AI to flag abusive messages, promoting respectful dating interactions.
• Match's CEO said safety and security are good for business.

Yoel Roth, Twitter's former head of trust and safety, is trying to reduce inappropriate messages sent on Match Group's dating platforms, like Tinder and Hinge.

The company is working on what Spencer Rascoff, its new CEO, called "an ecosystem cleanup." On an earnings call earlier this month, Rascoff said safety and security are good for business.

Roth joined Match a year ago as its vice president of trust and safety, responsible for overseeing content moderation across its dating apps. He formerly led the team that set rules for what was allowed on Twitter but quit shortly after Elon Musk took over the platform in 2022.

Last month, Meta ignited a firestorm when it announced it would end professional fact-checking in the US. But Roth, who dealt with online harassment himself after speaking out against Musk's Twitter, said Match is "doubling down on safety."

"For men especially, a big part of our safety approach is focused on driving behavioral change so that we can make dating experiences safer and more respectful," Roth told the Financial Times.

Using AI tools, Match can flag messages that could be perceived as abusive or overtly sexual. Match asks users who type what Roth called "off-color" messages if they would like to reconsider — and a fifth do, the FT reported.

The company found "a real need and opportunity to help people understand the norms and behaviors that go along with respectful and consensual dating," Roth said.

Due to dating app fatigue, women are also creating their own alternatives. A journalist with no previous event experience created the Bored Of Dating Apps events, where single people can meet in real life and form deeper connections, which took off in the UK and the US.

Between May 2023 and the end of 2024, more than half a million users left Tinder, a report from the UK-based online behavior research group Ofcom said.

Bumble and Hinge also reported losing 368,000 and 131,000 users, respectively, in the same period. Bumble's stock has slumped 37% in the past year, and Match is down 7.7%.

Match Group did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Tinder hopes to reverse its ongoing decline in active users by turning to AI. In the coming quarter, the Match-owned dating app will roll out new AI-powered features for discovery and matching. The addition aims to offer fatigued singles an alternative to the “swipe” that defined the dating app in its earlier days and influenced […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Dating app giant Tinder updated its Explore page to give users access to new categories, “Non-Monogamy,” “Serious Dater,” “Short-Term Fun,” “Long-Term Partner,” and “New Friends,”  the company announced on Thursday.  These new categories are designed to help users find compatible matches by grouping profiles according to dating intentions. The “Serious Dater” option focuses on users […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

• Jess Evans founded Bored Of Dating Apps after being constantly disappointed by dating apps.
• Her events offer an alternative to meeting someone online, focusing on real-life connections.
• There's one very important rule: no ghosting each other.

When Jess Evans was going through a horrible breakup a few years ago, she did what many people do in that situation: downloaded some dating apps.

"What I found there was just your usual string of disappointing experiences," Evans, 33, told Business Insider. "It was just one disheartening experience after the next."

Vowing to ditch the apps for good, Evans thought about other ways to meet someone. Uninspired by the options, she called up a friend and told her she was going to put on her own one-off dating night.

As a journalist with no events experience, Evans worried it would be a flop. But it wasn't. More than 200 singletons looking for love showed up.

That was in February 2022, and Evans hasn't looked back. Bored Of Dating Apps events now take place in London and Manchester in the UK, and launched in New York last year.

It's been so successful that BODA is now Evans' full-time job. She also met her now-fiancee at one of the events, so she swears by how effective they can be.

"Even if they haven't met someone romantically, people go home feeling so much better," she said. "They're like, oh my goodness, I can't believe how many amazing single people there are. It's just about getting off the apps and actually getting people in the same space."

People crave real-life connections

Many agree that dating apps aren't fun anymore, with Gen Zers in particular rejecting them. A Forbes Health survey of 1,000 Americans last year found that 79% of Gen Z respondents said they were experiencing dating app burnout.

This trend has left some apps struggling. Shares in Match Group, which owns Tinder, Hinge, and Match.com, have fallen 64% over the past five years as the number of paying users dips. Match also announced layoffs last July.

Evans has also noticed people fighting back against the surface-level dating culture that apps promote.

Rather than judging someone on a few photos and a list of vague interests, you get to take them in as a full person. After all, a profile cannot tell you whether you will have chemistry in person.

