Slack CEO Lidiane Jones quits to go run Bumble as founder Whitney Wolfe Herd steps down
Bumble yesterday announced that Lidiane Jones, who currently serves as chief executive at Slack, will succeed founder and current CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd, on Jan. 2. Wolfe Herd will become Executive Chair at that time, the company said in a press release yesterday. Nasdaq listed Bumble, which will report its fiscal third-quarter earnings later today, is expected to cross a billion dollars in revenue this year. “Early in my career, I was the target of online abuse and harassment. I lived in a perpetual state of anxiety; the internet felt like the Wild West, dangerous and toxic. I knew there had to be a better way: A kinder, more respectful internet,” Herd wrote in an exclusive blog for Forbes India in March this year. With that as the founding principle, Herd started Bumble in 2014, with a four-member team and a two-bedroom apartment, my colleague Naini Thaker wrote in her awesome piece on Bumble’s India plans in July. Before Bumble, Wolfe Herd was a co-founder of Tinder, which she sued for sexual harassment, according to Forbes magazine. Bumble went public in February 2021, raising $2.15 billion in a listing that saw the company’s stock soar to $76, versus the listing price of $43, before closing at $70.31. That made Wolfe Herd, who was 31 at the time, the world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire, worth $1.5 billion. She owns about a fifth of the company, according to Forbes. Since then, the stock has plummeted well below the listing price and currently trades at around $13. Under Wolfe Herd’s leadership, Bumble has built itself brand recognition as a dating app that is serious about women’s safety online, according to the company’s press release yesterday. Jones, who will take on the CEO’s role, has a B.S. in computer science from University of Michigan. She’s had a stellar record, which started as an intern at Apple in 2002, according to her LinkedIn profile. She then spent close to 13 years at Microsoft, where she was Group Product Manager for Azure Machine Learning when she left for Sonos, the high-end speaker maker. She was there for close to four years, including through the company’s IPO, and was VP of software product management when she left for Slack. Last year, she was named to replace Slack co-founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield, who left Salesforce in January this year. Salesforce acquired Slack in a $27.7 billion deal in 2021. Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research, told TechCrunch that Jones’s move to Bumble makes a lot of sense, and would be a better fit for her skillset. It’s not about moving from enterprise software to a dating app product, but rather that “Slack is no longer a growth play, but an integration play for Salesforce, and Lidiane’s talents are better at Bumble for turnaround and growth,” Wang told TechCrunch. When she was named CEO of Slack, Fortune Magazine, after an interview with her, described Jones as a rare Brazil-born, Latin American tech CEO. She’s also a mother, according to Bumble’s press release yesterday. “As a woman who has spent her career in technology, it’s a gift to lean on my experience to lead a company dedicated to women and encouraging equality, integrity and kindness, all deeply personal and inspiring to me,” Jones said in the press release.