Moment 152: The Top 4 Most Successful Stories From Women in Business!

Steven Bartlett (0:03)

But I think it kind of 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.

Karren Brady (0:16)

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 steward on the desk, he went, Oh, director's wives over there. And I said, It'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 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.

Steven Bartlett (1:39)

Why do you think it's so important to you in particular?

Karren Brady (1:42)

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.

Steven Bartlett (2:04)

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 of 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.

Whitney Wolfe Herd (2:44)

Oh, really? Yeah, I think what she's done is awesome.

Steven Bartlett (2:48)

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?

Whitney Wolfe Herd (3:04)

There's 5,000 dating apps in the App Store?

Steven Bartlett (3:06)

It's impossible. It's impossible. It's impossible to start a new one because of the network effects and all of those things.

Whitney Wolfe Herd (3:11)

It's impossible.

Steven Bartlett (3:13)

Impossible. So why you?

How you? How?

Whitney Wolfe Herd (3:21)

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.