YouSaid · the spoken record

Sima Sistani

lines on the record
40
first
2023-04-06
most recent
2023-04-06
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “A software company. We're providing a human-centric The social circles, it's the community. And so, I mean, we were the OG social network. And what I'm doing here right now is building us out into a third space, a digital first era. And that makes us, I think, inherently our DNA is as a tech company. All right”

    2023-04-06 · On with Kara Swisher · WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani talks TikTok, Telehealth Deal on GLP-1/Ozempic and Why She Took the Job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “It's a level of shame that exists in our society, and we all just, the more awareness we have around it, and the more we speak to it, the hopefully that we can start getting in front of these unrealistic, non-inclusive conversations.”

    2023-04-06 · On with Kara Swisher · WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani talks TikTok, Telehealth Deal on GLP-1/Ozempic and Why She Took the Job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “A fraught cultural conversation. There's a lot of stigma against those with overweight and obesity. And because of that, it's also meaning that we're challenging the science around it. As opposed to, you know, having the discussion and being able to talk about improving people's quality of life and the prevention of future illness and just being happy for people who could find that through whatever pathway it might be, we start shaming people around it. I mean, going back to the celebrity of it all, you see that with celebrities as well. They lose weight and it's immediately like, oh, you know, suddenly we love Adele and then we don't love Adele. I just, it's hard for me to even put myself in those shoes. It's like the anti-vaxxer conversation or something. Yeah.”

    2023-04-06 · On with Kara Swisher · WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani talks TikTok, Telehealth Deal on GLP-1/Ozempic and Why She Took the Job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “They need help with what the intuition even is. So it's just this false narrative that continues to perpetuate the body shaming cycle that we're in. And what we're trying to do is work against it, but I don't have a good answer to that. I want my kids to embrace their bodies and to not even be focused on it. Body positivity move to body neutrality just because of that, because it was like, even by being positive, you're telling me to focus on it in some way. It's like, I just need, I just want to exist in the world. And, you know, I think that that's a...”

    2023-04-06 · On with Kara Swisher · WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani talks TikTok, Telehealth Deal on GLP-1/Ozempic and Why She Took the Job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Yeah, this is Going back to the kind of the common thread of around body acceptance is that their shame for gaining weight, there's shame for losing weight, their shame for loving the body you're in, there's shame for wanting to change the body you're in. And what Sam was describing there is like, is a part of that shame right now is even being the moment that you start thinking about or wanting to address your weight health people say that that's disordered eating. I felt that when I was trying to lose, you know, my weight and I started tracking people like, oh, well, that's disordered in me. I was like, how's that different from me tracking my like finances? You know, I need a budget and I'm trying to understand it. And by the way, that's coming from a really privileged place in a lot of circumstances where we grew up with understanding an education around what is healthy, what is not healthy. And we take for granted that everybody knows that. And we say, oh, you should just be intuitive about your eating. Well, for some people,”

    2023-04-06 · On with Kara Swisher · WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani talks TikTok, Telehealth Deal on GLP-1/Ozempic and Why She Took the Job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “It's a service, it's a care team model, it's a curriculum. There's fitness, nutrition guidelines, all of the things to help you manage through, you know, the medication and to map it to the behavior change, because here's another thing. It's like a lot of these clinical trials, what people are missing is you don't just like melt 15 to 20% of your weight, they're also doing it alongside a lifestyle program in every single one of the clinical therapies. When you get the script, the FDA recommendation is to do it alongside lifestyle change. So it's like, if you're on a statin, you still have to have a low fat diet, right? So yeah, you can't just.”

    2023-04-06 · On with Kara Swisher · WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani talks TikTok, Telehealth Deal on GLP-1/Ozempic and Why She Took the Job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Weight, but it's also about muscle mass and bone density and hydration and giving people just like a holistic look at their health. I think more information, but also safeguarding, again, on the clinical side of things is that the clinician is not employed by Weight Watchers or by sequence. We're just the platform in between these two. We don't actually prescribe the medication, nor do we make any money from it. So those are all sort of the safeguards in place to make sure.”

