“The one thing you can never get back is your precious time,” is the first thing we hear from Whitney Wolfe Herd, guest on Meghan Markle’s new podcast Confessions of a Female Founder. The words ring in your ears throughout this 50-minute mutual love-in between Meg, aka the Duchess of Sussex, and Whit, aka “Beauty”.
It will shock no one to hear that Wolfe Herd, the founder of dating app Bumble, is one of Markle’s closest friends.
Wolfe Herd is still a good “get” for this first of eight episodes, or at least she would be if their chat was truly about the ins-and-outs, and ups-and-downs, of entrepreneurialism.
Wolfe Herd is a self-made millionaire who created a product people actually use. At one point, shortly after Bumble floated on the stock market, she briefly held the title of youngest self-made female billionaire in the world.
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She has a story to tell, albeit a vague, aphorism-filled one that she has told before. In 2023, she “broke up with Bumble”, stepping back as chief executive in a bid to be more than just “the Bumble girl”, only for her journey of “self-love” to lead her straight back to Bumble.
The part semi-glossed over here is that its share price has tanked in the meantime, and she’s now worth a mere $400 million, according to wealth-tracking magazine Forbes. Luckily, Wolfe Herd doesn’t do anything as foolish as measure her self-worth against the value of Bumble shares.
“What’s funny is that at my on-paper richest, I was at my inward poorest,” she insists. Markle, in highly relatable fashion for once, can only muse that it’s “amazing” how evolved her friend has become.
But Confessions of a Female Founder doesn’t feature any ear-pricking insights, it also isn’t about any specific business-world struggles that anyone who wishes to emulate Wolfe Herd’s success could either relate to or learn from. Instead, it’s about loving yourself – a “revolutionary act”, Meg and Whit agree – being a “cheerleader” for your friends, and the trials of being in the public eye.
Wolfe Herd has experience of this. After she exited dating app company Tinder, she accused another of its co-founders of sexual harassment, with Tinder’s parent company later paying up to settle the case. The public attention that followed means she can now credibly compare notes with Markle on the perils of being caught up in a media storm.
Wolfe Herd expresses astonishment that Markle is a celebrity figure even in Ireland. Walking through an Irish airport some years ago, her “jaw hit the floor” when she saw that her friend was “the cover of every single magazine and newspaper”, she reports, perhaps not understanding that the majority of these publications were likely the UK-owned titles that flood the market here.
“Every single one said something different. I mean, random headline, random headline. You were the cover of every single one of those magazines, tabloids and newspapers,” she marvels.
This was surreal to her: “I’m in Ireland. She’s back home in California with her kids doing school drop-off, and she’s the front page of every single one of these things. What are they talking about? There’s no content. There’s nothing to say. I just had this moment where I was like, wow, this is a different beast.”
Host and guest really do have things in common, including parenthood and post-partum pre-eclampsia, and genuinely seem to know each other.
But their treacly, ego-fluffing conversation – combined with Wolfe Herd’s reminder that royal gossip does a decent trade here too – only serves to underline how the culture gap between Ireland and the US remains as wide as the Atlantic. It seems unlikely to be closed by a multimillionaire and a duchess who want credit for daring to love themselves.