When she was on the apps, Evans said she felt like she was constantly battling against the perfect idea of a woman. The curse of dating apps is that they encourage you to think the grass is always greener, rather than see all of the good traits of the person you're seeing. Some call this the paradox of choice.

"There's always someone hotter or taller or thinner or someone with a better job, or someone who holds their pen in a particular way so you don't get the ick," Evans said. "As long as we were only ever hooking up, the apps would always have you back in their pocket again."

One of the biggest lessons Evans has learned is for people to embrace dating outside their "type."

"When we look at exactly what that type is, it's often quite an outdated tick list of ours," Evans said. "Someone that we think we ought to like layered over time with our 14-year-old teen crush on an American show doubled with a familiar face of an ex-boyfriend in university that it didn't work with."

Dating apps have led people to shut out people who they could have had a "beautiful relationship with," Evans said, simply because they didn't look exactly right on the surface.

"Because they haven't fitted their rigid, on-paper litmus test, they haven't given it a go," she said. "We've been judging people so much on just a few words on a page."

Finding love and a community

There's one golden rule anyone attending a BODA event must follow: ghosting is strictly prohibited.

"We want everyone to look after each other," Evans said. "So if you meet someone tonight and go on a date with them, please don't ghost them after."

Evans said this basic rule of social interaction has been lost along the way, largely because of dating app culture.

Ghosting and standing people up have become the norm, with little consideration for someone's feelings.

This cycle is particularly frustrating for people in their 30s who may have friendship groups full of people settling down, getting married, and having children.

Evans felt this way herself. She felt isolated as her friends became more occupied with their own families, and spare cash once devoted to nights out with the girls was set aside for family holidays and living expenses.

BODA gave Evans the opportunity to socialize and find people in the same situation, and it has become a community as well as a place to find love.

"It felt amazing to have those friendships where we could have loads of fun together and go out on a night out together and wing woman for each other," she said.

The art of the spontaneous flirt

BODA events include socials where singles can mingle and "meet-cutes" in bookshops, which mimic the old ways of flirting and meeting a potential match in the wild as depicted in romcoms.

"So many people, both men and women, have just really, really wanted to lean into the element of that romance," Evans said. "People are really, really craving romance right now."

Other past BODA events include hikes, supper clubs, painting evenings, and yoga, where people can practice the art of what Evans called "the spontaneous flirt."

The goal is for people to find deeper connections — and that's working for some. Evans told BI there have been 15 engagements and a "BODA baby" since the events started.

That's what makes all the hard work worth it, she said. "I'm such a hopeless romantic. I love that I get to watch people fall in love."

• When Wolfe Herd took Bumble public in 2021, she became the youngest female CEO to make such a move.
• Before Bumble, Wolfe Herd cofounded rival dating app Tinder.
• Wolfe Herd left her CEO role in 2024, and Bumble announced she'll return in March 2025.

Whitney Wolfe Herd is coming back as CEO of dating app Bumble just over a year after stepping down in 2024.

Wolfe Herd, who co-founded the app, transitioned into the executive chair position at Bumble in January 2024. She did so at a time when the dating app industry faced challenges. In her stead, Lidiane Jones had the top job before resigning, citing personal reasons, a press release said.

In 2021, Wolfe Herd made a bold move when she took Bumble public. She was 31 at the time, which made her the youngest female CEO to take a US company public.

Since going public, Bumble has experience ups and downs. Bumble's annual revenue was up 16% year-over-year in 2023, but its latest results for the third-quarter of 2024 dropped 1% year-over-year to $274 million. Wolfe Herd expanded her company and relinquished some of her responsibilities after the company went public, including hiring Drena Kusari, Bumble's first global general manager. 

In May 2023, Bumble also acquired Official, a relationship app designed for couples that helps with date planning and mood check-ins, according to Fast Company. 

"We're really trying to build the entire relationship journey and take care of the entire relationship from start to finish," Wolfe Herd told Fast Company.

Keep reading to learn more about Bumble cofounder Whitney Wolfe Herd.

Whitney Wolfe Herd, 35, is a Utah native.

Wolfe Herd was born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, The Times of London reported. Her father is a property developer and her mother is a homemaker, per The Times.

The CEO has been a feminist from an early age, telling The Times that she disliked how Utah's dating culture was dominated by men — women were expected to wait for them to make the first move.