    2023-04-06 · On with Kara Swisher · WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani talks TikTok, Telehealth Deal on GLP-1/Ozempic and Why She Took the Job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “An overall standpoint, I would say that we're trying to lead the conversation in terms of healthy eating. And if you look at word clouds for diet, for instance, it's all associated with so many negative words of deprivation and what we want to do is let people know that you can love the body that you're in. You can also want to lose weight, but that it's not about chasing a one-size-fits-all number on your scale or in your clothing size, some of the ways that we actually build that into our program is through the assessments, both on sequence and in Weight Watchers core program is to manage how people who have an eating disorder or under a certain BMI. We also ask them to set their own goals about what they're looking to achieve and what kind of metrics they want to be. We just now in January, we started giving everybody a smart scale so that it's not just about the”

    2023-04-06 · On with Kara Swisher · WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani talks TikTok, Telehealth Deal on GLP-1/Ozempic and Why She Took the Job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “Voice and really opening up the floodgates around body acceptance There's so much good in that, but there doesn't have to be a false dichotomy between those cultural conversations. Like you should be able to accept your body and also look for weight health and those things can coexist.”

    2023-04-06 · On with Kara Swisher · WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani talks TikTok, Telehealth Deal on GLP-1/Ozempic and Why She Took the Job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “That's why it's even more important to recognize that the movement to embracing clinical, it's not a trend. This is an innovation. It's an complete paradigm shift in our industry. But I want to take a step back in what you were saying, I think is really important in terms of like diet culture. And just acknowledge for a minute that diet culture is just, it's culture. You know, in the 60s, the ideal was British, wave-flight, twiggy, right? Then it was tone leg, sunkissed skin in the 70s and 80s was like the hard body, aerobics and the 90s was heroin chic. Like this, it's culture and it permeates all aspects of society. And that is something that we all need to be aware of and fight back in some ways. It's like the shift that has happened over the past few years and thanks in part, and this is one of the positive sides of social, is social and people having a voice.”

    2023-04-06 · On with Kara Swisher · WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani talks TikTok, Telehealth Deal on GLP-1/Ozempic and Why She Took the Job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “Of the medications because it's making it harder for us to actually address the public health concerns and what these medications can actually be doing to”

    2023-04-06 · On with Kara Swisher · WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani talks TikTok, Telehealth Deal on GLP-1/Ozempic and Why She Took the Job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “I think that if you have 10 to 20 pounds to lose, you should be on a behavior change program. You should be working towards lifestyle therapies. You should be trying fitness or you should be accepting your body. I'm the same way that I got to, I mean, there's just a new set point for my body post babies. It is what it is. And this is the great thing about, you know, our body positivity movement and the shift towards really what our body does for us and not trying to aspire to some aspirational or conform to some idealized version of our bodies. And so, no, these drugs are certainly not for getting yourself into reunion shape or ready for a summer vacation. They are for the management of a chronic disease and condition. And I think it's unfortunate that the clickbait and the attention has been put on the vanity.”

    2023-04-06 · On with Kara Swisher · WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani talks TikTok, Telehealth Deal on GLP-1/Ozempic and Why She Took the Job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “And that's exactly it. Is there medications for chronic management? And so similarly, I'm on synthroid, and I will be for the rest of my life. And if I come off of it, then I will bounce back to all of the symptoms and issues I had before and when on the medication. And if you end up on these medications, you could titrate the dosage, certainly, but you'll be on these medications likely for the rest of your life.”

