Bumble Founder Whitney Wolfe Herd Faces Employee Backlash As Hulu Biopic Falters

A Hulu drama meant to celebrate Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd’s rise to tech stardom is drawing scathing reviews — and fueling new scrutiny of the dating app’s troubled reality.

“Swiped,” starring “Mamma Mia!” actress Lily James, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival with the promise of showcasing Wolfe Herd’s journey from Tinder co-founder to feminist trailblazer. Instead, it landed with a thud, scoring just 29% approval on Rotten Tomatoes and facing jeers from critics who dismissed it as glossy mythmaking.

The poor reception comes at an awkward time for Wolfe Herd. Once hailed as the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, she has been under fire from employees after ordering sweeping layoffs at Bumble this summer that cut nearly a third of its global staff.

Her response to workers’ concerns sparked outrage, allegedly telling staff to “calm down” over the news, according to the National Enquirer.

“I see a lot of freaking-out emojis, y’all need to calm down,” she told employees in response to their social media posts. “This is being taken out of context … Everyone’s going to have to be adults in dealing with this.”

The film itself revisits familiar milestones: Wolfe Herd’s departure from Tinder in 2014 amid a sexual harassment and discrimination suit, (which was settled without Tinder admitting wrongdoing), the launch of Bumble later that year with its “women make the first move” feature, and the app’s meteoric rise in more than 150 countries before its 2021 Nasdaq debut.

But behind the feel-good storyline, critics and insiders say Bumble has been plagued by a toxic workplace and broken promises.

“I can’t count the number of conversations I’ve had where I mentioned I was an early hire at Bumble and people are like, ‘Oh, wow, congratulations, you must be rich’,” a former employee told Business Insider in 2022. “It’s just sort of like, ‘Um, I got nothing’.”

Others have pointed to Bumble’s ties to Andrey Andreev, founder of the company’s former majority owner Badoo, whose notorious parties — reportedly featuring drugs and nude models — prompted a 2019 Forbes exposé. Wolfe Herd issued a statement at the time saying she was “mortified” by the allegations.

Bumble’s Wall Street story has also soured. Its shares have collapsed by more than 90 percent since going public, wiping billions off its valuation, according to Business Insider.

The disconnect between the on-screen narrative and the company’s real-world struggles wasn’t lost on disillusioned staff.“Far from the feminist triumph being celebrated on screen, Bumble has been plagued by toxic culture and disastrous management under Herd,” an insider told the National Enquirer.

For viewers, though, the bigger question is whether “Swiped” can recover from its dismal debut. With critics unimpressed and employees speaking out, the movie meant to burnish Wolfe Herd’s image may instead cement her as one of the tech world’s most polarizing figures.