Wolfe Herd went on to attend Southern Methodist University in Texas, and was a member of Kappa Kappa Gamma, per Fast Company. She's still close with many of her sorority sisters and even employs a few at Bumble.

Wolfe Herd also launched her first business at 19 while still in college, per Money Inc. After the Deepwater Horizon oil spill pumped crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico for five months in 2010, Wolfe Herd enlisted celebrity stylist Patrick Aufdenkamp to design tote bags that could be sold to help fund relief efforts. The resulting nonprofit, called the Help Us Get Cleaned Up Project, became nationally known after Nicole Richie and Rachel Zoe were spotted with Wolfe Herd's bags.

After earning a degree in International Studies, Wolfe Herd did a brief stint in Southeast Asia.

Wolfe Herd spent her time in Asia volunteering at local orphanages, per Money Inc.

Wolfe Herd is currently at the head of Bumble, it isn't the first dating app she cofounded.

At 22, Wolfe Herd was hired to work at startup incubator Hatch Labs in Los Angeles, according to The Times of London. After hours, she starting collaborating with a group that was looking to build a dating app.

That app, which is now known as Tinder, quickly grew into a global phenomenon with Wolfe Herd's help. She even came up with the name Tinder, per The Telegraph. She is credited as a cofounder and spent two years as the company's vice president of marketing, per The Times.

Wolfe Herd didn't leave Tinder on good terms.

During her tenure at Tinder, Wolfe Herd dated fellow cofounder and her then-boss Justin Mateen, per The Times of London. She left the company shortly after they split, and filed a lawsuit alleging that she had experienced sexual harassment and discrimination.

The legal dispute was settled privately outside of court, with neither party admitting to wrongdoing.

Following the legal battle, Wolfe Herd also faced online harassment.

"I was inundated with hatred online, lots of aggressive behavior, people calling me names, really painful things that I'd never experienced," Wolfe Herd told The Times in 2018. "I felt like my entire self-worth, any confidence that I had, had been sucked away. There were dark times when I thought, 'Well, this is it. I won't have a career ever again. I'm 24, coming out of one of the world's hottest tech companies, but the internet hates me.' It was a horrible time. Then I woke up one morning and thought, 'I'm going to rebuild myself.'"

Wolfe Herd launched Bumble in 2014, originally planning to build a female-focused social network instead of a dating app.

Wolfe Herd was persuaded to forgo her original plan for the app by former business partner and Russian billionaire Andrey Andreev, according to CNN Business.

The app's women-led model was initially inspired by Sadie Hawkins school dances, where women ask men to be their date, Wolfe Herd told Business Insider in 2015.

"We're definitely not trying to be sexist, that's not the goal," Wolfe Herd said. "I know guys get sick of making the first move all the time. Why does a girl feel like she should sit and wait around? Why is there this standard that, as a woman, you can get your dream job but you can't talk to a guy first? Let's make dating feel more modern."

Wolfe Herd has since expanded the app with additional services to help women meet new friends and expand their professional networks, called Bumble BFF and Bumble Bizz respectively. Bumble has also invested in other apps, including gay dating app Chappy, TechCrunch reported.

Bumble has 3.6 million paying users across 150 countries as of June 2023, according to the company.

Wolfe Herd also reorganized and took the helm of Bumble's former parent company, Magic Lab, after its owner was ousted amid accusations of racism and sexism.

In addition to being Wolfe Herd's close friend and business partner who she said she was "incredibly in sync" with and called "two to five times a day," Andreev owned a 79% stake in Bumble, according to Fast Company.

After the allegations of racism and sexism against Andreev were published by Forbes in 2019, Wolfe Herd released a statement saying she had had "nothing but positive and respectful" experiences with Andreev but "would never challenge someone's feelings or experiences."

"All of us at Bumble are mortified by the allegations about Badoo (Bumble's majority owner) from the years before Bumble was born, as chronicled in the Forbes story," Wolfe Herd said in the statement. "I am saddened and sickened to hear that anyone, of any gender, would ever be made to feel marginalized or mistreated in any capacity at their workplace."

Even before she took on her expanded role, Wolfe Herd was already a workaholic.

Wolfe Herd typically wakes up every morning at 5:15 a.m. and immediately starts responding to emails, she told The Times of London.

