David Brown

Wolfherd's risk pays off.

Users stick with a platform.

By the end of October 2018, Bumble has 40 million users worldwide.

Wolfherd has become something more than a CEO.

She's a feminist icon.

But in a London office building far from Bumble's Austin headquarters, a scandal is brewing.

A scandal that threatens to fracture Bumble's relationship with its biggest backer and potentially change the company's future.

It's summer 2019 in Austin, Texas.

Whitney Wolf Hurd takes a call from her office at Bumble's headquarters.

The company is five years old now and operates out of a building that looks like it's been dipped in a giant can of sunflower yellow paint.

Honeycomb wall panels line the stairwells, and on the walls there are Instagram-ready neon slogans like Be Kind, spelled B-E-E, and Brains are the New Beauty.

The space is aggressively cheerful, but in Hurd's office the mood is anything but.

A Forbes reporter is on the line.

She spent months investigating allegations of misogyny and sexual misconduct inside Badoo's headquarters, the company run by Bumble's biggest investor and owner.

The reporter lays out what she's found.

Multiple women have told her that Badoo is a toxic workplace.

One former chief marketing officer says she was told to, quote, act pretty for investors and was even asked to give a job candidate a massage.

The reporter asks Wolf Hurd for her response.

Wolf Hurd pauses.

The headline on the Forbes story is blunt.