74 / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / August 2019Soushiant Zanganehpour , founder and
CEO of Swae, on how his startup aims to
upgrade the decision-making process
by TAMARA PUPICPOWERING
STRATEGY
START IT UP Q&A
Soushiant Zanganehpour, founder and CEO, SwaeIMAGE COURTESY SWAEM
ore often than
not, we wit-
ness or hear
about the lack
of voice or
influence most
people have
on systems, institutions, and
organizations that have sig-
nificant impact on their lives,
which has led many to try to
upgrade the decision-making
process. “This frustration,
coupled with the countless
examples of abuse of power,
the elitism of experts that
exclude others due to their
perceived ignorance, the
limited feedback loops and
tools we have to ensure lead-
ers remain accountable to
promises, and most impor-
tantly, the generally uninspir-
ing decisions produced by
this way of decision-making
really inspired me to explore
alternatives,” says Soushiant
Zanganehpour, founder and
CEO of Swae, an AI-enabled
platform giving users tools
to better express themselves,
and participate and influence
decision-making processes
and governance.
Officially established in
2018, the Vancouver-based
Swae aims to create more
intelligent, meritocratic, and
higher quality decisions in or-ganizations by disrupting the
overly-centralized, top-down
and outdated hierarchical
process of decision-making.
“We do this by combining
anonymity, artificial intelli-
gence, and collective intel-
ligence to give people the
ability to build powerful
proposals from the bottom-
up without much expert
intervention and dependency,”
says Zanganehpour. “This
allows them to participate in
consequential and complex
decisions that have impact
on them– from government
policy, community budgets, to
workplace decisions. The plat-
form also helps organizations
unleash the creativity of their
stakeholders, discover unre-
vealed truths, data and well-
crafted bottom-up solutions,
so decision-makers can make
more intelligent decisions
around products, services,
policies, and strategy.”
Prior to his work on Swae,
the whole of Zanganehpour’s
career trajectory shows his
tendency to solving problems
at the intersection of public
policy, business, technology,
and systems change. Swae
is his fourth entrepreneurial
experience- the three previous
startups that he worked on,
which focused on large eventpromotion and production,
digital advertising technology,
and education, have been led
to profitability and a buy-
out. Zanganehpour is also
currently engaged as a board
member of Harvard Business
Review's Advisory Council
and Biocarbon Engineering
(a reforestation startup using
drones to replant a billion
trees per year), as well as an
advisory board member of
RADIUS ventures, a social
venture accelerator based out
of Simon Fraser University’s
Business School in Vancouver,
Canada. His academic career
includes him working as an
adjunct professor at Sciences-
Po in Paris, France, and a lec-
turer at the Masdar Institute
in Abu Dhabi, UAE, teaching
business models for social
progress and impact investing
at the master's level.It is thus his career so far that
offered him an insight into
the quality and efficiency -or
the lack thereof- of decision-
making processes in organiza-
tions of all sizes. “I came up
with the idea of Swae in 2014,
as a result of my experiences
working in senior manage-
ment roles inside small and
large organizations,” says Zan-
ganehpour. “Here, I regularly
witnessed several occasions
where poorly designed, non-
meritocratic, and politically
motivated decision-making
processes led to poor decision
quality, and poor organiza-
tional performance. I felt
strongly that these processes
and their end outcomes were
a disservice to the organi-
zation’s potential, and the
available but untapped collec-
tive intelligence that resided
within them.”