Sima Sistani and the art of getting people into the room

At seven, Sima Sistani decided she was Wonder Woman. The costume had homemade accessories: aluminum-foil cuffs and a bathrobe belt pressed into service as a lasso of truth. She insisted on being addressed by her superhero title. Her mother negotiated a settlement. Outside the house, people could call her Diana, the civilian name of her chosen heroine.

The compromise lasted rather longer than the costume. In her own telling, Diana became Diane, and she eventually had her middle name legally changed. A childhood identification had acquired paperwork. There are less entertaining explanations for the initial in a board biography.

That story makes a useful introduction to a career full of changes that look orderly only when arranged on a résumé. Sistani has worked in banking, Hollywood, mobile technology and games. She co-founded Houseparty, became its CEO in 2019 and helped sell it to Epic Games. Today, she teaches at Duke and has launched a perfume company. Plot Twist is, conveniently, one of its fragrances.

Before the app, the aunties

Sistani was born in Texas and grew up in Alabama, a first-generation Iranian-American in a small community of immigrant families. Her mother learned English alongside her by watching Sesame Street. Other families became a support network; the adults were uncles and aunties, whether or not the family tree agreed.

Community, in that setting, meant people doing things for one another. It was an arrangement she had experienced before it became a word in a product presentation. Years later, describing her childhood, she connected that extended family to the networks she would help build online.

At Duke, she moved between public policy, English and women's studies before settling on sociology. She graduated in 2001. Law school was a possibility until an internship supplied a practical objection: she disliked the work. The degree that had left her parents wondering about employment prospects turned out to concern the subject she would keep returning to - human relationships.

There is something pleasingly untidy about that education. A career in social technology can begin with questions about how people behave long before anyone opens a laptop to build the answer.

A trading floor, then a different kind of script

Her first job took her to Goldman Sachs and international equities in Chicago. Media companies were undergoing dramatic changes, and talking with research analysts drew her attention to the business behind entertainment. At Creative Artists Agency, she worked in film finance. Hollywood, which had felt remote during her Alabama childhood, became a workplace.

The later moves placed her closer to the machinery through which people would consume and exchange media. At Yahoo, she led mobile growth; at Tumblr, she became the first head of media. She also earned an MBA from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management. Finance, entertainment and online communities supplied different views of the same problem: getting people interested enough to participate.

These jobs are easy to turn into a tidy origin story. Sistani has resisted that treatment herself. Looking back, she has described a career that appears carefully connected in a biography but felt much less calculated as she was living it. The sequence mattered. The master plan was largely retrospective.

The audience was getting in the way

At South by Southwest in 2015, Sistani encountered Meerkat, the live-video app attracting attention there. A mutual friend introduced her to Ben Rubin. She liked the team's determination and joined an enterprise whose first burst of excitement would prove insufficient. Broadcasting live was easy to try. Persuading ordinary people to keep broadcasting was another matter.

The useful discovery came from the smaller moments: a friend appearing in a stream, a parent going live. Houseparty grew from that preference for familiar faces. The team began testing a private video product with students, with Sistani helping take feedback from schools while engineers revised the app.

That is an appealingly modest foundation for a social network. Nobody had to become interesting to a large audience before the product could work. They needed someone they already wanted to see.

The distinction was social as much as technical. A call asks somebody to answer at the moment you choose. An open room signals availability and lets the other person decide when to join. A host preparing for a performance has a different task from a friend dropping by.

Houseparty's attraction lay in making the second arrangement feel ordinary on a phone. Its premise also gave games a natural place in the room. A shared activity can carry a conversation when nobody has arrived with news worthy of an announcement.

Success still needed someone to keep the lights on

Sistani became CEO in March 2019. In June, Houseparty announced that it was joining Epic Games. The two companies described a shared interest in real-time interaction, with Houseparty bringing its experience of face-to-face connection to the company behind Fortnite and Unreal Engine.

The acquisition announcement stressed continuity: existing friendships would remain, and Houseparty and Epic accounts would stay separate. That emphasis was revealing. An app built around familiar people has something more delicate to carry across a transaction than a list of features.

“We have a common vision to make human interaction easier and more enjoyable, and always with respect for user privacy.”

Sima Sistani, June 2019

In 2020, Houseparty recorded 50 million new sign-ups over a 30-day period. For Sistani, the work included adjusting expectations and giving employees more flexibility while she and her husband were also homeschooling their seven-year-old. The person running the virtual gathering place still had to manage the household around her.

The app's independent life ended in October 2021. Sistani continued leading social gameplay and feature development at Epic, including work connected with Fortnite, before leaving in February 2022. She became CEO of WW International the following month and held that position until September 2024.

Sistani has offered a view of authority that allowed for precisely this possibility. A title was something she was renting. The job was to judge whether she remained the person a particular context required. It is a bracing way to discuss leadership in a business culture that often treats the corner office as a reward for arriving. Renting implies responsibility, maintenance and the possibility of handing over the keys.

Those endings belong in the story as much as the launches. An acquisition does not preserve an app forever, and a chief executive's title comes with an expiration date that is usually invisible when the appointment is announced.

The professor keeps up with Love Island

In 2025, Sistani returned to Duke to teach the Women's Leadership Lab. She also continued serving on Best Buy's board, which she had joined in March 2023, and remained part of the Aspen Institute's 2023 class of Henry Crown Fellows. Her working life now accommodated several commitments.

She called this her freedom era. The practical ambition was to choose meaningful projects rather than let one title organize everything. Supporting women through teaching, mentorship, investing and new businesses was part of that plan.

Her account of staying curious included niche podcasts, TikTok trends and Love Island. The sociology graduate was still watching people, sometimes with rather better lighting than a university seminar provides. She had also returned to Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, treating creativity as something that could be practised.

There is a useful teaching subject in that combination. A leader can study spreadsheets and still need to understand what customers are laughing at, watching or discussing with friends. Culture rarely waits for the quarterly review.

A product you have to smell in person

Liberation of Flowers arrived in 2026 with fragrances made by Christophe Laudamiel and bottles carrying Ashley Longshore's artwork. The collection's Persian influences include rose, saffron, oud and amber traditions. Its names - Plot Twist, Divine Intervention and Peace Offering - suggest that a perfume counter can accommodate a little narrative ambition.

For Sistani, the new business also changes the tempo. She is funding it herself and documenting ordinary founder tasks, including packing orders and writing to retailers. She wants smaller boutiques to have a continuing place in its distribution. A physical fragrance cannot be revised as casually as software already installed on a phone.

There is continuity beneath the change of materials. Houseparty invited people into rooms. Fragrance asks them to try something together, compare impressions and talk. The new product puts a different demand on attention: you have to stop long enough to smell it.

Her personal writing makes a similarly small-scale argument. In July 2026, she described travelling to see friends, giving ordinary dinners a little ceremony, learning people's names and writing notes by hand. She and her college friends had kept taking trips together for more than 25 years.

Someone still has to send the message and commit to the date. That detail brings the story back down to human size. After years spent building ways to gather on a screen, Sistani is also making time to get into the room.