Long before Li Haslett Chen built technology to help people buy things, she remembers her family getting a refrigerator. She was about five, growing up in Beijing in the early 1990s. The appliance belonged to a larger change she could see happening around her: China opening to the world, and everyday life acquiring new possibilities. For a future retail founder, it is an unusually literal beginning. Commerce arrived in the kitchen.
She has also recalled a washing machine, an air conditioner, and the pleasure of trying Häagen-Dazs for the first time. These were small domestic arrivals with consequences larger than their packaging. Her account of that childhood makes her interest in products easy to understand. A purchase could change the texture of a day. Retail was something people experienced at home, well before it became a dashboard of conversion rates.
Chen would eventually become the founder and CEO of Howl, connecting brands with creators who recommend their products. Her work has passed through publishing, affiliate links, social commerce, and now AI shopping. Across those changes sits a persistent question: how does a useful recommendation reach a buyer, and how does the person who made it get paid?
A career with an accidental costume department
Her route into that question was circuitous. She studied at Columbia, graduating with a BA, magna cum laude, in 2010. She has described studying biochemical engineering while also pursuing internships in creative industries. A family of creatives and an interest in science gave her more than one professional vocabulary. The later combination of retail, content, and data came from those overlapping interests.
The résumé then moved through Vogue, McKinsey, and luxury retailer Moda Operandi. Each put her near a different part of the same transaction: the editor who attracts attention, the business that needs growth, and the customer deciding whether to spend. A shopping link can look trivial from a distance. From those jobs, it carried a surprising amount of responsibility.
At Moda Operandi, she worked on customer acquisition and saw how product coverage could bring in buyers. The problem was keeping the machinery working as the volume grew. A review could remain persuasive long after its destination stopped making sense. The item sold out. A price changed. The reader clicked anyway. The internet had preserved the enthusiasm while misplacing the merchandise.
The opportunity hiding inside a dead link
In a Vogue conference room, Chen began calculating the opportunity in making commerce content work properly. She described that moment in 2018 as the impetus for Narrativ. Her experience had exposed a system with several interested parties and too much manual work between them. Readers wanted accurate information. Editors wanted their work to earn. Retailers wanted customers who arrived with a reason to buy.
Narrativ emerged from stealth in August 2017. Its SmartLink technology made product links dynamic, letting merchants bid for traffic when a reader clicked. The launch announcement described more than 500 participating merchants and early publishing partners including New York Magazine. The practical idea was to give an existing editorial recommendation a functioning market around it.
That architecture matters because the editorial work and the checkout happen in different places. Whoever controls the connection can affect where a reader lands and what a publisher earns. Chen was tackling that narrow passage. It was a less photogenic proposition than a new magazine or fashion label, but it addressed a difficulty both already had: a good story can send customers somewhere useless.
The small-company education
By January 2018, Chen was talking about the habits she needed as a young founder. She described changing how she hired, looking beyond skills toward accountability, consistency, and willingness to adapt. A startup demands repeated revisions; the person who can do the job today also has to remain useful when the job changes.
She also acknowledged having paid too little attention to advancing women in technology. A women-and-commerce network helped her recognize the opportunities earlier female leaders had opened. Narrativ then made a deliberate effort to increase the proportion of women in its engineering recruitment pipeline. In that interview, she said the team was 53 percent female. The figures describe that period, and the decision behind them is the revealing part.
Her founder education included company, too. At Grand Central Tech, she found other entrepreneurs with whom she could compare experiences and seek encouragement. She was a solo founder, but the work did not happen in solitude. The advice she described favored disciplined risks, listening, and adapting. It is an approach with less theatrical appeal than the fearless-founder myth, and considerably more room for learning.
The shelf beside the spreadsheet
Chen’s reading interests offer another way into her thinking. She is a cyberpunk enthusiast, and in 2021 she described joining a book club devoted to Asian authors. Her recommendations included Ted Chiang’s Exhalation, Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown, and Min Jin Lee’s Free Food for Millionaires. She linked these books to questions about a person’s place in family, society, and the wider world.
