Hannah Murphy, Financial Times (FT)

Lidiane Jones, the 44-year-old former 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.

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.

Please read the full article at FT.