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When Lidiane Jones moved from a poor neighbourhood in Brazil to study computer science in the US on a scholarship, aged 18 and barely able to speak English, she was so homesick her mother would often beg her over the phone to return.
“But I kept thinking — I won the lottery,” Jones says in an interview with the Financial Times. “And I can’t waste the ticket because somebody else could have had that ticket.”
This week, the 44-year-old Slack chief executive was announced as the successor to Whitney Wolfe Herd, CEO of Bumble, marking a handover between two rare female leaders in tech.
Jones has a difficult job on her hands. Shares in the female-friendly dating app have fallen around 80 per cent since its 2021 initial public offering. And in March, Blackstone — Bumble’s largest institutional shareholder — sold a 10 per cent stake in the app for a heavily discounted $300mn price tag. The $7bn dating market remains dominated by incumbent Match Group, which has snapped up rising players such as Hinge.
Bumble slid another 10 per cent on Monday on news of the handover to an all-time low. The following day, it was knocked again by missed earnings and a bleak outlook. Can Jones repair Wall Street’s relationship with Bumble? If Jones, a stranger to the dating sector, has any doubts, she does not show it. Describing herself as “relentless”, she insists her background gives her a “much broader perspective than some of my colleagues” and has equipped her with a fighting spirit. “The immigrant and the scholarship — I think that’s probably as underdog as I can get.”
Born in São Paulo to a cleaner and a mechanic, Jones left home for the University of Michigan after discovering the “magic” of programming during free computer classes at school. Following an internship at Apple, she began a 12-year stint at Microsoft, where she worked on products such as Excel and Office. During that period she met her husband, a fellow Microsoft employee, with whom she has two children
She interviewed for speaker company Sonos while pregnant, beginning as its vice-president for software product management during her maternity leave. Four years later, she shifted back to business software, rapidly rising through Salesforce’s cloud business before being offered, to her surprise, the role of chief executive at Slack, a year after it was acquired in a $28bn deal. Acquaintances describe her as a well-networked fixture in the innovation hub of Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she lives. Within a year of starting at Slack, the Bumble opportunity arose.
Although it’s an industry devoted to facilitating love and partnership, the history of the matchmaking sector is one of strife and division. After co-founding Tinder, Wolfe Herd sued the dating app in 2014 over sexual harassment and discrimination allegations relating to her co-founder and former partner Justin Mateen, in a case that propelled concerns about the treatment of women in tech into the spotlight. Tinder settled without any admission of wrongdoing.
Later that year, Wolfe Herd founded Bumble to challenge the gamification of matchmaking that had arisen from Tinder’s casual swiping process. Instead, it required women to “make the first move” — or send the first deliberate message — so they were not bombarded with unwanted advances.
Brian Solis, head of global innovation at ServiceNow and a former Salesforce vice-president, says that for Jones to take over from Wolfe Herd is “an incredible validation” after the Bumble founder “fought against all the things that make it so difficult for women founders”.
By all accounts, the passing of the baton was a swift one. The line from Bumble is that Wolfe Herd had been considering a succession plan for some time, but a search had failed to yield the right candidate. Then she stumbled across a video of a Jones interview on CNBC from May, in which the then-Slack chief was calmly promoting the launch of “Slack GPT” — the platform’s generative AI chatbot. Wolfe Herd was impressed, and the pair were soon introduced through a mutual contact.
Although Wolfe Herd is staying on as executive chair, Jones will have the autonomy to make her mark as a leader at Bumble. That brings its own challenges, however. “She hasn’t had to answer herself for short-term results,” says Stewart Butterfield, Slack’s founder. Having just lost their own founder-CEO, Bumble staffers are “probably going to be skittish”, he adds.
Nevertheless, he recalls how Jones managed when taking over from him at Slack earlier this year, during “a perfect storm of anxiety among the employees”. Butterfield says she “was able to model the equanimity and stability people needed to see and feel”.
Asha Mehta, who sits alongside Jones on the advisory board of Compass Working Capital, a non-profit focused on addressing asset poverty, agrees that she offers far more than product expertise. “She listens carefully to what people say and what they don’t say,” says Mehta.
Whether Jones can turn Bumble’s fortunes around depends in part on her plans for global expansion and bringing about “the next wave of innovation”. For instance, she wants to embed more artificial intelligence in the app.
“[Someone] I met said to me the other day: ‘You look like someone that has been underestimated in your life and isn’t that an advantage?’” Jones says. “And I looked at him and I said, ‘Yes. It is’.”
hannah.murphy@ft.com
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