Photograph by Michael Buckner/Getty Images for GlamourWhitney WolfeWhitney Wolfe, a former vice president for marketing at Tinder, the wildly popular hookup facilitation app, is suing the company and its parent,IAC/InterActiveCorp (IACI), for sexual harassment and discrimination. In herlawsuit, Wolfe says that Tinder’s chief marketing officer, Justin Mateen, subjected her to constant sexually charged abuse and threats and that both Chief Executive Officer Sean Rad and his corporate supervisor, IAC’s Sam Yagan, looked the other way. IAC has suspended Mateen indefinitely. In amemo to employees, Rad called Mateen’s communications “unacceptable” while also calling Wolfe’s complaint “full of factual inaccuracies and omissions.”
The behavior Wolfe alleges in her complaint is awful: She says that Mateen, whom she dated, called her a “desperate loser” who “jumps from relationship to relationship,” a “joke,” a “gold digger,” a “disease,” a “whore,” and a “slut” who needed to be “watched” if she were to keep her job. Text messages Wolfe submitted to the court show Mateen disparaging “middle age Muslim pigs” and depicting IAC Chairman Barry Diller “as a penis.” Tinder CEO Rad, Wolfe says, dismissed her pleas for help as “dramatic” and told her that if she and Mateen couldn’t get along, she would be fired.
This conduct would be abhorrent directed at anyone. What gives these allegations even greater sting is Wolfe’s contention that she was not just any employee but a Tinder co-founder—and was stripped of the designation as a result of the treatment she endured. This isn’t just adding insult to injury; it’s adding injury to injury, since a co-founder of a hot startup can be expected to attract better career opportunities than someone who was a mere early employee.
Was Whitney Wolfe a co-founder of Tinder? I think the answer exposes a different, quieter, but no less punishing form of the sexism that is pervasive in the startup world.
I spent a short and intense two weeks last summer reporting out a Tinder feature for Bloomberg Businessweek. What I found was a meteoric startup that wasn’t really a startup, owing to the fact that Tinder was born in an IAC incubator, and IAC owned and controlled the company. Rad and Mateen seemed to be playing make-believe in a lot of ways. They were keen to hide the IAC arrangement (“They’re sort of our partner in this”) and pretend that they were living the dream of being wined and dined by Silicon Valley moneymen (“We are being bombarded by venture capitalists … it’s very overwhelming”). When I talked to their minders at IAC and the incubator, executives were often dismissive of the two youngsters—happy to let them spin grand visions and soak up founder acclaim, while telling grownups, i.e. Wall Street analysts and investors, that Tinder was simply a lure to get millennials to pay later in life for IAC’s profitable dating service Match.com.
One big way in which Rad and Mateen seemed to be off in their own world was the malleable—even fictive—way they thought they could tell the story of how Tinder was born. In their version of the story, the two of them thought up Tinder before either worked for the IAC incubator and were responsible for the app’s success. This is no more true than the idea that Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss inventedFacebook (FB). Many location-based dating apps were already on the market, and more were bouncing around as ideas in entrepreneurs’ heads. Here is the truth as I see it, having spoken to nearly everyone who was involved in the project: What made Tinder Tinder was the work of a team: Joe Munoz, who built the technical back end; Jonathan Badeen, who wrote the iOS code; Christopher Gulczynski, who created the design; Rad, who played point.
And Whitney Wolfe, who ran marketing.
In the summer of 2013, with their app taking off, Rad and Mateen—who was hired after Tinder was designed, coded, and available for download in Apple’s App Store—wanted to present to me a modified version of the truth of how Tinder got off the ground. It didn’t have room for the contributions of a bunch of people working under IAC’s roof with salary and benefits. That bothered me, but I didn’t have the space to tell the whole story in the magazine. I mentioned the app’s killer look and coding—an attempt to credit the work of Gulczynski, Badeen, and Munoz—but did not give their names. And I didn’t mention Wolfe, for an entirely different reason.