She has even been known to wake up every two hours during the night to check her inbox. "I'm trying to stop that," Wolfe Herd told The Times in 2017. "I get no downtime. I don't get a weekend, I haven't lived like a twenty-something since I started Bumble in 2014."

Wolfe Herd is also politically active, helping outlaw digital sexual harassment in Texas.

Sending unsolicited nude photos — a phenomenon that has plagued dating apps and even AirDrop — is punishable under a new law championed by Wolfe Herd, Inc. reported. She is now advocating for a similar law in California and hopes it will soon be federal law, too.

"It is time that our laws mirror this way we lead double lives, in the physical and the digital," Wolfe Herd told Inc. shortly after the Texas law was passed in August 2019. "You look at government right now, it only protects the physical world. But our youth are spending a lot more time in the digital world than they are in the physical."

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The CEO says she doesn't have political aspirations of her own, however. "I could never run for [office]," Wolfe Herd told The Times of London, saying that she is frequently asked if she's considered it. "There are people so much smarter than me."

Wolfe Herd is also a mom.

Wolfe Herd married Texas oil heir Michael Herd in an elegant three-day ceremony on Italy's Amalfi Coast in 2017, per Vogue.

The couple first met while skiing in Aspen in 2013, but Wolfe Herd first saw him on a dating app. "He has the kind of face you remember," she told The Telegraph.

He is now the president of the oil and gas field operator founded by his late grandfather, Herd Producing Company, and also owns a high-end farm to table restaurant called the Grove Kitchen + Gardens.

The pair have two sons named Henry and Bobby, named after Michael's late grandfather, and they makes frequent appearances on Wolfe Herd's Instagram account.

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The couple also has a Great Dane named Duke and a yellow lab named Jett, per The New York Times.

"[Duke] is a kind animal but does not understand how big he is," Wolfe Herd told The Times in 2019, while describing her daily after work routine. "At 175 pounds, he could quite literally kill me. I have to lock myself in the car while I wait for my husband to come home and get him away from me."

Wolfe Herd has been open about her struggles with anxiety.

"I haven't gone through the testing, but I should," Wolfe Herd told The Times of London. "It's anxiety about everything. I worry about awful things happening to people I love. They say phones are a strong catalyst for making anxiety worse, so I have this interesting balance — how do I make sure I'm on top of everything, but also preserve my mental health?"

The Herd family splits time between their two Texas houses.

The Herds have one home along the Colorado River in Austin near Bumble's headquarters and another further north in Tyler, near Michael Herd's office, per The New York Times. They also own a vacation home in Aspen, Bumble's chief brand officer Alex Williamson told Aspen Magazine.

The couple also owns Michael's 6.5-acre family estate on Lake Austin, according to Mansion Global. The waterfront compound boasts a movie theater, helipad, putting green, 10 garages, multiple boat docks, and a guest house, as well as a 5,000 square foot cabana designed for entertaining. That property was listed for sale for $28.5 million.

They also travel a lot.

Wolfe Herd takes frequent trips for both work and pleasure. Wolfe Herd told Travel +Leisure in 2017 that her all-time favorite trips include a sailing expedition through Myanmar and Thailand and a family trip to India.

For their honeymoon, Wolfe Herd and her husband stayed at Four Seasons resorts in both Bora Bora and Maui after leaving the site of their destination wedding in Italy, according to a blog post by the Indagare, the group that planned the trip.

Wolfe Herd told Indagare that she wanted a beach-heavy honeymoon because she and Herd were "looking for the ideal place to unwind, where we could take in the sun and swim. Our favorite moments were just relaxing and appreciating each other in such beautiful locations."

In July 2019, she celebrated her 30th birthday with a multi-day party on a yacht off the coast of Capri, Italy, per Guest of a Guest.

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Wolfe Herd has an estimated net worth of $400 million, according to Forbes.

Wolfe Herd's multimillion-dollar fortune landed her at No. 39 on Forbes' list of the wealthiest self-made women in America in 2020.

In 2022, Bumble's total revenue increased to $903.5 million, according to its financial earnings. The company brought in nearly $243 million in quarter one of 2023, a 16% increase, according to Bumble.

