But I think that brings me on to a wider point about, and as you say, the reason why you're in Saudi, is this battle that I know you've had through your career with men kind of underestimating your sexism, which I guess started when you first got the job at Birmingham.
Yeah, I mean I remember my first away game, I think it was Watford, and I turned up and I said, oh hi, could you tell me where the boardroom is?
And this little old boy, little Stuart, on the desk, he went, oh, director's wives over there.
And I said, that's interesting, but where is the boardroom?
And he said, dear, you don't understand.
The director's wives go in the ladies room.
And I said, no, I don't think it's you understands.
I am the managing director, so I want to know where the boardroom is.
And this little boy put his little glasses on, he went, oh yes.
He said, yes, you're that woman.
Stay here and I'll find out what to do with you because there were no other women in football.
So there was never a woman in the boardroom, and women weren't, you know, weren't welcome in boardrooms because it was meant to be the place where the directors all met.
And of course, they were all men.
And I remember thinking that it was the very first door I'd kicked down.
And I was determined that I would keep that door open as wide and as long as possible to get as many other women through as possible.
And that is something I've spent my last 30 years doing.
It's really important to me.
It's really important that there is a sense of equality and equal pay and equal respect for everything that you do, regardless of where you're from, what sex you are, what your beliefs are, how you look, where you're educated.
Equality is very important to me.
Why do you think it's important to you in particular?
I think because, look, at 23 I was given the challenge and chance of a lifetime and I took that and I knew that that started with someone having trust in me and I knew that there were so many talented people out there that didn't have someone that had that trust in them.
And I wanted to be that person.
Going back to the question, which I kind of took us off on a tangent away from, about why you think Bumble won or was successful, was able to break through into that very small category of dating apps or dating sites, where there's really only like a handful of real players.
Why? Why? Because I know, you know, I have to say something.
I know that the other dating apps, because I was sometimes in the room, tried to launch dating apps for themselves.
So they took their existing network.
They tried to launch a new dating app into it and it didn't work.
I've seen it happen over and over again.
I know Michelle from Peanuts.
She's one of the people I used to work with when we were doing the marketing at Purdue.
Oh really? Yeah, I think what she's done is awesome.
Yeah, I love Peanuts.
It's great. But I know it's not easy.
And I know it's not chance.
I know it's not luck because I've seen, I can't tell you at social chain, how many times we had dating apps come to us and say, can you do our marketing?
Maybe 200 times? There's 5 ,000 dating apps in the app store.
It's impossible. It's impossible to start a new one because of the network effects and all of those things.
It's impossible. So why you?
How you? Every other dating product until Bumble had been solving for the wrong side of the coin.
They've been thinking about men.
That's all. They woke up in the morning and thought about how to make a dating app good for guys.
And they had it backwards.
Why are you solving for men when this is all about what women need and what women want?
No one was asking women.
You think women want to get abused on the internet?
Think again, like find me a woman that enjoys being harassed on a dating app.
Not one. But for some reason, that problem didn't strike anyone as a problem.
So it's not that hard to say, wait a second.
This is a double -sided marketplace.
This product can't survive without women, yet we're exploiting and degrading women on a lot of these products, not naming any names.
What? And so for me, it was all about taking that original concept of Merci, a kind space for women, a safe space for women.
And to Andre's push, got to give him some credit for being so interested in dating.
Right? I was so turned off of dating.
I wanted nothing to do with dating.
When Andre was like, oh, let's do a dating, you know, come be my CMO.
First of all, I'm not for hire.
I'm starting my own company.
I must be founder and CEO of whatever I do next.
I cannot work for someone.
I just have to be my own boss.
And, you know, I got to give him a lot of credit because he trusted that.
And he said, okay, do whatever you want to do.
But it just my one stipulation is it has to be in dating because I know dating and I want to get behind a dating product.
So when I was sitting there, you know, we were we had kind of agreed to, okay, we're going to do this dating app.
What's going to be what about Merci?
I wanted to be Merci.
I wanted to be about women and I want to be women only.
I want safety and kindness and accountability.
There's no internet spaces for women.
Nothing's been built for women.
We have to do this for women.
And then it kind of just all clicked.
And I sat there and within literally minutes, it all just wrote itself.
I said, wait a second.
I know the problem.
Women don't go first.
Men do. Men message as many women as they can.
Women are getting inundated.
They never respond.
The lack of response is causing a rejection and the rejection is triggering an aggression.
And that aggression is now translating into harassment.
And this is why women are being abused on the dating apps, because if only they would go first, the man wouldn't feel rejected.
They'd feel empowered.
It would totally calibrate this whole experience.
And I said, okay, great.
I know we're going to do women have to talk first on this product.
And they only have 24 hours to do it.
I knew nobody else could conceptualize the way I would explain it.
So I was like, thanks, Cinderella, the pumpkin and the carriage.
And men can send one extend on time of day to capture their attention if they want to.
Now we have to also call out something.
This was back in 2014 in a very heterosexual oriented dating app experience.
The landscape has evolved.
We have to be inclusive to all.
And so of course we are.
And of course we are currently, as we speak, spending countless time and putting all of our heart and soul into how to make the experience better for non -binary, for the trans community, for anybody that identifies as a woman as well.
And so that's a big portion of the future.
But that was really how I would say we became successful because of two things.
Women, making sure that we were solving for women's real problems on the internet.
Marketing to women.
So when I went back to those sororities and fraternities, instead of going in with whatever we had gone in at Tinder, I went in with things for women.
I went in with items women wanted.
Cute yellow cookies.
Like I understood that we are going to build a cute brand, not a sexy brand.
And that's what set us apart.
I wanted it to feel warm and cozy and inviting and soft and feminine and safe.