    2023-04-06 · On with Kara Swisher · WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani talks TikTok, Telehealth Deal on GLP-1/Ozempic and Why She Took the Job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “Well, it's not medically appropriate to get it that way. And also, by the way, it needs cold storage. I've been hearing some crazy stories of, you know, it's not actually even one of the brand names. It's a compounded who knows. There's a lot of bad actors in the space right now. But part of the reason we're now taking a vocal stance here is to address the misinformation is to get ahead of bad actors, is for people to understand when it is medically appropriate or not. somebody who the doctors have deemed medically appropriate that they have a full care team around them because the titration of these medications and the care that needs to go around to make sure to manage the symptoms throughout the weight loss journey is very high touch it requires a lot of support for people to do it well”

    2023-04-06 · On with Kara Swisher · WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani talks TikTok, Telehealth Deal on GLP-1/Ozempic and Why She Took the Job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “And so you have this automation engine. And then secondly, they've built a really great platform for both the clinician and the member. So it's like being in a WhatsApp group with a whole care team. This isn't like an ED script that you could just like get in the mail and like go along your merry way. No, it has to be management. Well.”

    2023-04-06 · On with Kara Swisher · WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani talks TikTok, Telehealth Deal on GLP-1/Ozempic and Why She Took the Job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “Model. And I think that's really what people are missing with sequence why it's so exciting it's doing two really important things. One is”

    2023-04-06 · On with Kara Swisher · WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani talks TikTok, Telehealth Deal on GLP-1/Ozempic and Why She Took the Job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “I mean, absolutely not. Like we are following the FDA regulations here. It's like if you have a BMI over 27 plus another weight related condition or BMI over 30, that happens to be a big portion of our population. And even then, it's like the decision is between the clinician and the patient. That is not part of the business. So I'll take a step back here with regard to sequence and the company that we acquired, you know, what they are providing is a platform to connect a patient with clinician. We are in the business of the subscription, not the prescription. If the doctor has decided that it's medically appropriate for the person to be on a medication, whether that is GLP1 or otherwise, then they would be moved into sort of this care.”

    2023-04-06 · On with Kara Swisher · WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani talks TikTok, Telehealth Deal on GLP-1/Ozempic and Why She Took the Job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “Is another great example. It took a global pandemic for the private sector and for society to adequately acknowledge and invest and innovate on mental health. We used to call it mental illness. It was a condition and then really COVID forced us to confront the issue and understand that it was under-resourced and that there's more that we can be doing. I mean, I think that the same is true for obesity and weight health is just one of the most neglected problems.”

    2023-04-06 · On with Kara Swisher · WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani talks TikTok, Telehealth Deal on GLP-1/Ozempic and Why She Took the Job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “That's exactly it. I think that it's unfortunate that it's become the kind of the clickbait headlines. And the attention is being put on quote-unquote weight loss drugs versus these are medications for chronic weight management. Those are two very different things. And the attention on sort of the celebrity of it all is taking away from the real possibilities to solve public health issues for not just Americans, but the globe. And I think it has a lot to do with our society and the stigma around obesity. I mean, if we had said we found these new medications and they're going to address Alzheimer's or cancer or Parkinson's or something, wouldn't everybody be talking about access and how do we increase access and embracing these medications? It's because of the stigma around obesity that has become such a clickbait issue. I mean, mental health.”

    2023-04-06 · On with Kara Swisher · WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani talks TikTok, Telehealth Deal on GLP-1/Ozempic and Why She Took the Job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “Behavioral changes, but there's also people who need the medication alongside to have the best outcomes. And that's what we're seeing now.”

    2023-04-06 · On with Kara Swisher · WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani talks TikTok, Telehealth Deal on GLP-1/Ozempic and Why She Took the Job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “Adhere to the health habits that they've tried to access their entire life. And we're just starting to realize that, yes, there's like the hungry brain, but there's also the hungry gut. And these medications help address that. And I think that it's a lot like, you know, the way we might think about hypertension in the 70s is like. Got recognized as a disease, and then in the 80s there were these medications and ace inhibitors, but people could take. But it wasn't until really the 90s where it was finally like, okay, they're a combination therapies. Yes, you need to have a low sodium diet. You should stop smoking. You should do all of these lifestyle changes.”