Forbes previously reported that Wolfe Herd was the youngest self-made woman billionaire after she took Bumble public — a title that lasted for ten months. Wolfe Herd's net worth is currently $400 million, per Forbes.

"I feel like what I'm doing is quite important," Wolfe Herd told The Times of London in 2018. "A lot of people are, like, 'What do you mean it's important? It's a dating app.' But it's important because connections are at the root of everything we do. Human connection defines our happiness and our health. This company feels like a piece of me. I know this sounds cheesy and weird, but I really feel like it's my mission."

In November 2023, Bumble announced that Lidiane Jones would be replacing Wolfe Herd as CEO.

Bumble announced on November 6 that Jones, then CEO of Slack, would replace Wolfe Herd as CEO of the dating app starting January 2024.

Jones replaced Slack cofounder Stewart Butterfield in January 2023 and was CEO of the company for less than a year before her new role at Bumble was announced.

Wolfe Herd stayed on as the executive chair of Bumble. 

 

In May 2024, Wolfe Herd shared her thoughts on AI dating.

Wolfe Herd attended the Bloomberg Technology Summit in May where she said Bumble is eyeing ways to foster "healthy and equitable relationships" using AI.

She used the term "AI dating concierge" to describe tech that would ease the pressure of online dating.

"If you want to get really out there, there is a world where your dating concierge could go and date for you with other dating concierge," she said at the summit.

Bumble announced in January that Wolfe Herd would be coming back as CEO.

Bumble announced that Wolfe Herd would return to the CEO role in a press release on January 17 — just over a year after stepping down. She'll succeed Jones, who'll remain at the helm until the change goes into effect in March.

"I am deeply grateful for the transformative work Lidiane has led during such a pivotal time for Bumble, and her leadership has been instrumental in building a strong foundation for our future," said Wolfe Herd in the release.

In her own statement, Jones praised the platform for its "tremendous progress."

"It has been an honor to serve Bumble's stakeholders, and I will remain an enthusiastic supporter of Whitney and the Company, especially the outstanding team behind the brand," Jones said.

• Podcast host Ilana Dunn gives daters advice on her podcast "Seeing Other People."
• She guides her listeners through transforming their dating app profiles, charging $95 apiece.
• She shared three tips to make dating profiles better, including how to choose photos.

Ilana Dunn knows dating — and she agrees that it's tough out there.

Dunn, 30, used to be the lead content creator for Hinge, a dating app with about 20 million users. Now, she hosts the podcast "Seeing Other People," which is about dating in the digital age. It recently hit 5 million downloads and has over 400 episodes.

Its popularity comes as singles complain of "swipe fatigue," a disillusionment with online dating apps that has caused headaches for Bumble and Match Group, which owns Tinder and Hinge, and created a rush of new dating-app startups.

Dunn told Business Insider that she sympathizes with modern daters, who have the daunting task of crafting digital personas.

"Dating apps appeared one day, and they never came with an instruction manual," Dunn said.

There's hope, she added: Some simple tweaks to online dating profiles can help boost the chances of better matches.

In recent years, fans of her podcast have reached out for help with their profiles. Dunn began charging $95 to revamp them, helping clients select the best photos and prompts and curate how they share the story of who they are.

Dunn shared her top three tips to improve any dating profile.

1. Choose photos that show you doing what you love

Dunn said some daters fall prey to an obvious impulse — they only select photos in which they think they look the best.

"They're just posting the most attractive pictures of themselves, or what they think somebody would be attracted to," she said.

It can end up looking like a random, bland collection of images, Dunn warned.

Instead, Dunn recommended finding photos that more effectively reflect one's interests and personality. For example, Dunn once suggested that a dater delete a gym selfie from their profile and upload a picture of a marathon they ran instead.

Dunn suggested a simple thought exercise: Think about how your friends might describe you to a stranger, then pick photos that showcase the most important things a potential partner should know about you.

2. Weave an easy date idea into your profile

A common complaint from dating-app users is that conversations rarely translate into real-life meetups. This year, Hinge added a feature that blocks users from matching with new people if they have eight unanswered matches.

To encourage real-life plans, Dunn suggests planting an idea for a date somewhere in your profile, ideally related to food or drink you like.

Sometimes it's as easy as tweaking a statement you're already making. For example, Dunn would change a response to the prompt "The one thing you should know about me is…" from "I just moved to New York City" to "I'm looking for the best dollar slice in town."

"It sends the signal, 'We don't have to beat around the bush. We can just get to the date,'" Dunn said.

She added that another strategy is to name your favorite cocktail or café order and then ask where to find it in your profile.

3. Put one of your answers to a prompt in list form

Dunn said more is better when it comes to listing your interests on your dating-app profile.

You never know what word or phrase might pique the interest of a potential match, so put it all out there, she added.

Dunn recalled filling out Hinge's "I won't shut up about…" prompt when she was dating. She initially listed just her dog, Zoe, but then went back and added the Jonas Brothers and Sugarfish, a buzzy chain of sushi restaurants in New York and LA.

Her future husband ended up messaging her about the Jonas Brothers. The first dance at their wedding? "When You Look Me In The Eyes," by the Jonas Brothers.

"We've now been to 10 Jonas Brothers concerts together," Dunn said. "We may not have met if that wasn't on my profile."

Spotify Wrapped arrived on Wednesday, packaged in its usual neon, Instagram-ready glory.

The annual release dominates social-media posts for a day, but beneath the colorful cards (designed to be bespoke but distributed en masse), it's Spotify's brag about the amount of data the company has collected on you, mirrored back in a way that's meant to make surveillance sexy, silly, and shareable.

In recent Decembers, the wrap-ification of our data has spread beyond Spotify. Apple Music, Spotify's main competitor, now has a similar feature called Replay, unveiling this year's version on Tuesday. Starbucks has sent out emails telling people about their favorite beverages and number of store visits, shocking some with exactly how many dozens of Frappuccinos they bought. Duolingo kicked off the Wrapped season earlier this week, showing people how many mistakes they made while trying to learn a new language. The British supermarket chain Tesco has sent Clubcard members a review of what they bought in recent years, called Unpacked. And on Tuesday, Tinder hosted a Year in Swipe party, where it revealed the top trends in online dating the app gleaned from its broad swath of 50 million monthly users, which included people getting specific about what kind of person they're looking for or putting a hand emoji in their bios to indicate they're searching for real connections.

All this is getting weird. The type of lattes we drink and the music we listen to are things we fundamentally know about ourselves. The most common names of men and women on Tinder (Alexes and Daniels dominated among men, Marias and Lauras women) tell us nothing about how to find love. But these year-in-review trends still catch avid attention and, in turn, provide free advertising for companies when they're reshared. About an hour after Spotify unveiled this year's Wrapped, its market cap reached $100 billion for the first time. Spotify did not respond to requests for comment.

"People are so excited about seeing data collected from them and then being shown back to them in a way that feels meaningful and relatable," Taylor Annabell, a researcher with Utrecht University who has studied the Wrapped phenomenon, said. "Wrapped taps into this belief we have that data is meaningful and that we want to see it because it helps us understand ourselves."

Wrapped 2024 included the usual unveiling of top songs and artists, but Spotify has added a "Wrapped AI podcast," which features two voicebot hosts chatting through your listening habits without really saying much about the songs, in particular. There was also a section picking apart how listening styles changed over different months of the year. For me, that meant going from "van life folkie indie" to "mallgoth permanent wave punk," mildly embarrassing phrases that might describe my musical tastes from a distance but tell me little new about myself.

Of course, Spotify can't capture everything about your tastes — maybe you played a vinyl record on repeat or shared a streaming account with someone in your family. ("It's not me who can't stop listening to Chumbawamba. It's my cousin, I swear!") Maybe you opted for a mysterious approach and kept your Tinder bio short and sweet.

But where data is lacking, some have set out to create it themselves. Wrapped content has proved so effective and viral on social media that people have taken to making up new categories, packaged parts of their lives not captured by apps, and turned it over to their followers. Here, at least, these people get to curate their experiences and post them as they wish. Last December and already this week, some people took to TikTok to talk through how many first dates they went on during the course of a year, using cute and colorful slideshows to walk their users through their year of bad dates, situationships, and ghosting. A third-party project called Vantezzen takes TikTok data and generates a Wrapped-like analysis for those who want to know how many minutes they spent doom scrolling.

All this comes as people have largely thrown up their hands and given in to sharing their data with their apps. Companies have "gotten us to move past just accepting that they are spying on us to celebrating it," said Evan Greer, the director of the digital-rights advocacy group Fight for the Future and a vocal opponent of Spotify who released an album called "Spotify Is Surveillance" in 2021. "That's the shift we're seeing with this explosion of these types of year-end Wrapped viral gimmicks," Greer added. "They're actually about hypernormalizing the fact that the online services that we use know so very much about us."

Tinder's year in review looked at data from profiles in the US and globally and its own survey results, determining the most popular love languages and zodiac signs, the fastest-growing words mentioned in bios (freak, pickleball, and finance all soared this year), and how people like to communicate (ironically, "better in person" won out over the messaging app). It also created an interactive vision-board feature for people to set intentions for their 2025 dating plans. The company's in-person Year in Swipe party was held in a moody Manhattan bar, where attendees could make charm bracelets or have a tarot-card reading, and each sported a button designed to correspond with their dating vibe, like a black cat or delusional. Tinder did not respond to a request for comment about whether people could opt out of being used in the aggregate data.

But Spotify, in particular, wants to tell its users more about themselves throughout the year. In September 2023, the company began making "daylists," or curated playlists released multiple times throughout the day. While they don't come with the sharable, flashy cards to post on Instagram, they're given catchy names that hint at something about you, changing several times a day. Just this week, Spotify has dubbed me a "Laurel Canyon hippie" and crafted a vibe for a "yearning poetry Tuesday afternoon."

The daylists feel like Spotify's attempt to take the Wrapped success "to the next level," said Nina Vindum Rasmussen, a fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science who worked on the Spotify research with Annabell. It's "data fiction that accompanies people throughout the day," she said, adding: "What does it mean for them to have this mirror constantly shoved in their face?"

Most of us have gotten comfortable with — or at least resigned to — the fact that Big Tech is watching our every move. Wrapped season is a shiny reminder of all we've done, seemingly in private, on our phones. But don't count on your friends to stop sharing their elite spot as a 0.05% top listener of Taylor Swift anytime soon.

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.

• Dating apps like Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge have new competition.
• A slew of new apps have launched in 2024 and are taking on swipe fatigue and dating-app burnout.
• Business Insider has interviewed several founders of the newest dating startups entering the ring.

Dating apps are in for a shake-up.

Many users are tired of swiping, dating app giants like Match Group (which owns Tinder and Hinge) face headwinds, and new startups are launching left and right.

Business Insider has interviewed several founders jumping into the dating-app arena as incumbents lose their luster.

Read: Meet the founders behind 11 dating startups

The new crop of dating apps is tackling various pain points in the online dating experience.

Some, for instance, are experimenting with new ways to discover and meet singles (aka not swiping). That includes startups offering users only a small batch of profiles to review each day, such as the New York-based app Pique Dating.

Others are testing how to successfully incorporate artificial intelligence into dating, like Sitch, which offers a chatbot and matchmaking feature powered by AI.

Matchmaking, whether through AI or by friends and family, has also become one of the hottest buzzwords in the dating-startup world.

There's also a wave of IRL-focused startups that forgo the experience of a dating app entirely with in-person events bringing singles together.

Read: The loneliness epidemic has given rise to a new crop of startups aiming to help people connect in real life

Meanwhile, social startups that aren't branded around dating — like Posh, 222, and Pie — are also breeding grounds for new friendships in person that could lead to love down the line as young adults seek to meet people in more organic settings. (Several of these IRL-social startups have also raised venture-capital funding this year.)

Even Big Tech is getting in on the action, with Facebook continuing to expand its Facebook Dating feature and Instagram's long-standing role as a digital flirting mechanism.

Gen Z is also redefining modern dating. Alex Hofmann, an investor and CEO of mobile app conglomerate 9count, recently told BI that younger daters are more interested in connection broadly, even if platonic.

Read more about new dating startups launching to compete with Tinder, Hinge, and Bumble:

• Fourplay, a dating app that lets people go on double dates.
• First Round's On Me, which prioritizes setting up dates over DMs.
• Several new dating startups, like Cheers, Sitch, and Arrange are launching apps with matchmaking features.
• There are also social and dating apps for LGBTQ+ users, like Collective, Freddie, and Lex.
• 222 is not branded as a dating app, but sets up strangers on group dinners in New York and Los Angeles.