She negotiated a hyperlink by hand in a Vogue conference room, decided the whole internet was wired wrong, and built two companies to fix it. The latest, Howl, has moved more than a billion dollars of merchandise on the strength of people you actually trust.
Li Haslett Chen - the founder who thinks creators are the PhDs of commerce, and built a company to pay them like it.
Li Haslett Chen runs Howl out of New York, and the number she keeps coming back to is not revenue. It is the $100 million-plus the platform has paid to roughly 23,000 creators since 2022. The headline figure, more than $1.1 billion in creator-led commerce, is the proof. The payout is the point. Howl exists to make the offhand product mention - the one a gaming streamer or a wellness writer drops because they mean it - into something that earns, transparently, every time it converts.
The thesis is almost old-fashioned: people buy what people they trust tell them to buy. The internet just never built the plumbing to reward that honestly. Ads got the infrastructure. Recommendations got a broken affiliate link and a shrug. Chen has spent a decade arguing that this is backwards, and Howl is the most complete version of the argument so far - a marketplace where creators connect with brands, promote what they actually use, and get paid on real, attributed sales rather than vanity impressions.
She is blunt about who deserves the credit. "Creators are the PhDs of commerce," she says - the people who have studied their audience so closely they can predict what will land. Howl is built to treat them that way, with specialized tooling for gaming, consumer tech, and wellness creators rather than one flattened, lowest-common-denominator feed.
We're rewiring the Internet for a better shopper experience - one that values honest recommendations above ads.
Every origin story has a room. Chen's is a conference room at Vogue. She was Director of Marketing at the luxury fashion platform Moda Operandi, handed a mandate to grow marketing revenue from roughly $4 million to $45 million. Chasing that number, she discovered something inconvenient for a marketer: customers trusted honest editorial recommendations more than any paid channel she could buy. Editorial converted. Ads leaked.
But the recommendation economy was held together with tape. Traffic went uncaptured. Scaling meant doing things by hand. Links broke constantly. The moment crystallized when she found herself in that Vogue conference room, manually negotiating where a single link would sit. A person, in a room, brokering a hyperlink. That was the state of the art. She decided it shouldn't be, and in 2015 she left to build the infrastructure herself.
That company was Narrativ. Its job was unglamorous and enormous: connect large publications with the businesses that could help them monetize their shopping recommendations, automatically and at scale. It was commerce infrastructure built to serve readers and creators rather than the ad monopolies sitting between them. Fast Company named it one of its Most Innovative Companies. Forbes put it on the AI 50. Chen ran it as founder and CEO until 2022.
Then she did something founders rarely do cleanly. She started over. Where Narrativ wired up publishers, Howl would wire up the people - the creators, the communities, the fans who increasingly drive what gets bought. Same conviction, bigger surface area.
Read Chen's path backward and it looks inevitable. Read it forward and it looks like a dare. Before she was a two-time founder she was a biochemical engineer. Then a Vogue intern. Then a McKinsey & Company business analyst, learning to turn messy data into a decision. Then a fashion-marketing operator. None of those jobs obviously points to the next one. Strung together, they describe exactly the person you would design to build commerce technology for taste-makers: someone fluent in systems, in data, in fashion, and in how attention actually moves.
She grew up in China during the economic-reform years of the 1990s, watching an entire country modernize in real time - living standards rising, the rules rewriting themselves year to year. It is not a stretch to hear that experience in how she talks about her work now: systems, she likes to say, widen access and create change. She has even described studying nervous-system health as an analogy for designing complex systems, and copped to a fondness for cyberpunk. The founder who pays creators by the click also thinks in metaphors borrowed from biology and science fiction.
There was a huge technology gap between editorial content online and every other marketing channel.
Walking away from a company on the upswing is the part of Chen's story that confuses people. Narrativ worked. It had the awards, the publisher logos, the validation. But the market underneath it was moving. Shopping recommendations were leaking out of glossy editorial pages and into the hands of individuals - the streamer mid-broadcast, the reviewer with a loyal comment section, the niche expert whose audience is small but converts like nothing else. Narrativ was built for the institutions. Howl would be built for the individuals. Chen has described the difference as building a team to build the product, and then the product to build the company - layers, in order, with the people first. She rebuilt all three rather than retrofit the old one.
The bet on individuals also reflects a read on where trust is migrating. A magazine's recommendation carries the weight of a brand. A creator's recommendation carries the weight of a relationship, parasocial but real, and that relationship converts at rates institutions can only envy. The hard part was never the conviction. It was the attribution - proving which sale came from which honest word - and that is precisely the unglamorous engineering Howl exists to do.
Ask Chen about building a company and she talks about people before product. She hires senior leaders for what she calls multiplier potential - the ability to make everyone around them better - and junior people for coachability, that mix of confidence and humility that lets someone grow fast. She runs the place on OKRs tied to structure so that ambition and org chart point the same direction.
The result is a company that looks different from its peers. Howl's leadership team is majority women, in an industry where that remains rare enough to be worth saying out loud. As an Asian female founder who raised money in a market not built for her, Chen has been vocal about venture capital's blind spots, particularly the funding gaps facing Black and women founders, and about extending real labor protections to creators who now power a meaningful slice of retail. She has also flagged the gender gap forming inside AI - in who builds it and who earns from it - as the next inequity worth heading off early.
In 2022, the same year she founded Howl, Chen was named an independent director of Warner Bros. Discovery, a seat at one of media's largest tables. She served until 2024, when she resigned from the board. The tenure says something about her standing: a startup founder, mid-build, trusted with governance at a company that size.
The recognition has stacked up alongside the metrics. The World Economic Forum named her a Technology Pioneer. The Financial Times called her a retail disruptor. Ad Age put her on its 40-Under-40. The pattern across all of it is consistency - she has been making one argument, in different rooms, for ten years.
Leave things better than when you found it. You will never regret that.
The near-term goal is legible from Howl's own announcements: deepen the platform where creator trust is highest - gaming, consumer tech, wellness - and keep the payout number climbing faster than the headline sales number. The longer arc is the one she has been on since that Vogue conference room. An internet where the honest recommendation, not the bought impression, is the unit of value. Where the people doing the recommending are treated as professionals with protections, not free distribution. Where the next platform shift, AI, doesn't quietly recreate the old inequities.
It is a big bet, and she has made it twice. The first time, with Narrativ, proved the plumbing could exist. The second time, with Howl and a billion dollars of merchandise moved, is proving people will use it. Chen's wager is simply that trust, properly wired, beats advertising. So far the receipts are on her side.
Creators are the PhDs of commerce.
You're really building a team to build the product and then the company.