If you’ve ever wished your online spaces felt safer and more for you, meet Michelle Battersby. She’s spent her career creating female-first platforms—from Bumble to Sunroom—that prioritize women’s agency, safety, and community. Now, as the President of Peanut, the social networking app designed for mothers, she is focused on helping women find their “village.”
Just in time for Mother’s Day, we sat down with Michelle to talk about building better spaces for women, her shift into motherhood, and why connection still matters more than ever.
You’ve built your career around creating female-first digital spaces—from Bumble to Sunroom to Peanut. What’s been the common thread driving that work for you?
I was fortunate to figure out early in my career that my purpose is to build products that better the lives of women. Working in tech allows me to bring that purpose to life in ways that are not only accessible, but meaningful and offer women solutions at times they need them most.
Bumble was about giving women the autonomy to make the first move and encouraging them to do that not only on the app but in all areas of their lives. That thread carried me to start Sunroom, where I built a platform that gave women a space to put a price on their content and be paid for their creativity. And now onto Peanut, where we help women feel supported during some of life's biggest moments, be that fertility, pregnancy, motherhood, or menopause.
At each of these roles, I felt very connected to the women I was serving: navigating dating and relationships, being a female creator myself, and, of course, now being a mom looking for her own “village” as I navigated pregnancy and am raising two boys.
What do you think most platforms still get wrong when it comes to designing for women?
Safety and privacy are also common threads running through the platforms I’ve built, and they’re also essential elements that other spaces miss. Women are too valuable and too smart for us not to take their privacy seriously. We’re also living in an era of social media where every scroll can be triggering. I think as leaders of tech companies, we have a responsibility to build models that help shield women from the problem, rather than giving in to the problem.
How has your perspective on motherhood and a work/life balance evolved?
For a long time, I delayed having children for the same reason many women do, which is that I was afraid it would negatively impact my career and that I couldn’t be both an ambitious career woman and a mom. I feared investors and founders wouldn’t take me seriously, or my team would stop seeing me as the leader I worked so hard to be. I even polled my Instagram once and found that over 80% of women shared these thoughts. Everything shifted when I finally decided to challenge those fears. Motherhood didn’t make me any less career-focused; it just shifted how I think about it.
What does a truly safe and empowering online space for women look like in 2026?
It starts by leading with empathy, paying attention to your community, and making changes that support what they need. This past year, we saw a 2,041% increase in Peanut users asking their online community to validate responses AI gave them, which flagged something pivotal to
us.. Even in the age of AI, millions of women are looking for human validation to feel confident and empowered in their decisions. In response.
Has motherhood taught you anything about leadership that you didn’t learn in your career before?
I lead more with my heart now. My kids have pushed me through breakthroughs on a personal level that have shaped how I operate as a leader professionally. Before having kids, I feared I would care less about work or lose my sense of ambition and commitment, but these characteristics have only strengthened and become more focused. I feel more courageous and capable than before because I have a clearer sense of what I need, and I know I’m doing everything for more than just myself.
From your perspective, what would be the best Mother’s Day gift this year?
