Bumble Inc.

Hello and welcome to the Bumble fourth quarter 2023 financial results conference call. My name is Elliot and I'll be coordinating your call today. If you would like to register a question during today's event, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. I'd now like to hand over to Cheryl Valenzuela, Vice President of Investor Relations. The floor is yours. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Elliot. Thank you for joining us to discuss Bumble's fourth quarter and full year 2023 financial results. With me today are Lydiane Jones, CEO, and Anusa Brahmanian, CFO of Bumble. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that certain statements made on this call today are forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties and reflect our current expectations based on our beliefs, assumptions, and information currently available to us. Although we believe these expectations are reasonable, we undertake no obligation to revise any statement to reflect changes that occur after this call. Descriptions of factors and risks that could cause actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements are discussed in more detail in our earnings press release and filings with the SEC, including our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2022, and our subsequent periodic filings. During the call, we also refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. These non-GAAP measures should be considered in addition to and not as a substitute for or in isolation from our GAAP results. Reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP measures are available in today's earnings press release, which is available on the investor relations section of our website at ir.bumble.com. With that, I'll turn it over to Lydianne.

Thank you, Cheryl, and good afternoon, everyone. It's an honor to join all of you today for my first earnings call as Bumble CEO. I want to sincerely thank Whitney for her continued partnership. She's a founder who is a pioneer for women, who has built an incredible company that has created lasting value for customers. I also want to thank the board for their confidence and trust in me and the entire Bumble team for their support during my onboarding. From the first time I met Whitney and proceeded to meet our employees and many of our customers, the impact Bumble has had on so many people's lives has been inspiring to me. As a longtime tech leader for both consumer and enterprise businesses, I joined Bumble because I felt deeply drawn to its mission to create healthy and equitable relationships. and by the impact Bumble has had in helping millions of people around the world find love, connection, companionship, and friendship. Since its founding, Bumble's powerful brands have in aggregate served a passionate customer base of hundreds of millions of customers in more than 160 countries around the world. I have now been with Bumble for two months, and I'm even more convinced of the opportunities that lie ahead of us. I have met and connected with dozens of our customers, fully immersed myself in our products and technology, dove deeply in all aspects of our business, and have seen firsthand the caliber of talent we have with our employees. I'm a product leader at heart, and I'm truly excited to help unlock the company's potential by building innovative products that lead our customers to find love and connection throughout their lives. The global addressable market for online dating remains strong with about 2 billion single people around the globe, and we see continued demand and opportunities to drive growth in this market. We're well positioned to capture this opportunity with the strong brands and assets in our portfolio. At the same time, I took this role knowing that the online dating industry hasn't seen true innovation in several years, and the population of active users is undergoing a generational transition that rightfully expects more from their experiences. We're not immune to these dynamics, and we have also had some company-specific execution challenges that disproportionately affected Bumble app and have impacted our company's near-term outlook reflected in today's guidance. We're taking significant and decisive actions to address these issues. Over the past 18 months, we launched a number of new features in Bumble app, which while individually promising, have in aggregate slowed the overall app performance and cluttered the user experience. Additionally, our new pricing tier introduced last December, Premium Plus, has also not had a clear enough product market fit. These are things we strongly believe are in our control to solve, and we're doing so with four major steps. First, in Q2 of this year, we plan to reignite Bumble's strength by relaunching Bumble app with a compelling modern experience geared toward capturing a broader audience and aimed at having a stronger appeal to younger users, easing the profile creation experience, optimizing the core performance of the app, and strengthening our AI capabilities to enhance fake account detection and bring profile picture insights to lead our customers to success faster. As a part of this release, we will also revamp our Premium Plus offering. These efforts will be a significant moment of evolution for us in bringing women's empowerment to the core of our experience. This relaunch will also provide us with a strong platform for ongoing innovation. It will come with a new marketing campaign across our core markets, extending our reach and showcasing the benefits of our offerings. This is the first major overhaul of Bumble apps in the past two years, and I'm very proud of our team for embracing a faster pace of innovation and marking the start of a new phase of customer experiences in the