Tinder's Forgotten Woman: Whitney Wolfe, Sexism, and Startup Creation Myths

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-07-02/tinders-forgotten-woman-whitney-wolfe-sexism-and-startup-creation-myths

by dbloom • 12 years ago

149 98 12 years ago

businessweek.com

minimaxir3• 12 years ago

Despite the linkbaity headline, this article actually adds new information and context to the controversy.

Also, NSFW Instagram images.

hyperliner3• 12 years ago

Yes people. Please flag [EDIT, as in write "NSFW" when applicable. Thanks shawnz]. The article feels that is going to be serious, which it kind of is, but then the pics. What was the point of that? The writer could not have simply mentioned the pics?

minimaxir3• 12 years ago

This is one of the very few contexts where those types of images are completely relevant, but I'm surprised there wasn't a warning in the article.

optimusclimb• 12 years ago

I think the expression, "a picture is worth a thousand words" applies. Sometimes points merit reinforcing. I'm guessing the author thought that adding the pictures added impact. I'd say it did. Too easy to gloss over phrases like "twitter account littered with misogynist/immature/whatever pictures".

Also, great article, I thought.

redthrowaway• 12 years ago

The pictures, from the Instagram account of the men accused of misogyny, are directly pertinent to the purported misogyny of the people in question. Why shouldn't they be included?

hyperliner3• 12 years ago

I don't disagree with optimus. It's just about lacking the flag.

bashinator• 12 years ago

Agreed - this article has imagery that's inappropriate to display in many locations, and should be indicated as such in the title.

dang3• 12 years ago

We tried to edit the title to make it less linkbaity, but only partly. If anyone can suggest a better one (i.e. accurate and neutral), we can change it again.

dbloom2• 12 years ago

It looks like the URL of the article has an alternative (older?) headline in it:

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-07-02/tinders-forg...

"Tinder's Forgotten Woman: Whitney Wolfe, Sexism, and Startup Creation Myths"

msie2• 12 years ago

Pretty shocking revelations. Was this ever revealed before? Only because of Wolfe's firing?

saraid216• 12 years ago

s/firing/lawsuit

minimaxir3• 12 years ago

The author had done an article on Tinder last year: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-09-05/dating-app-t...

It's likely that current events help explain some oddities in Tinder's past.

msie2• 12 years ago

Interesting differences in reporting between the two articles. 1) Rad is given more credit in the first with development of Tinder than in the second article where Munoz is now mentioned. 2) Wolfe isn't mentioned at all in the first: Mateen is credited with the idea of seeding the app at sororities and fraternities.

henryw• 12 years ago

Interesting that Tinder is owned by the company behind Match.com.

robg2• 12 years ago

Not just owned, but incubated by their employees. That completely blows me away that IAC is so, so good at rebranding for different audiences.

_delirium2• 12 years ago

Yeah, the most interesting part of this article is that, if true, it seems like Tinder was kind of a pseudo-startup, a subsidiary of an established corporation given a more media-friendly backstory by positioning it as a startup. In retrospect I'm surprised that kind of thing isn't more common. (Or maybe it is?)

clay_to_n• 12 years ago

I remember somebody telling me this (that they weren't a "real" startup, and owned by the company behind Match), and then they came to my school to talk about their company - and spun it so seriously that I assumed the guy telling me was wrong.

Not cool for companies to lie about their history, even if a lot of them do it.

filmgirlcw• 12 years ago

And Tinder has done this from the word go. I remember talking to Rad and a few others when they were ramping up and the first thing I said was, "oh, OK, so you're part of IAC" and they got all defensive and tried to pretend like the fact that their offices, all their capital, all their equipment and their paychecks were from IAC was irrelevant and that they were still totally indie.

From talking to IAC people, they don't care what the founder say -- to a point -- as long as people are using the app. As this article made clear however, if you get too far off the messaging and start to oversell the "independent" angle, you will be smacked back into reality.

