- Lidiane Jones, Bumble’s new CEO, has her work cut out for her to improve the company’s outlook.
- The former Slack CEO has never led a public company before, and Bumble’s stock isn’t doing well.
- Jones told Financial Times she sees herself as an “underdog” — and that will work to her advantage.
Bumble’s new CEO knows she has her work cut out for her to rescue the company’s plunging stock and take over as the dating app’s co-founder, Whitney Wolfe Herd, steps down from the executive suite.
But Lidiane Jones, who moved to the US from Brazil to study computer science on a scholarship and recently left her role as chief executive of Slack to take on the challenge of running Bumble, told the Financial Times she knows what it’s like to be underestimated.
“The immigrant and the scholarship — I think that’s probably as underdog as I can get,” Jones told the outlet in an article published Friday.
The uphill battle Jones faces includes Bumble’s stock falling to an all-time low Monday following the news that she’d succeed Herd as the app’s leader in a rare deal between women in tech leadership. Stock for Bumble, a dating app that requires women to initiate conversation between matches, has fallen roughly two thirds since its IPO in 2021 to just $14.25 a share.
Representatives for Bumble did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider.
Jones spent less than a year as CEO of Slack before moving to Bumble, which is her first foray into running a public company and working on dating software — though she has a long history in tech. And though a new trajectory for Bumble is unclear, Jones told the Financial Times she hopes to usher in “the next wave of innovation” and incorporate more artificial intelligence in the app.
Recently, Jones told the Financial Times someone she met recently said to her, “‘You look like someone that has been underestimated in your life and isn’t that an advantage?'” Jones told the Financial Times. “And I looked at him and I said, ‘Yes. It is.'”
