 Please welcome to the stage Alex Williamson, Chief Brand Officer of Bumble. Alexandra Williamson is how I signed my email, so people know I'm a woman, not a man, but it was actually really helpful when we launched Bumble for people to think Alex Williamson was a dude talking to them on emails. It's also really, really strange to see your face that big behind you as you walk somewhere. Hi, I'm Alex. I am so excited to be here today to talk to you all about building a brand with kindness and empowerment and a purpose. This has been one of my favorite conferences so far because I think the energy is so fun in this room, and I'm a Kevin Hart fan. So I also am not really a slide follower and am known to have the welcome sign from my slides show up like way later in my talk, so I'm gonna just head on into that slide right there. Welcome. Thanks for having me. So I started with the company about four years ago and was there to launch Bumble. When we first started, it was four of us on a group text and we had to get people excited about dating apps. And at that time, if you can think back to four years ago, nobody really wanted to be associated with dating apps, right? We're talking, it was on the last page of all your apps that you would use at 11 p.m. at night and not really talk about it. It was something that was really frowned upon and women had historically had really hard experiences using dating apps. You can look back to websites like by Philippe and the way that the aggressiveness of the conversations go because men always make the first move based on society standards. So when there is all of the rejection that takes place on dating apps, you go from like, hi, hello, how are you? And then it ends up turning just like deteriorating really fast into aggressive, inappropriate behavior. So we wanted to flip that on its head, right? And create a space where women felt empowered online and where men didn't feel like they had to overly exert themselves so much to start a conversation. And that's how Bumble came about. And also, because of that, having women make the first moves, we're up against two things. Dating apps were not cool, right? It was not something that was like really you wanted to be a part of. It was known as a hookup culture and we really wanted to create a platform that created meaningful connections. And then you had an app where you're like, listen, women, you're gonna love it. This is gonna be a great platform for you, but you're gonna have to make the first move, which goes against everything that women have been told forever in dating. And so it was a challenge. A lot of people said that it was never gonna work out. This was gonna be some little gimmick thing. It would be a small product. And we've managed to stay behind it because we have stuck to our North Star, which we believe is ending misogyny and changing relationships and ending toxic relationships, abusive relationships, and that's something that we've never compromised on. So we follow our brand values, which our North Star is to end misogyny and our brand values are kindness, respect, equality, accountability, and growth, which is both growth in our numbers and also personal growth. When you start to become a part of a company where you are changing the dynamics of relationships and encouraging people to think differently, it creates a lot of personal growth for not only our users who are having to change the way they approach relationships, but also our employees. And that's how we approach every partnership that we do as well, is making sure that everybody who we work with follows along with our same mission and values, or at least are just kind people. We've been known to walk away from partnerships if the interactions are not nice and that's been something that we've always stood behind. And what we've found is that brands, and again, I apologize, I'm really not a slide person, but brands tend to, if you think to the brand that you work with, the mission is typically somewhere in the website, right? And you don't really, like it's there, but it's not something that guides you. Our mission is what guides us every single day. It's why people join our team and it's become a really, like just it's what gets everybody on our team up every single morning. And so that would be like my biggest piece of advice to anybody. It's finding, and this is what our founder and CEO, Whitney Wolf-Hurt, always says, is find something that is broken in society, figure out a solution to solve it and formulate your business around that. And that's what we've done with Bumble. We also jumped out of airplanes on the very first day of lunch. We actually, funny story, we had never met. All of us had never been in the same room together. The four of us who launched Bumble. And we wanted to prove that it was less scary to make a first move on the app than it was to jump out of an airplane. And that was our launch video. Obviously very startup-cultified. It was like a 24-hour film festival that we did, but it was really fun. So since we've launched, we have 40 million users. We've passed this number of, we're at about 650 million times women have made the first move. So it's working. We have Bumble success stories. I actually am an ordained minister of the Church of Bumble and I officiate Bumble weddings. And we have Bumble babies. And it's been a really exciting time. So we've expanded beyond, we're gonna see you laughing. We've expanded beyond just dating now. We wanted to, it's always been a part of our overall vision for the company is to expand beyond being a dating app and move into making meaningful connections for everybody. So we launched Bumble BFF in March of 2016 where women match with women. Men match with men. We facilitate friendships. And then we launched Bumble Biz in October 2017. And on that platform, it's open-ended social networking for professionals. And that was a really professional way to say that sentence, wasn't it? Sounds really legit. You should use it. No, I'm kidding. But on Bumble Biz, women still make the first move because we wanted to eliminate the gray area that exists when you're in business networking. Because if you think about it, most women can relate to the idea of walking into a business meeting, thinking you're meeting for coffee or drinks and all of a sudden being like, am I on a date? Like is this not what I thought it was going to be? Like is he paying for this? It just gets awkward. And we didn't want Bumble to feel that way. So we have three modes and we have clear intentions in each mode and we block users very fast who misuse any of our platform. If they try to date on Biz, they're gone. They're not just gone from Biz, they're gone from date and from BFF. And we stand true to what we're trying to accomplish, which is creating meaningful connections. We're known to, and I'll get to that in a second. Let's see where I am in these slides. We're known to block users and actually two and a half