And then thing is, it isn't cool for a lot of companies to lie about their history -- but if you don't create this false narrative (and let's be clear, 90% of the startup narratives you hear are altered to make the story more attractive. The same is true for any other aspect of business (see also: Hollywood)), people won't pay attention. To a certain extent, as a society, we wall want to have that great Cindarella story.

We want to believe Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team (even though that's not really what happened [1]) and then went on to be one of the greatest players of all time, because it helps create hope within ourselves that we too can overcome the odds and be that successful.

A successful startup born out of an incubator that is funded by a multi-billion dollar company with direct reports to the incumbent in an industry it is trying to "disrupt" is far less compelling for everyone than "we had this idea for this app and it spread like wildfire and now the VCs are coming knocking at our door."

That said, as icky and gross as I find every single person in this entire Tinder saga (to be clear, I think Wolfe was absolutely a victim but that doesn't mean I'd want to hang out with her), the truly notable aspect of the company (to me at least), which was its astonishing growth, was legit. That didn't happen because of IAC or Match (at least, not directly, meaning b/c of those employees or that branding). And that's still laudable. The service might be run by total jerks, but it's growth rate is still laudable and is still an interesting narrative into itself, even if we accept that the whole rags to riches, came out of nowhere aspect, is bullshit (which it is).

[1] http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/2012/01/16/106149626/...

rayiner2• 12 years ago

The "Tinderslut"[1] comment says a lot about how Rad and Mateen view the women who use their app. It's consistent with Wolfe's claim in her complaint that Mateen told her it would be "slutty" to be a female Tinder co-founder, because it was an app people used to hook up.

As an aside, Mateen exhibits the textbook Madonna-whore dichotomy. To him, women are either someone he can see being a wife (Wolfe pre-breakup), or a whore/bimbo/slut (the women on his Instagram feed). When she rejected him, in classic fashion she went from the former bucket to the latter. This is a case study for a gender-studies paper.

[1] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Tinderslut

pbhjpbhj2• 12 years ago

says a lot about how Rad and Mateen view the women who use their app //

Isn't the point of the app to enable promiscuity. "Slut" is a word for a promiscuous woman, sometimes used for a prostitute, sometimes used of men (in UK at least). Surely they viewed the women who use the app as wanting to have free and easy sexual encounters, ie behave like sluts?

When the slang that associated their app with the actions of those using it, viz "tinderslut", was popularised were they not justified to consider that an achievement - the app was clearly notorious for enabling promiscuous behaviour, exactly the behaviour it was designed for.

There seems little controversial in them calling active users of their app sluts (men or women).

For me there is much to hate about the app morally but it seems rather silly to get upset that the designers of the app that people use to seek out promiscuous sex consider their users to be in to promiscuous sex?!

serge2k• 12 years ago

Why is this much to hate about this app morally?

potatolicious3• 12 years ago

"Slut" is a derogatory term, it has connotations and meanings well beyond the most literal definition of "promiscuous person".

Calling Tinder user "sluts" is no more appropriate than calling my Chinese users "chinks", or my gay users "faggots".

It seems intentionally obtuse to pretend that the term doesn't have a gigantic truckload of derogatory connotations behind it.

rhizome• 12 years ago

So, what would you say is the word for a man who uses Tinder often, a word that would make sense to the greatest proportion of people, i.e. not "slut," which you acknowledge is relatively rarely used to refer to men?

joe_the_user• 12 years ago

"Slut" is generally considered a derogatory term.

I think it is sometimes, maybe, possible to use this kind of term in a way that communicates a positive "no apologies" attitude. However, I think a speaker has to go to some lengths if this use is going to be convincing. Especially, it's a lot easier for people denigrated by a term to convincingly use it in a way that show non-derogatory attitude - contrast a ghetto black person using the N word versus a middle class Southern white person using the same word.