    2023-04-06 · On with Kara Swisher · WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani talks TikTok, Telehealth Deal on GLP-1/Ozempic and Why She Took the Job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “Yeah, so some maglotide or semaglutide both are correct. It essentially mimics the natural occurring hormones that help our body regulate appetite. And it's a game changer. Like doctors, scientists, they will all say these drugs are a game changer. As the global leader in weight management, I felt, you know, one of the first things I did was, again, look at new modalities and what are the evidence-based treatments that are out there behavioral changes are crown jewel, but I see clinical and functional as both being pathways that we can give our members access to. And that doesn't mean that everybody should be on these medications. Absolutely. That's not the case. There are certain people where it's medically appropriate and others where it's not. But it's amazing to see the way that they are able to help people.”

    2023-04-06 · On with Kara Swisher · WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani talks TikTok, Telehealth Deal on GLP-1/Ozempic and Why She Took the Job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “A lot of passionate people who, you know, we don't want to freaking move fast and break things because that's not what you want to do with people's health.”

    2023-04-06 · On with Kara Swisher · WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani talks TikTok, Telehealth Deal on GLP-1/Ozempic and Why She Took the Job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “You're exactly right. Think about what AI can do. You can start to take pictures and take a picture of your fridge, tell you exactly where a five-point food can come from. I mean, those are the kinds of things that we're building in. And that's where when I took this, because I watched Marissa do all the things that didn't work at Yahoo. And I thought about, is this a challenge I want to take on? The difference is we're ahead of the game. And so we literally just have to change the culture of how we build and think about this. It was a marketing-led company. And now we are like solving problems. And it's like, I hate to say it, low hanging fruit. So now we've brought in like our new how to product is from WhatsApp, our head of marketing is from Maisonet and Birchbox, our new head of people is from Patreon. It's just a totally different culture that we're infusing into the company while also keeping all of what makes it special because you don't come to a company like Weight Watchers unless you've had personal experience with this.”

    2023-04-06 · On with Kara Swisher · WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani talks TikTok, Telehealth Deal on GLP-1/Ozempic and Why She Took the Job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “Preach it to the choir. I mean, that's what I'm changing. But the UX, if you haven't tried in a while, it's better, but it's going to be a lot better in the second half of the year. We're introducing a bunch of new features.”

    2023-04-06 · On with Kara Swisher · WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani talks TikTok, Telehealth Deal on GLP-1/Ozempic and Why She Took the Job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “I mean, I would describe it more like a Peloton style approach where it was there were coaches that were delivering sort of broadcast-based content. So live and also live to tape, and people could access that content. What true accountability brings and where true networks are created is not when a bunch of people follow one person. Like, I love Allie Love on, you know, in Peloton, but I'm not really connected to other people who love Allie Love. The way people with weight loss, they need to get connected to peer groups. And I think that there's something to be said for within that group, for those people to be able to share more content with each other. So the relationships are about the member to coach, the member to member, and creating that dynamic so that it's more of a few to few model than one to many.”

    2023-04-06 · On with Kara Swisher · WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani talks TikTok, Telehealth Deal on GLP-1/Ozempic and Why She Took the Job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “People are always looking at our industry, it is unique in that way, they are looking for the shiny object. Remember South Beach, remember Atkins, right? There's always been a new shiny object. And the reason we've been around for 60 years is because we haven't hopped on those fads. We've always been evidence-based. And I think content is an important part of how we deliver the curriculum and the education and that there's plenty that we can do to better that experience. And we've been working on it both not just within our app behind the paywall, but also how we show up just on our own social media and more broadly. I think we've really started to invest in our brand in that way and being more relevant and part of the zeitgeist.”

    2023-04-06 · On with Kara Swisher · WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani talks TikTok, Telehealth Deal on GLP-1/Ozempic and Why She Took the Job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “No, but it's actually exactly right. I mean, we can get in our own way. It's suicide, not murder. We have to make sure that we continue to evolve and change. I would say that if anything outside of us is getting in the way of us being able to really continue to be the leaders in the weight management space, it has to do with social, honestly, because every other person now is an expert in the space on YouTube or Instagram or TikTok. And there's a lot of misinformation. And that's difficult to manage. Certainly. But, you know, look, at the end of the day, it's how we show up in the world and we have a lot of control. This is very different than when Marissa came to Yahoo and tried to turn it around. Yahoo is behind the curve in mobile on the social internet. We're still the leaders in this space. So it's ours to lose. It's not the other way around.”