It is an appealing counterpoint to the business of measuring clicks. Fiction allows people to remain complicated. A customer can be practical, aspirational, contrary, and sentimental in the same shopping session. Those contradictions become relevant when a founder begins asking software to understand taste. A catalogue has tidy fields; a person rarely does.
Her professional recognition arrived through several routes. Narrativ became a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer in 2018, and later received Fast Company and Forbes AI 50 recognition. Chen appeared on Ad Age’s 40-Under-40. The mix reflects the territory she had chosen: technology built around the economics of media and the behavior of shoppers.
“What if we could give more people access?”Li Haslett Chen, reflecting on the move toward Howl, 2024
From publishers to people
In 2022, the business took the Howl name and moved toward creators and social commerce. Chen has described a hesitation behind that expansion: Narrativ was working, and success gave her a reason to stay with the existing model. Yet the tools serving large publications might also serve individuals with product knowledge and a community that listened.
That brought the work closer to the ordinary recommendation. Someone knows laptops, sneakers, or games, and other people value that judgment. The commercial challenge is making the relationship manageable: finding brand opportunities, understanding performance, and receiving compensation. A person making recommendations needs a business process as well as a point of view.
In August 2025, Howl announced that it had facilitated more than $1.1 billion in creator-driven sales since its 2022 launch and paid more than $100 million to 23,000 creators. Those are company-reported totals for that date. They measure different things: merchandise bought through the platform, money paid to creators, and the number participating. Reading them separately keeps the scale legible.
A board seat, then a choice
Chen’s work also took her into a public-company boardroom. She joined Warner Bros. Discovery’s board in April 2022. The company described her contribution in terms of technology, platforms, and reaching consumers directly. It was another setting where understanding how people encounter content had commercial consequences.
In a public post about a 2023 governance discussion, she admitted being nervous about whether her perspective as a first-time public board member would be useful. She took part anyway. That small admission gives a human scale to a title that can otherwise sound finished and formal. Joining a board does not automatically supply the confidence to speak in every room.
Her departure was announced in December 2024 and took effect on January 31, 2025. She said she wanted to devote her attention to Howl as it entered another period of growth. A founder’s calendar is a finite resource, however expansive the ambition. Leaving the seat made that choice visible.
The promise meets the payment system
By September 2026, Howl’s story had changed again. Reporting described an August sale of its creator division to Connexity, the commerce business owned by Taboola. Both companies confirmed the transaction; financial terms were undisclosed. Chen said Howl would continue operating while considering its next direction, including opportunities in AI commerce.
The transaction also came with reported complaints about delayed payments. Publishers described outstanding balances, and Connexity told acquired creators that repairing the payment experience was a priority. These are reported claims, rather than an adjudicated finding about Chen personally. They belong in the account because compensation was central to the product’s promise.
“Transparency is the foundation for an equitable system,” Chen said in 2024. A marketplace built around recommendations has to earn trust on several fronts. The audience trusts the creator’s judgment. The creator trusts the record of the sale. The publisher or creator then trusts that the payment will arrive. The last step can decide how the first two are remembered.
What the shopper knows that software doesn’t
Chen’s recent thinking returns to a familiar difficulty: connecting information to a person’s actual experience. In a 2026 conversation about shopping agents, she argued that software needs to understand taste, budget, and changing priorities. She proposed evaluating shopping assistance across price, quality, trends, and personal identity. A cheap purchase can be wrong; an expensive one can be sensible.
“Creators are the PhDs of commerce,” is her shorthand for the expertise involved. Her argument is that product experience comes from people who have used things, and that creators and publishers deserve compensation when their work contributes to AI shopping. She imagines agents that ask questions, retain context, and help with the recurring work around purchases.
The idea takes her back toward that childhood kitchen. A refrigerator earns its place by making daily life easier. Shopping software faces a similar test, even if its workings are harder to see. Chen’s next commercial direction remains open, but the question running through her career is concrete enough: can the technology respect the recommendation, the person making it, and the person trying to buy?