And there is a double standard in the US, where only a promiscuous woman gets called a slut. Someone might turn that around but that person would to do a lot of work to show they were sincere.

WoodenChair• 12 years ago

While the allegations are shocking, it was irresponsible for the journalist to add the little bit in the very last paragraph on the third page about one of the founder's former startups having an FBI investigation as a kind of final pot-shot. How was that relevant to the thrust of the rest of the article? What did it add? Was it fair to include it without elaborating?

bigdubs• 12 years ago

I was struck by that too, the "I wasn't going to mention this before, but now, here it is." nature of it was strange.

coryl2• 12 years ago

Modern journalism isn't really even journalism anymore, its more like blogging. Publish whatever it takes to get the most attention.

RickS• 12 years ago

Worse still is the implication that he was complicit in the uploading or transmission of illegal images. Any messaging or image based app is going to have to deal with that - young apps are especially vulnerable to abuse because it's expected that they not have robust security or a large enough staff to close the floodgates.

While the dude's clearly a jerk, his first startup sounds like it died a death that was out of his hands, not a result of his being a predator.

MattGrommes• 12 years ago

It seemed like he learned a number of odd things about the founders during his research and now that they were in a lawsuit and were confirmed as being giant dicks he felt justified in throwing a few rocks. The "take note lawyers" bit and the bunch of juvenile social media pictures were the same way, not needed except to fill in the picture he was painting.

Bahamut• 12 years ago

The analogy comparing the creation of Tinder to the Winklevosses and Facebook was also inaccurate/poor as well.

threeseed• 12 years ago

It was absolutely relevant. The entire article was about the character of the founders. If you had a business that had to be shut down by the FBI because of the extent of child pornography it reflects on your character.

austenallred• 12 years ago

"Here is the truth as I see it, having spoken to nearly everyone who was involved in the project: What made Tinder Tinder was the work of a team:"

You could replace "Tinder" with any company and find that the above statement holds true. Twitter isn't Jack or Ev or Biz, it's the combination of the three. Facebook was mostly Zuck, but not all. Apple was indeed [very] heavily influenced by Steve Jobs, but Apple wasn't Steve Jobs.

I've found the idea of a single genius founder being behind anything is largely a myth; they're just the public face of a company that is doing great things in the background.

dbloom2• 12 years ago

It's ironic that Mr. Rad went to such great lengths to keep his friend Mr. Mateen from facing the consequences of his behavior for so long. Because by putting his friend above his company, he ended up hurting both even more.

If Rad had just forced his friend Mateen to resign earlier on for "creative differences" before his behavior got out of hand, everyone -- including Mateen! -- would have been strictly better off.

And this definitely isn't the first time that this has happened (Rap Genius, and I'm sure there are others too...)

TL;DR: Do your sexist, racist friends a favor by getting them out of your workplace.

(By the way, to be clear, I don't feel bad for any of these guys. They deserved what happened. But this sort of thing really shouldn't be happening again, and again, and again...)

jjsz2• 12 years ago

Does one really lose the freedom to express themselves once they are VC backed founders? Tinder is a hook up app, and yes, perhaps Tinderslut is too revealing and direct about what any female or male users do with it, but, if he were to use promiscuous tinderian and have a gender neutral tone: would there be that much controversy? If I love naked women and art do I have to throw naked men and art in the mix to not be called a misogynist? The author exaggerated his article with those pictures. Tinder, being male dominated, will naturally have a slight chauvinistic culture. She wasn't pushed aside for being a female, the author hasn't provided evidence to support such a claim. As one of my favorite YouTuber said in his video [1], "if a women has a skill and passion for something she is already pursuing it." Thus, to not be brushed aside she had to battle for relevancy like anyone else does with skillful work instead of lightly accepting her irrelevancy and looking for the media to gain an undisclosed agreement.

Edit: As usual, anything not supporting the usual response gains downvotes.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_dRt00ufp4

jw_• 12 years ago

He said a lot more than that, from the article.

