THE WITCHY AMBITION OF SIMA SISTANI

WeightWatchers' CEO was tasked with helping her company catch up in the digital age. Now she's scrambling to keep it relevant in the Ozempic age

- LAUREN GOODE

SCHAUB'S BURGERS AND melted ice cream: Those are the food items logged in my memory from the night I first met Sima Sistani. This was a decade ago, before she became the chief executive of WeightWatchers. Sistani was working at Yahoo, and I had just moved to Silicon Valley. A mutual friend connected us, and Sistani invited me over for dinner. I accepted with "What can I bring?"¶ This is how I ended up buying charcoal-colored beef patties at her preferred butcher. That night we talked about Yahoo's content business. We talked about Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In. We talked for so long the ice cream became soup in our bowls. It was some kind of indoctrination into the Valley. It was also evident that Sistani wanted to be someone. Her sharp observations about the tech industry continued long into the night. What wasn't obvious-because why would it be, and whose business was it anyway-was that Sistani was logging her food in the Weight Watchers app. She and her husband had recently had their first baby, Adrian, and she was attempting to lose the weight she'd gained during pregnancy.

Sistani's career has been a winding one. After jobs at Goldman Sachs, Creative Artists Agency, and a short-lived tech startup, she became the head of media for Yahoo-owned Tumblr. Then the VP of media for Meerkat, a buzzy livestreaming video startup. She and a Meerkat founder decided to stealthily launch a second live-video app called Houseparty. In 2019, Epic Games acquired that venture for a reported $35 million.