Engineer to Entrepreneur: Swati Vauthrin on Leaving Big Tech to Shape the Future of Parenting

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. 🔑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. 🎙️

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Engineer to Entrepreneur: Swati Vauthrin on Leaving Big Tech to Shape the Future of Parenting is an episode from Wings of Inspired Business by Melinda Wittstock.

This episode is 36:25 long.

This episode was published on Feb 17, 2026.

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