And that's the beginning and still the current through line of Bumble.
You know, starting a business like that at 53, a lot of people have a like a stigma or a stereotype that you can't start a business in midlife.
You know, you shouldn't be doing that at that point or that, you know, you won't be able to raise all of those kinds of stigmas around starting a business in midlife.
Crap. Crap, yeah. Total crap.
I started a business at 16 called, what's my first business?
Bose Unlimited. When I was at school, I sold hair bows.
I know. And then I started business at 53.
So it's like, there's no other way to put it that age is a number.
It is just a fucking number.
And you can either mention that number endlessly or you can look at what energy do you have at that moment in time to execute on your dream?
That's all you need.
Energy. All you need.
Well, you need a lot, but you know, you need to feel that you need energy, passion, drive, relentlessness, perseverance, resilience, pick yourself up and just get fucking on with it.
You need all of those things, but you need the energy so that you jump out of bed in the morning and you are on it.
Did it take time for you to cultivate that in the passing, after Johnny had passed?
Was there like a, do you know what I mean?
Because I did already too before and for that I was, you know, I did 18 hard days for two and a half years.
It's like, you know, it's in me that I've been a grafter for quite a long time.
You'd been mulling this idea for many, many, many years.
And then you finally put it into action.
I heard you say I started pitching in 2014 and it took me three years to launch.
Yeah, I started pitching in 2013 I think.
And what were you pitching?
I was pitching. What was the elevator pitch?
The elevator pitch was to create portable, cream -based, personalized makeup for women.
35 plus. And how was that pitch received?
I did 48 pitches before one person fit.
I must have sent 300 emails.
What kind of negative feedback did you get?
Oh, I had lots. I had, you don't have enough followers.
Fine. I had like, I think 50 ,000 followers then.
I had your two -odd start a business.
I had who's going to really run the business?
Classic. Oh, that's a nice look.
I love that one. You live in this Neverland.
It's not like it's never going to happen, but it's never going to happen.
But you don't put words to either.
You sit like this place.
And I had that feeling.
I thought, are people ever going to get it?
But I thought, I'm never going to give up.
So they both sat side by side really strongly.
Why didn't you give up?
Because I knew it was a fucking good idea.
And I knew it would work.
I just had to find the right people who would get it.
But everyone's telling you no, everyone's telling you to.
I don't care if everyone's telling me no, I know.
And I know enough and I believe in myself enough to know, I know it's a good idea.
I just know it. I just got to find somebody who has the vision to understand it.
How do you know it though?
Because I know women.
As you look forward at your mission and your future, and what you hope to achieve in the next chapter of your life, what is that tangibly?
If I had to measure success, if I was to say that all the things you write about, the change you write about in this book, if I was to measure and say it was successful, what would the world look like?
That we have true equality.
You know, that little girls can be everything and anything honestly.
You know, that they can be president or prime minister.
That they can launch a company and get seed funding.
That they can be a scientist.
That they can literally, or they can be a stay -at -home mom.
That they can be whoever and whatever that they want.
And I think my hope for mothers is that they too don't see their biggest dreams die on the vine.
That they don't live a life of regret and envy and should have been, would have been, because they let things happen to them rather than change things.
That we live in a world where we respect and we dignify women and girls.
We're not there yet.
You know, we're so far from being there in many ways.
And I think part of it again is because of the things that we've sold women.
That we've basically told women that the problem is you.
Think about all the books that women read.
Confidence code. I got to learn how to do a power pose.
I got to lean in. All of it is about women thinking that you're wrong.
The amount of times that women come to me and say, I have imposter syndrome.
I'm like, no, no, no, no.
They didn't let you in.
You're in there because you are the best.
But now you're made to feel like you snuck through the back door.
And so, what I am saying in many ways is really radical.
And it's very deeply seated in us.
And it's not just women.
It's people of color.
It's poor people. Anybody who has really had to through grit, perseverance, found themselves in rooms that people don't look like them.
We're still asking ourselves, do I belong here?
Should I be here? And we're constantly being fed information, book, podcast, movies that tell ourselves that we just have to change one more thing about ourselves.
That we have to fix one more thing.
And it's just simply not true.
I always say that I feel so lucky that through the work that I've done, I've been able to be in almost every single powerful room.
I've probably met every single powerful person in the world.
And I used to be that girl at Yale Law School in my constitutional law class going like this.
A few years ago, I got asked to give a speech at Bill Gates' summit.
And the slot that they had given me was between Bill Gates and Warren Buffet.
And it was the only speech that anyone was giving.
It was a Summit of Fortune 100 CEO.
So you can imagine who was in the room.
And I remember them saying, this is a really hard speaking slot, Rashma, because most people are really intimidated.
Because Bill and Warren are sitting in the front row.
And it can be a little scary.
And I remember as I was sitting there in the backstage, they had given me 10 minutes to speak.
I remember thinking, man, I wish they gave me 12.
Because I really had some more stuff to say.
And then I remember thinking, how did I become this woman when I used to be that girl?
And I remember thinking, yeah, it's because I've been in every single powerful room.
I've met every single CEO, every president, every prime minister.
And when I meet them, I'm like, you?
You're running what?
Me and my girls, we can run circles around you.
And I realized that it's never been about whether we're qualified, whether we're prepared, whether we're ready.
That we've really never really dissected all of the undeserved, unearned privilege that so many people have.
And that we have literally bought and been fed, you know, basically this propaganda that we're not good enough, that we're not smart enough, that we don't belong.
And the real resistance in this moment is saying no more.
I'm not reading those books.
I'm not taking those courses.
I'm not taking that class.
I'm not buying into that bullshit.
I'm here. And I can lead too.