online dating category. Second, I recognize that to sustainably re-accelerate growth, we must drive further innovation, be operationally excellent, and be more attuned to our customers' needs. To that end, earlier today, we announced a transformation plan that will return us to a functional operating model that will foster better collaboration across our apps and allow us to deliver a comprehensive portfolio of experiences to our customers. Centralize our mission-critical teams, including engineering product in fewer locations, Remove layers to accelerate decision-making and speed to market, and eliminate duplicate roles to drive stronger operating leverage. Reducing the size of our team is an extremely difficult decision, and I'm incredibly grateful to all of our employees for the role they've played in getting Bumble to where it is today. We will do all that we can to support affected colleagues during this time. Right-sizing the company will help us unlock our ability to deliver long-term growth by greatly improving our operational efficiency, agility, and speed, and enable us to reinvest a portion of our expected savings in critical foundational capabilities, including dating innovation with AI, machine learning, and safety differentiated experiences that will drive our future. We'll remain laser focused on execution during this time of transition. Third, We are updating our Bumble Inc. strategy and innovation roadmap to take advantage of our more agile development platform. My vision for Bumble is to lead the online dating industry and connections at large with a more positive experiences for users around the globe. As a technologist, I have been really impressed by the unique data set, knowledge, and intellectual property Bumble has related to personalization, matching, and safety that has been deeply tuned to Bumble's guidelines. We will lean on this technical foundation and emerging technologies like generative AI to bring product innovations to meet the demand we see in the market. We'll do this while staying true to our mission and focus our innovation to accelerate human connection and encourage equitable and healthy relationships. Bumble has always been about more than dating. and we have seen significant customer demands for friendship and platonic connections throughout different phases of life. But candidly, we have been slow to realize this broader vision with Bumble BFF thus far. Going forward, we will focus our reinvestments to accelerate a bolder strategy for Bumble for Friends, one that will focus on building equitable and safe friendships across communities of people with similar interests that want real-life connections. We plan to bring along the millions of customers we currently have in our base that are eager to continue to be part of our platform. We'll have more to share about our full company strategy and product roadmap in the months ahead. Finally, to bring our strategy to life, we recently strengthened our executive team with three talented new leaders who'll be instrumental in driving the vision for Bumble's future. I'm excited to welcome Ali Rael as Chief Product Officer, Antoine Leblond as Chief Technology Officer, and David Ard as Chief People Officer. Ali most recently served as Senior Vice President of Product at Slack, overseeing Slack's customer experience and communication platform, along with user safety and customer support. As a member of Slack's founding team, Ali's experience overseeing viral user growth will be invaluable to Bumble. Antoine previously served as Senior Vice President of Software Engineering at Sonos and held a 25-year leadership tenure at Microsoft prior to that, driving platform growth at scale across several businesses. His experience innovating and scaling effectively will be paramount. David joins us from Salesforce, where he served as head of employee success, leading the people's strategy business partner teams and benefit across global teams, and previously served in people leadership roles at Equinox and Gap. Finally, I am thrilled to announce that Selby Drummond has been promoted to chief marketing officer for Bumble Inc. Selby will oversee both brand and marketing, bringing her extensive experience from companies such as Snap and Vogue optimize the performance of marketing investments and expand the reach of our brands globally. With Ali, Antoine, David, and Selby leading critical functions of our business, along with existing executive leaders who have the context of the company and the industry, we are well equipped to drive breakthrough innovation, advance our mission, and drive our business back to strong growth. Given the strength of our financial position today, And as we update our broader strategic plan in the coming months, we will also be evaluating the best use of capital for Bumble to drive value creation and long-term growth of our business. The steps we're taking today set the stage for our next chapter of growth. We have work to do, but you have my full commitment that will innovate and sharpen our focus on execution to create a durable foundation for our business. I look forward to meeting our stakeholders to better understand their needs in the weeks and months ahead and will be open and transparent in communicating progress on our strategy as we move forward. But before I turn it to Anu, I want to express that I'm tremendously honored to be leading this talented and passionate Bumble team in the pursuit of Bumble's founding mission with our renewed vision and focus. We have an exciting journey ahead of us. and I am thrilled to be leading our team to realize the incredible opportunity ahead on behalf of our customers, our employees, and our shareholders. And with that, I'll turn it over to Anu, who has been a close partner since the start.