“Whew,” she gushes, in her elegantly scripted introduction to Confessions of a Female Founder, in which the Duchess meets businesswomen, “whether they’ve IPOd or they’re at the beginning of their climb”, for advice as she launches her lifestyle brand, As Ever. “It’ll keep you up at night. I was absolutely consumed with packaging… Boxes, it’s all I could think about”.
Markle’s first guest is one of her closest friends, Whitney Wolfe Herd, the 35-year-old founder of dating app Bumble, who in 2021 became the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire.
Unfortunately, Markle elects not to bother dwelling on much of that. After a gushy recap of how they first met, at the Duchess’s New Year’s Eve party, Markle says, “we’ve never actually talked extensively about everything that happened with you and your career trajectory, and a lot of it is like, covered ground, so I don’t need us to go through it all” despite most listeners being here precisely to hear her go through it all.
Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd, (Photo: Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images)This is a lofty ambition, and there is little evidence of the app “rearchitecting” any kind of barriers or boundaries between men and women, but as a dating app it’s a triumph and I am truly interested in how she made it happen – and what she had to change about herself – in order to make it one.
I would have loved to hear more detail about those challenges rather than so many vague allusions. I imagine she must have experienced sexism, underestimation, dismissal, failure, regret, sacrifice and suffered through any number of difficult and toxic working relationships. She must have interesting observations about how different men and women are in the workplace. She must have horror stories from the frontlines of an early 2010s startup.
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Edible flowers and avocado toast? Meghan Markle has been living under a rock
Read MoreStill, true to her word, Markle has taken inspiration from Wolfe Herd, whose concept for Bumble in its first iteration as an app called Merci was “no comments, just compliments”, which also appears to be the ethos of Confessions of a Female Founder. There are no pressing questions, no topical references, few thoughtful follow-up questions – save for asking, when Wolfe Herd describes the impact of “being stressed, being miserable, being overwhelmed, being paranoid” onto family and business, “can you turn that off?”
As the conversation concludes, the women agree that the only thing separating it from one of their usual lunches is a “glass of rosé”. Which confirms that the intention – the “why of it all” – was not to deliver real insight into female entrepreneurs but to yet again offer a glimpse at what it’s like to be gal pals with Meghan Markle. No matter the packaging – an inane Netflix series or “raspberry spread” or edible flowers – the product is always Meghan herself.
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