    2023-04-06 · On with Kara Swisher · WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani talks TikTok, Telehealth Deal on GLP-1/Ozempic and Why She Took the Job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “A pivot, it wasn't a move to try to do something that isn't what Disney does best. It was seeing what was out there and not letting it eat its lunch. And that's what we're doing.”

    2023-04-06 · On with Kara Swisher · WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani talks TikTok, Telehealth Deal on GLP-1/Ozempic and Why She Took the Job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “It's both. And we don't suck. That's the important thing there's so much of what we're doing. There's a reason why it's the doctor, number one doctor recommended program. It's been, you know, we have a legacy of people that we've helped succeed, and that's part of the business model is when people succeed, they leave our program. But in the old days, because people were coming in IRL workshops, they continued to come because it was social, because they had a peer group. That's where we're investing in for the third space, our digital space, how people are going to continue to connect and stay in the program. But the Bob Eiger example is exactly right. People forget that Disney was a turnaround in some respects when he joined. Disney animation was failing. It was because he embraced Pixar new ways of work that allowed him to then go look at Marvel and Lucas and like really pulled together and entirely new strategy that took the core of then Disney animation and made it better and uplifted that thing.”

    2023-04-06 · On with Kara Swisher · WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani talks TikTok, Telehealth Deal on GLP-1/Ozempic and Why She Took the Job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “Low margins, you know, ultimately, I think that it was driving the company into a bunch of different directions versus our critical North Star of connecting people through healthy habits. And so what the company needed was focus. And if we don't take a digital first approach, the life cycle is that we'll let others outside of our business disrupt us versus us taking the first steps, the blockbuster example is the one that I like to give. It's not like the blockbuster CEO at the time didn't see Netflix coming. They were just too scared to take the hard decisions of getting rid of late fees because it was a big part of their operating income. But had they done that and moved to subscription, maybe they would have had a different story. And that's what we're doing right now. We're making those hard short-term decisions for the long-term health of the business.”

    2023-04-06 · On with Kara Swisher · WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani talks TikTok, Telehealth Deal on GLP-1/Ozempic and Why She Took the Job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “I would say it's less about that landscape. It's more about taking the things that we already do and doing them with like a more modern lens. Also in just how we run the company. It's actually, there wasn't a ton of technical debt when I arrived. It was more organizational debt. It was like, are we going to take the best ways of like the ways growth tech works with data informed, agile development, being able to be truthful about what's working, what's not postmortems, all this sort of things that we take for granted, I would say, and apply it to this business, this industry. So we, you know, the first thing we did was shut down a bunch of features and product lines that weren't working.”

    2023-04-06 · On with Kara Swisher · WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani talks TikTok, Telehealth Deal on GLP-1/Ozempic and Why She Took the Job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “Community, our nutrition and lifestyle therapies, but let's like turn over the whole thing such that we're taking a digital first approach and we're more like a growth company than anything else.”

    2023-04-06 · On with Kara Swisher · WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani talks TikTok, Telehealth Deal on GLP-1/Ozempic and Why She Took the Job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “I think that that's the misconception it is still an analog company. In a lot of ways, that's why I'm here is because we were still being run like one. And the biggest change here, and I said this when through the process of considering this role, is what the board who was interviewing me is if you choose me, you're choosing to put a disruptor in the seat. You're choosing the strategy and the strategy is going to be uncomfortable at first. And this company was founded 60 years ago by woman, Gene Niditch. And it has all of the dynamics around what we consider to be some of the leading ways people connect, right? It's got repeating counters. It's got reciprocity built in. It's got gamification in the way the point system manifests. It's got all of these ways to really help people with health outcomes. But it wasn't showing up in a digital first way. And that's what I was focused on is like, let's double down on the things that we do really well.”

