When we sat down to think about architecture, we basically punted on it completely.

The thinking was that, well, we don't know, we can't predict what this product is going to be in the long run, which was true.

But if we had maybe spent half a day thinking through, like, what could limit

us in the future? How might we be painting ourselves into a corner? What assumptions are we

making that might be wrong? We might have saved ourselves a little bit of technical debt.

My name is Valerie Kaufman.

I'm CCO and co-founder of Swayable.

This is Code Story, the podcast bringing you interviews with tech visionaries who share in the critical moments of what it takes to change in industry and build and lead a team that has your back.

I'm your host, Noah Labart, and today how Valerie Kaufman created a way to measure the persuasive impact of your messages.

All this and more on Cote Story.

Valerie Kaufman has a family in San Francisco with two cats, both 18 pounds each, and two kids,

the oldest being three and a half. So you could say she has a lot to juggle,

even outside of a startup. Her family spends time outside in parks, the zoo, museums, etc., as much as she

can since they are opening up again post-pandemic. She graduated from Cornell with her PhD in theoretical condensed matter physics,

which I had to Google to understand. Prior to her current venture, she was the CTO and chief

science officer at Zometry, an on-demand marketplace for custom manufacturing, building their

software team from scratch. She and her co-founders started their current venture by exploring why people resist

believing scientifically backed factual information.

She wanted to figure out which messages and stories were more effective at communicating

these true facts.

This is the creation story of Swayable.

Swayable. Swayable is a data science platform for measuring the persuasive impact of advertisements.

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