Bumble's High Bar

Most dating apps are dumpster fires. Whitney Wolfe Herd started Bumble to give women a better option. Is it living up to its lofty ideals?

- By Claire Suddath

Whitney Wolfe Herd remembered the day she decided to go after dick pics.

“It started with me barging into a meeting and being like, ‘Guys, we’re going to make a law, and we’re going to make dick pics illegal!’ ” she recalled. Wolfe Herd founded and runs Bumble, the dating and networking app that says it offers women a safe way to meet people online. Bumble had already banned users from posting such pictures to their profiles and was working on software that could detect them when sent in a message. Yet according to a company user survey, about a third of Bumble women had received lewd photos from men, whether through text or other social media that Bumble couldn’t control. “I was just like, ‘This is bullshit,’ ” Wolfe Herd said. If it were illegal to flash someone on the street, she reasoned, there should also be a law against flashing people online. Bumble is based in Austin, so Texas seemed like a good place to start.

Wolfe Herd didn’t have many political connections in the state, but her husband did. Michael Herd is president of his family’s oil business, Herd Producing Co., and a family friend of Gaylord Hughey, an oil and gas attorney who’s one of Texas’ top Republican fundraisers. Wolfe Herd called Hughey, Hughey called a lobbyist, the lobbyist got Democrats and Republicans to sponsor a bill, and in August, Governor Greg Abbott signed it into law. Now, anyone sending photos of “intimate parts” to someone in Texas without consent could be fined $500.