You are still free to say whatever you want, and people are free to call you an asshole and distance themselves from you.

pauleastlund• 12 years ago

Not to pile on, since you've already been downvoted, but have you actually read the abusive texts that started this whole shitstorm? Nothing in this article speaks well to Justin's character, but I don't think any of it would be getting attention if it weren't for the can of batshit misogynist crazy he opened up on a female co-worker. I think the social media behavior documented here is pertinent context for those allegations.

jjsz2• 12 years ago

Just researched for a bit and saw them. The author shouldn't have focused on her departure for simply being female and should have mentioned the texts. I conclude that he's an extremely sexist asshole, but not misogynistic. An overall hate would be mean not to be able to appreciate the art he's into. Nevertheless, due to the texts and the CEO ignoring the behavior, her outcry to the media was justified and needed. Hopefully she gets a hefty sum for her troubles.

stmchn• 12 years ago

You're right, she totally should have "battled for relevancy" despite being called a "slut" and a "whore" while the CEO does nothing about it. Obviously, she just wasn't trying hard enough.

intortus• 12 years ago

Lean in!

jpeg_hero• 12 years ago

So they were dating? IAC is screwed. Dating an direct report is essentially sexual harassment in the eyes of the court.

I am adding "anti-fraternization" policy to my employee handbook today.

Seriously, does anybody know how to handle the hr on discovering a supervisor / direct report are dating?

I've been told that best practices is to immediately suggest one or the other resign, and if they don't, fire both for violating policy.

How does one handle this situation?

rayiner2• 12 years ago

This is usually handled in large companies by moving the lower-ranking employee out of the management chain of the higher-ranking one. At smaller organizations, someone is asked to leave.

jacquesm2• 12 years ago

Someone should tell Bill & Melinda Gates.

You can make all the policies you want but human nature does not care much for policies.

The best cure is an immediate transfer to another department of either of the two. That way you avoid all the claims of favoritism and possible fall-out in case the relationship goes sour. Also make sure that managers know that such relationships should immediately be reported to upper management. (Hard if the 'upper management' is in fact one of the parties). Any evidence of pressure from the higher-up should result in immediate termination. Again, that's pretty tough but it is much better than the possible alternatives.

nostrademons2• 12 years ago

Or Sergey Brin & Amanda Rosenberg, or Larry Page and Marissa Mayer.

That said, in all three of those cases they were dating an indirect report. That's still a bit of a no-no, but nowhere near as problematic as dating a direct report. Your manager has a huge influence on your career; the company CEO dating someone who works for the company is a little dodgy and will cause morale problems elsewhere, but it's much harder to argue direct influence when they don't directly interact in the course of the workday.

skittles• 12 years ago

If it is possible, move one person to another role in the company so that one isn't reviewing the work of the other.

protonfish2• 12 years ago

I seriously doubt having an "anti-fraternization" policy in your handbook will do anything prevent sexist harassment.

jedanbik2• 12 years ago

It's better than nothing. It's better than literally nothing.

ColinCera• 12 years ago

Dating an direct report is essentially sexual harassment in the eyes of the court.

That's not even remotely true. No court has ever held that merely dating a subordinate is ipso facto sexual harassment. Accordingly, many companies do not have an official policy against it.

randyrand• 12 years ago

You're right, but this area is so incredibly gray it might as well be one in the same. Sexual harassment laws were not created with relationships in mind, but co-workers.

I have the opposite opinion in that I think that sexual harassment cases involving exes in the work place should almost always be thrown out, but alas...

It's nearly impossibly to date someone and not sexually harass them in some way. It's doubly hard to break up with someone and not sexually harass them in some way.

Considering most of her allegations are words/phrases that he called her, and considering many people call significant others very bad things when they are breaking up, it's almost impossible to draw the line between sexual harassment and break-up banter.

dasil003• 12 years ago

We're talking about co-founders here. There is no HR director to bring down the policy hammer.

