Meghan is back with a new podcast, after parting ways with Spotify following a single series of her first, Archetypes, and in between series of her Netflix show With Love, Meghan. I call her Meghan because there’s no mention of the Duchess of Sussex title, or even a surname, in the first 50-minute episode of Confessions of a Female Founder, only the mononym.
She’s not the female founder confessing, ostensibly, but the launch comes a week after the first “seasonal drop” of her new business, As Ever, sold out in less than an hour. (“As Ever is more than a brand — it’s a love language,” promises the website, which translates to raspberry “spread”, honey and other seasonal cottage-garden offerings such as French-style crepe mix. Serena Williams has been unboxing hers on Instagram, having been a guest on Meghan’s first podcast — but back to this one.) Meghan will be picking brilliant business brains for their wisdom but also, if you’re not into that, promises “girl talk”, and the trailer includes a clip of her asking a guest if they’re still single, a question we don’t ask CEOs enough, and the Beyoncé-style call to action, “Let’s do this, ladies!” because not one single man could learn anything from a female CEO — and if they wanted to, then how could we girl talk?
“I’m Meghan,” she opens with over a slightly White Lotus-esque whistle-tambourine jingle, before telling us an anecdote about choosing packaging — “I was absolutely consumed with packaging” — for her new brand, “and the person that I knew was perfect to talk to about this, that had to lead the season, well, she’s one of my closest friends”.
This woman so well placed to advise on product packaging is Whitney Wolfe Herd, founder of the dating app Bumble (and co-founder of Tinder before that), whom Forbes named in 2021 as the world’s youngest female self-made billionaire — she was 31.
“How you doing, beauty?” Meghan says, before asking her first pressing business question, about how they met. Whitney complies: “Do you remember when I came to your house in a disco cowboy outfit? How am I going to meet this iconic, elegant, classy couple, and I’m wearing a rhinestone disco crystal-ball cowboy outfit.”
“That was the theme for the party you were heading to after you had dropped by our place,” Meghan counters. Before you start to imagine which of Prince Harry’s old fancy dress costumes he’d picked out — though we do learn that Archie was dressed as one of the PJ Masks, little cartoon superheroes — she continues: “It wasn’t the theme of our house! We were having one of those quiet, ‘we have young kids, we aren’t having a night out’ kind of New Year’s Eves … I call it an east coast New Year’s, so that ball is dropping for our 9pm and I’m going to bed.”
Pleasantries out of the way, now we get down to business. I am poised, ready to jot down the wisdom that will doubtless awaken the entrepreneur within and make me my first million.
• Finally! We’re allowed to see Meghan’s kitchen
“We’ve never actually talked extensively about everything that happened with you and your career trajectory,” Meghan says to the self-made billionaire. Here it comes, the good stuff. “And a lot of it is covered ground, so I don’t need us to go through all that, I think people know your story of going from Tinder and then certainly creating your own thing. But I would love to talk about even before all of that. Before all of that, what was that voice inside … that knew you had an entrepreneurial spirit? Or not?”
I have been listening for 8 minutes and 48 seconds before Whitney (I will call her Whitney, since we are doing “girl talk”) speaks about business for — I timed it — 17 seconds before Meghan chimes in again.
Next we touch on the fallout of the lawsuit that she filed against Tinder for alleged sexual harassment and discrimination that she faced at work after her relationship with her co-founder Justin Mateen ended (Tinder denied any wrongdoing and it was settled out of court for a reported $1 million). Because of that, her first imagining of Bumble was a “girls and women-only social network where we could encourage kindness amongst women, because I was being — certainly not to the degree that you’ve experienced — but I was being bullied on the internet when I left Tinder, because of the lawsuit. That’s why when I see the way you’ve been treated in the media, which is a magnitude that I’ll never understand, but my heart breaks for you — it’s not fair and it’s brutalising.”
“Maybe because you understand it in whatever degree, you know how to show up for me,” Meghan says.
“I do think there is so much to be said for your ability to exist even in the presence of that,” Whitney says. “That takes a very strong cookie.”
Perhaps this mention of cookies reminds Meghan of her business (shortbread cookie mix with flower sprinkles, $14) and that we have yet to resolve the packaging questions that are, she admits, keeping her up at night. Now they are both talking about boxes.
“I try to compartmentalise it” — she actually isn’t talking about boxes here, I’m almost sure — “and say, OK, all I can control is this extension of my essence and my aesthetic and what I want to share with people,” Meghan says. Gotcha.
“The why of it all was always in the spirit of sharing something that I loved, sharing a piece of what I loved that people maybe hadn’t been able to experience.” Which is, of course, box-mix crepes, something which I had previously only read, and occasionally dreamt, about. Perhaps off air this was the packaging eureka moment that led to raspberry spread being priced at $9 but raspberry spread “in keepsake packaging” — which looks like a paper-covered cardboard loo roll tube with the logo on — selling for $14.
We move on from packaging to running businesses as mothers. “We both had very similar experiences, though we didn’t know each other at the time, with postpartum, and we both had pre-eclampsia, postpartum pre-eclampsia … It’s so scary … and the world doesn’t know what’s happening,” Meghan says.
“I’ll never forget the image of you after you delivered Archie and the whole world was waiting for his debut,” Whitney says. “I could barely face a doorbell delivery for takeout food.”
Time has flown by, and now there are only ten minutes left to deliver the Ted talk that will inspire the next generation of entrepreneurs, but as we’ve resolved the packaging issue we can squeeze in a bit on this self-made billionaire. Meghan has already summed up “what you’ve manifested now in your life, with this incredible, loving husband and two boys”. Whitney is now the CEO of Bumble again, having stepped down from that role in 2023. “Consciously uncoupling,” Meg (Whitney calls her Meg) jokes, giving hope to the idea that Gwyneth Paltrow may be a future guest, especially since she instagrammed a video of Meghan eating cake in her kitchen last month to end rumours of a feud. But before that, a few words from this week’s guest on Meghan’s own business: “Everyone’s going to get exposed to the real loving essence of you and I’m excited for that … I’m proud of you.”
“Imagine if they had given us a bottle of rosé for this conversation,” Whitney quips, but hits the nail on the head: if only I’d thought to open one myself.
