When should a founder step down?

“I’m an entrepreneur. I’m a founder. That’s the way my mind and brain works,” mused Whitney Wolfe Herd in an interview with Fortune magazine on November 6th, the day she announced she would be stepping down as chief executive of Bumble, a dating app she founded in 2014. Ms Wolfe Herd, who had previously co-founded Tinder, a rival app, confessed to her lack of enthusiasm for the drudgery of running a public company. She will move to the role of executive chairwoman, where she will spend her time “looking at the future of love and connection”.

Into her place will step Lidiane Jones, who currently runs Slack, a chat platform bought by Salesforce, a tech giant, in 2021. Slack’s own founder, Stewart Butterfield, stepped down as its boss at the start of the year. Investors will be hoping that Ms Jones will spend less of her time looking at the future and more at the present; shares in Bumble have lost 82% of their value since the company listed on the stockmarket in 2021. Ms Wolfe Herd’s grand vision of turning Bumble into a wider platform for women to make friends and professional connections has been a flop. Meanwhile, it has been caught in a tussle for growth with arch-rival Match Group, which owns Tinder and various other dating apps including Hinge. Costs have risen.