In this situation the real problem is a you have sexist fuckwad of a partner who is basically a loose cannon and going to get you in trouble eventually. If you really want to build a company with someone like that you need to start telling them to tone it down early and often, but of course that's easier said than done.

jacquesm2• 12 years ago

Off-topic: That photo of her looks like she was hit in the face on the left hand side. One eye much wider than the other, big swelling.

afterburner• 12 years ago

"a mere early employee"

Founder or nothing these days, eh?

surprised12• 12 years ago

Hmmm so i wondered if this reporter went through many other successful start-up guys in their early to mid 20s (even late 20s) instragram and twitter feeds would he find similar stuff?

Their actions aren't right, but they are not surprising based on age and level of success.

mwetzler• 12 years ago

Misogyny is pretty ubiquitous in the current state of the world. Most people get away with it under the "that's just the way boys are" blanket of protection you just mentioned.

It's unfortunate that it takes a case like this for people to question if slutshaming is accetable behavior.

It's very brave of her to file the lawsuit. Whatever shitparade the other founders and dealing with, I'm sure hers is ten times worse.

michaelochurch2• 12 years ago

What seems like a side story is actually, I think, quite indicative.

Tinder isn't a real startup, but a manufactured success for a couple of well-connected douchebags (who behave as if they're above the law). It's the Disneypreneur phenomenon (http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/06/09/silicon-valle...). If you look into it, both of these guys are invaders from the MBA culture.

These phony startups, that are actually pre-arranged by powerful players in the mainstream corporate/McKinsey world, are becoming a lot more common and they're often difficult for genuine, old-style startups to compete with. (They blow up big, suck up a lot of talent and attention, then fail and lose credibility, so their inferior capability still leads to a both-lose outcome.)

This is going to blow up big in a couple of years: this massive proliferation of propped-up junk businesses and pseudo-startups run by incompetents. We're already seeing the embarrassing-but-not-yet-devastating fuckups. We haven't seen an Enron yet. But that's going to come, and it's going to have massive effects (and probably negative ones, on good and bad players) on the startup scene.

jessaustin2• 12 years ago

Can you provide other examples of this phenomenon?

michaelochurch2• 12 years ago

Snapchat and Clinkle.

Evan Spiegel should have been fired after the frat emails surfaced. As for Clinkle, that's been around for years and hasn't produced jack shit because it's not even a real company-- just a scam.

bearnun• 12 years ago

There is something interesting about the fact that conversation is, again, revolving around the men in this scenario instead of the woman. Just an observation.

EDIT: Referencing top comments.

jlees2• 12 years ago

The article does as well. In this case, I suppose the heart of the story is about how douchebaggy the guys are -- there seems to be no question that Wolfe deserves credit for what she's done, but since she declined to comment, we only have the actions of the men involved to work from.

jessaustin2• 12 years ago

...depicting IAC Chairman Barry Diller "as a penis."

I wish I could believe this isn't the actual reason that Mateen is gone.

tzs3• 12 years ago

She says that Mateen, whom she dated

...and now I have no reason to believe either her allegations or his defenses. People are simply unreliable witnesses in matters concerning former romantic partners that they are not on good terms with.

mrjaeger• 12 years ago

Except that there are explicitly documented text messages of him doing exactly what she described http://www.businessinsider.com/tinder-lawsuit-and-sexual-har...

tzs3• 12 years ago

OT, but how come some of the screenshots show an airplane icon AND wifi signal strength? I thought the point of airplane mode was to disable ALL radios on the phone (cellular, wifi, and bluetooth).

tzs3• 12 years ago

Here's a copy of the complaint: http://www.rezlaw.com/News-Events/06-30-14_Complaint_with_Ex...

Tinder's Forgotten Woman: Whitney Wolfe, Sexism, and Startup Creation Myths

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