41
by her senior year, she had become one
of the top 25 debaters in the country in
her field. “Frances was a math whiz, and
she loved political science,” Wunn says.
In competitive debate, you don’t get to
decide which side of the issue you argue
for. But Haugen had a strong moral com-
pass, and when she was put in a posi-
tion where she had to argue for some-
thing she disagreed with, she didn’t lean
back on “flash in the pan” theatrics, her
former coach remembers. Instead, she
would dig deeper to find evidence for an
argument she could make that wouldn’t
compromise her values. “Her moral con-
victions were strong enough, even at
that age, that she wouldn’t try to ma-
nipulate the evidence such that it would
go against her morality,” Wunn says.
When Haugen got to college, she real-
ized she needed to master another form
of communication. “Because my parents
were both professors, I was used to hav-
ing dinner-table conversations where,
like, someone would have read an in-
teresting article that day, and would
basically do a five-minute presentation,”
she says. “And so I got to college, and
I had no idea how to make small talk.”
Today, Haugen is talkative and re-
laxed. She’s in a good mood because she
got to “sleep in” until 8:30 a.m.—later
than most other days on her European
tour, she says. At one point, she asks if
I’ve seen the TV series Archer and mo-
mentarily breaks into a song from the
animated sitcom.
After graduating from Olin College
of Engineering—where, beyond the art
of conversation, she studied the sci-
ence of computer engineering—Haugen
moved to Silicon Valley. During a stint at
Google, she helped write the code for Se-
cret Agent Cupid, the precursor to popu-
lar dating app Hinge. She took time off
to undertake an M.B.A. at Harvard, a rar-
ity for software engineers in Silicon Val-
ley and something she would later credit
with helping her diagnose some of the
organizational flaws within Facebook.
But in 2014, while back at Google, Hau-
gen’s trajectory was knocked off course.
Haugen has celiac disease, a condi-
tion that means her immune system at-
tacks her own tissues if she eats gluten.
(Hence the sushi.) She “did not take it
seriously enough” in her 20s, she says.
After repeated trips to the hospital, doc-
tors eventually realized she had a blood
clot in her leg that had been there for
anywhere between 18 months and
two years. Her leg turned purple, and
she ended up in the hospital for over a
month. There she had an allergic reac-
tion to a drug and nearly bled to death.
She suffered nerve damage in her hands
and feet, a condition known as neuropa-
thy, from which she still suffers today.
“I think it really changes your priori-
ties when you’ve almost died,” Haugen
says. “Everything that I had defined my-
self [by] before, I basically lost.” She was
used to being the wunderkind who could
achieve anything. Now, she needed help
cooking her meals. “My recovery made
me feel much more powerful, because I
rebuilt my body,” she says. “I think the
△
Haugen leaves the Houses of
Parliament in London on Oct. 25 after
giving evidence to U.K. lawmakers
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