years ago, there was a user, and I'll read this letter to y'all. He was very inappropriate with one of our female users and we saw it in a tweet. It was something that showed up and I think most brands would hide that or be like, I'm so sorry. Well anyway, if anybody ever has a bad interaction on Bumble, we send flowers, we make it right. Our users come first before anything. Our users come before any of our marketing activations because we feel like you can do the coolest activations in the world, which we do try to do. We've had high pop-ups, we've tried to do Bumble in real life places and not tried. We've done it and it's been successful, but we wanted to create environments where people could actually go and take their business connections or new friendships or dates and build out programming around it. But all of that doesn't work if your users aren't having a good experience on your platform. It doesn't matter, right? So we wanted to take a stance against this user. So here is the letter. Dear Connor, it has been brought to our attention that you lost your cool on one of our female users, Ashley. She made small talk, you felt personally attacked. She mentioned her work day and asked about yours. You assumed she was prying into your financial status. Given we're all working women ourselves, we're gonna venture a guest into Ashley's intentions here. Take a seat, Connor, because this concept may blow your mind. Women nowadays work. It's happened gradually, we know, but the majority of women from our generation have jobs. With that in mind, and knowing that Ashley simply mentioned work and the conversation, we can infer that she wasn't hoping to figure out if your wallet was sizable enough for her to move into your house and start cooking dinner for you. Instead, Ashley was, wait for it, Connor, because this is where things get really interesting. Viewing herself as you're equal. It might sound crazy, but people connect over the basic routines of life, you know, things like weather, working out, grabbing a drink, eating, and working. While you may view this as neoliberal, Beyonce, feminist cancer, and rant about the personal wounds you've sustained from entitled, gold-digging whores, we're going to keep working. We're gonna expand our reach and make sure women everywhere receive the message that they're just as empowered in their personal lives as they are in the workplace. We're going to continue to build a world that makes small-minded, misogynist boys like you outdated. We're hoping one day you come around. We hope the hate and resentment welling up inside of you will subside, and you'll be able to engage in everyday conversations with women without being afraid of their power to the extent you feel the need to lash out on them. But until that day comes, Connor, consider yourself blocked from bumble. Never yours, the bumble hive. So this went, this went live about two and a half years ago, and it was a huge moment for us to show that we really do stand behind what we're saying, and we have our users' backs. And these are opportunities that we take to cause people to think differently. One of our biggest marketing campaigns that we've done was be the CEO your parents always wanted you to marry, then find somebody you actually like. So we're just trying to shift the way that people think about dating in the context of relationships. And what we found through the marketing that we've done, God, slides really can't help, can't they? What we've found through the marketing that we've done is that we have been able to change what is historically dating apps tend to have a hookup vibe. 85% of our users are looking for empowering lasting connections on our platform, which goes to show if you ignore the haters and keep moving forward in what you're trying to accomplish as a brand, if you have a purpose, it will, like people will come around to it. People will start believing in what you're doing, but it takes risks a lot of the times, and it takes doing things that people typically wouldn't do. So that would be my next point, would be to deliver on your brand's promise. But we actually just launched a feature, which we are so excited about. This took place two weeks ago, and it is called Bumble Snooze. And again, delivering on your brand's promise, we decided that our users' mental health is more important than our bottom line as a company. And so we decided to build this part of, it's like an AIM message. It's like an away message where you can actually, our users can say, you know, they're not wanting to date right now, they're focused on work, they're focused on, you know, they're on a vacation, they're prioritizing themselves, and that we wanted people to feel like that's okay. Because if you're saying you're empowering your users and empowering people in their lives, you have to follow through with that and your product as well. And so that is a feature that we came up with because we've realized that in today's day and age, and the way that people are using social media, there's a lot of burnout, right? And it's very disheartening, and it's stressful to feel like you have to reply to people. It's like even in this room, I'm looking at y'all on your phones instead of watching me, which is totally fine. But, you know, you're there because of the urgency of feeling like you have to get back to people all the time. And we didn't want our platform to feel like that kind of a place. We want people to feel like they can date who they want on their own terms and meet people who they want in their own terms, not just dating. So that would be, if you follow through with your brand's vision and what you're trying to accomplish and never let things, because so many opportunities come up, right? But if you stay true to who you are and your values, that's how you build a brand with purpose, and that's how you really end up disrupting a marketplace where sometimes it's easy to make noise. So I could keep talking through these slides, but I actually think I'm gonna get the hook and get pulled off the stage right now. But that even, like, four years ago, I came up with the Bumble Voice and Personality, and we make sure that that is existent in every single part of the app. So I'm looking to make sure that I don't need to go off the stage. I'm gonna go, I promise. But we make sure that our users, not only in our social media and all of our brand copy, but also in the way that we interact with our users. Our customer experience team is, they're the biggest cheerleaders for our users. They're almost like therapists to them. They're involved and we really wanna see our users win and get into meaningful connections and find their next business partner, find their new best friend or roommate. And if you stick to all of that and put your users first, I think that it really makes it fun to get out of bed and work every single day. So that would be my advice. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you.