EPISODE #969
Swati Vauthrin
Engineer to Entrepreneur:
From Big Tech to Revolutionizing Parenting
969 Swati Vauthrin: Engineer to Entrepreneur
What Women Bring to Engineering
Parenthood can be isolating, overwhelming, exhausting, and expensive—especially when balancing it with a demanding career. But there’s something about that kind of juggling act that inspires many women to take the leap into entrepreneurship.
Swati Vauthrin became BuzzFeed’s first engineering director when she was six months pregnant and quickly experienced the challenges of time management, identity shifts, and navigating work while building a family. From juggling a newborn while presenting to engineering teams, all while supporting her child’s developmental needs during the pandemic, motherhood both reshaped how she leads as an executive, but also inspired her leap from top engineer to entrepreneur with the new parenting platform, Recess.
Reaching the upper reaches of Big Tech engineering across Instagram, ESPN, Disney and BuzzFeed, Swati turned her coding expertise and motherhood frustrations into Recess—the spam-free, AI-powered community space she wished existed when she became a parent. She shares how she is helping parents get real advice, find community, and shop high-quality secondhand gear safely and affordably.
Swati is passionate about women in tech, inclusive leadership, and building products that solve real problems. She speaks on scaling teams, the rise of recommerce, sustainable marketplaces, fundraising as a female founder, and what work-life integration actually looks like when you’re raising three kids and building a company.
🔑Key Takeaways🔑
🤝🌐 Why Purpose-Built Communities Are the Future: Why it’s time to move on from the toxicity of social media, and build community around shared interests. Recess was born from real-life parenting challenges—aiming to combine trusted advice, local connections, and sustainable recommerce in one supportive digital village.
🤖💪 Women in Tech: What’s the secret of successful women in tech? For Swati it started with curiosity and a Commodore 64, and it led her to become one of the few women innovating in engineering—the “0.1% of the 0.1%” as she puts it.
❤️ 🛠️Empathy Drives Product Success: Women engineers bring empathy as a differentiating superpower to all things code, often outperforming male counterparts by understanding the “why,” not just the “what,” leading to products that genuinely help people and foster strong communities.
👩🍼 🚀 Motherhood and Entrepreneurship: Learn what motherhood teaches about leadership, time management, personal identity, and what real work-life integration looks like—and why no two journeys as a mom or a founder are exactly alike.
🦄✨ What Makes Recess Different: Built to be “a village”, Recess focuses on community matched to your circumstances and interests, with advice, tips, and an innovative “re-commerce” feature that makes it easy to save money by passing along used products with a story, so every transaction is infused with warmth and meaning.
More about Swati Vauthrin at therecess.app
Create and share clips of your favorite moments of this or any other podcast episode on across social media via Podopolo, and join the conversation with Swati and me in the Wings episode comments section.
More about Swati at RecessParenting.App
Swati Vauthrin is the Co-Founder and CEO of Recess, the parenting platform redefining how families connect, learn, and shop through community and circular commerce. A seasoned engineering leader turned mission-driven founder, Swati spent over 15 years as an engineer building and scaling products at Instagram, BuzzFeed, ESPN, and Disney—most notably leading global growth for Instagram Reels. Her inspiration for Recess came directly from her own motherhood journey. As a mom of three, Swati experienced firsthand how isolating, overwhelming, and expensive parenting can be so she’s building Recess to create the trusted, spam-free, AI-powered space she wished existed when she became a parent—where families can get real advice, find community, and shop high-quality secondhand gear safely and affordably.
Download the Recess app on the Apple App Store or Google Play to join our trusted parenting community and shop verified secondhand baby gear.
Visit recessparenting.app to sign up for our newsletter and be the first to know about exclusive gear deals, parenting resources, and new features.
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