If you have dedication, courage and confidence in yourself, then even the strongest tempest can’t break your dreams

Success stories are often made of impossible dreams. We see the face of success but barely know what goes behind the making of the successful person or how fascinating or struggling his journey has been to reach that top. This story is of 37-year-old billionaire Whitney Wolfe Herd.
Whitney Wolfe Herd, also known by the name The Queen Bee of Bumble, a female billionaire at the age of 31 and former co-founder and VP of Marketing at Tinder, was born on 1 July 1989, in Salt Lake City, Utah. She was brought up in a Jewish catholic family, her father Micheal Wolfe a rich property dealer while her mother Kelly Wolfe a housewife. She was in 4th standard when she accompanied her parents on a sabbatical to Paris. She completed her schooling at Judge Memorial Catholic High School and then moved towards Southern Methodist University.
God had bestowed every human being with some abilities. Some people have one kind of ability and some have another. Now the only difference is that some recognise these abilities at the right time and use them in the right way, while some don’t recognise them in their whole life. Whitney was among those people who not only knew their abilities but used them in the right way and at the right time to conquer the world. She faced all the odds bravely but never gave up. Her entrepreneurial qualities became evident when she was just 20 and she opened up her own charity business of bamboo tote bags to support regions impacted by the BP Oil Spill. The international celebrity Stylish Patrick Aukdenkemp also partnered with Wolfe in this non-profit venture which came to be known as the ‘Help Us Project”.
This was just the new beginning of her interest in the world of entrepreneurship and the social world as many hands of well-known celebrities joined with her and supported her efforts of bamboo tote bags. Then she climbed one more step of her success and founded another venture focused on clothing with Aufdenkamp which she named Tender Heart and aimed at bringing awareness on the issues like human trafficking and fair trade practices. Her efforts of helping people didn’t stop here but once she completed her university, she went on to work in orphanages across Southern Asia. Whitney was not only a billionaire by wealth but a billionaire by heart, too.
Then Wolfe started working with Hatch Labs, Justin Mateen and Sean Rad and impressed them with her marketing skills. They made a team of 5 and founded Tinder, an online dating app, in September 2012. ‘Tinder’ was Wolfe’s brainchild and she left no stone unturned in popularising the app. In the journey of life where there is sun, there are clouds too. Wolfe also faced the burning heat of the sun in her life, she faced sexism in the tech industry, but she faced all the odds with bravery. She started a new online dating platform named as Merci. Wolfe was the CEO of this new company. She realised that giving the power of the first move to women can make their platform unique.
Whitney worked very hard and the app was a hit in no time. With her hard work and dedication, this app Merci became “Bumble”. The main focus of Bumble was the concept of “by women, for women”. Bumble first went live in December 2014 and clocked in 100,000 downloads and in 2017, 85% of its work consisted of women. Wolfe utilised many inventive strategies to make it popular, from taglines like “You’re a Queen Bee,” “Be the CEO Your Parents Always Wanted You to Marry” and “Make the First Move”.
Celebrities like Priyanka Chopra and Sareena Williams became the star investors of Bumble and in the year 2020, over 100 million users had registered on the application worldwide. Now the Queen Bee of Bumble took a super move to make her company public in February 2021 and it was a historical moment for NASDAQ as Bumble raised over 2 billion$ in an initial public offering. Whitney’s entrepreneurial spirit, focus on innovation and the love of the world of investors led the shares charting high and the company is now valued at $8.3 billion.

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Sufaya Yousf