    2023-04-06 · On with Kara Swisher · WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani talks TikTok, Telehealth Deal on GLP-1/Ozempic and Why She Took the Job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “To join, and two years later, they called me about hey, are you interested in the CEO opportunity? And it was the perfect time for me. And it was a moment for me to take all of what I had built around digitizing social relationships and apply it to health outcomes and to help people through community, through accountability achieve better weight health.”

    2023-04-06 · On with Kara Swisher · WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani talks TikTok, Telehealth Deal on GLP-1/Ozempic and Why She Took the Job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “Yes, she's on my board. And in that podcast, Tina Fay, who is a lifelong weight watcher, talks about how she's not on any social media and how she was in Weight Watchers Connect. And that's where she posted. That's where she went to like fill her tank. And it just was like this huge aha moment for me that was like, oh my gosh, here behind a paywall, because people are coming together with this huge vulnerability and a shared interest in weight loss, that this was the true empathetic social network. What I've been trying to work on and build. And so I actually reached out to the company and I thought, you all must be trying to figure out this digital era, especially in the midst of COVID where the retail IRL workshops are closing down. Can I be of service? How can I help? I had no interest in leaving House Party. So I reached out to the company. I was interested in joining the board. The timing wasn't right for me.”

    2023-04-06 · On with Kara Swisher · WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani talks TikTok, Telehealth Deal on GLP-1/Ozempic and Why She Took the Job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “There's so many. It's look, it's network effects at the end of the day, and now we have really, really big networks out there that when they see the new feature, which a lot of these networks come for the tool, stay for the network, are built on some sort of tool. And for a house party, it was group video chat. And the moment that the bigger network sees something taking off, they embrace it and they push it forward. And, you know, in a lot of ways, I think that's great. What we tried to set out to do was to get people to build these tools into their networks. And so we did the same. You know, we sold our company to Epic Games. We took a lot of all the best parts of House Party and we built them into Fortnite so that we could build a more empathetic, trusting metaverse like Third Space. And so that ends up being the outcome for a lot of the new ways of connecting, engaging people is that they make the networks that are already out there.”

    2023-04-06 · On with Kara Swisher · WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani talks TikTok, Telehealth Deal on GLP-1/Ozempic and Why She Took the Job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. “House Party is a group video chat. I mean, that's the most simple way to describe it, but we were trying to solve empathy in online communication. I wanted my kids to know the right facial response to happiness, sadness, not just the right emojis. We were leaning into synchronous forms of communication as a way to be the next best thing to IRL. And we had started House Party way before COVID, but that was a time where people really leaned into video communication and it catalyzed what we were doing.”

    2023-04-06 · On with Kara Swisher · WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani talks TikTok, Telehealth Deal on GLP-1/Ozempic and Why She Took the Job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  39. “You know what the juice diets and fasting and paleo and all, you know, there's all kinds of things. But ultimately, you know, none of it worked for me and none of it held me accountable. And so I found Weight Watchers really kept me on track through the community, through the accountability. And also I realized during that time that I was suffering from a thyroid condition that, you know, but anyways, between the two things, it worked. But being a product person, I also wanted to throw my phone against the wall. I didn't think it was a compelling user experience. Fast forward to 2020. It's the middle of the pandemic. And I was very deep in all things house party. And it occurred to me, I started.”

    2023-04-06 · On with Kara Swisher · WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani talks TikTok, Telehealth Deal on GLP-1/Ozempic and Why She Took the Job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  40. “I was a member first, 2014 actually. And well, my mother, she's a registered dietitian, and she actually has her PhD in food science. I grew up with healthy habits in my life. I feel like I understood what I needed to do. And when I had my first child, I gained almost 60 pounds and I had a really hard time losing it. And I tried probably every snake oil and fad that was out there. And my mom was like, if you're not going to listen to me, just go on Weight Watchers. I thought, what?”

    2023-04-06 · On with Kara Swisher · WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani talks TikTok, Telehealth Deal on GLP-1/Ozempic and Why She Took the Job · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT