Bumble's Stumble | The Sting | 2
Business Wars
Audible
4.6 • 13.5K Ratings
🗓️ 6 May 2026
⏱️ 44 minutes
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Summary
It’s 2024 and Bumble’s users are increasingly frustrated by matches that go nowhere. Investors are equally uneasy as the stock price cascades from its post-IPO highs. In response, new CEO Lidiane Jones rolls out a rebrand with a major change. But the rollout faces a backlash and the company’s slide continues. Founder Whitney Wolfe Herd returns to save her company and to find out whether an app built on human connection can be rescued by AI.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of business wars ad-free right now. |
| 0:06.0 | Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app. |
| 0:19.8 | It's spring 2024 in Austin, Texas. Inside Bumble's sunflower yellow headquarters known as the hive, |
| 0:27.1 | engineers and designers are working late. Empty coffee cups line their desks. Screens glow in the dim |
| 0:33.7 | light as they work on something big. A new app. |
| 0:38.3 | A new logo. |
| 0:39.4 | A new algorithm. |
| 0:41.2 | A new version. |
| 0:42.6 | A bumble. |
| 0:44.2 | And most importantly, a new feature that once upon a time would have been unthinkable. |
| 0:51.0 | For the first time in the company's history, men will be allowed to make the first move. |
| 0:57.0 | Down the hall from where the programmers are plugging away, the company's new CEO, Lidiani Jones, |
| 1:04.0 | gathers her top executives in a conference room. Behind them hangs a framed print that reads, |
| 1:10.0 | Life Short, Make the first move. |
| 1:12.9 | For a decade, that line defined Bumble. It was the company's differentiator, the reason women |
| 1:18.9 | chose the app in the first place. Now, Jones is leading an evolution. Jones comes from the work |
| 1:26.4 | messaging app, Slack, where she served as CEO for the |
| 1:29.9 | past year, so she knows product. She's been brought in to turn things around because, well, |
| 1:36.4 | because there's a lot to fix. Bumble lost $32 million in the last quarter. Its stock has |
| 1:42.9 | fallen sharply since its post-IPO peak, |
| 1:45.8 | and users are burned out. Women are matching, but not messaging. Men are matching and waiting. |
| 1:53.9 | The whole system has stalled out. Inside the conference room, Jones and her team start crafting their comeback strategy. |
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