SWEN.CO is an online ecosystem for journalism. We create AI tools and web experiences that allow journalists to connect directly with all global audiences; on a social platform designed for news.

THE SWEN ORIGIN STORY

MISSION: We Empower Humanity With Information.

VISION: We Are Creating A World Where Every Human On Planet Earth, Has Access To High Quality, Accurate Information.

VALUES: Leadership, Passion, Accountability, Commitment, Transparency, Integrity.

We build SWEN products in concert with our customers because co-creation drives loyalty and advocacy for SWEN solutions.

Chief Creative

FIDEL ION

The Founder of SWEN is an experienced international technology leader with a passion/obsession for broadcast journalism (C4-News/ DEMOCRIO/The Network 2011) and a natural flair for global leadership (EU Ambassador) with hands on experience blitzscaling AI R&D at Amazon Alexa AI and Babylon Health.

Chief Scientist

DR catherine breslin

Will oversee AI scientific research & development + IP creation. She holds a First-Class Degree in Computer Science (University of Oxford) and a PhD in AI/Engineering/Automatic Speech Recognition (University of Cambridge). Catherine brings her experience building Alexa AI from the ground up. To build ASK‘ SWEN AI.

Chief Technologist

sverre sundsal

Will guide software development, having previously built Google’s search engine and self-serve advertising technology for news media conglomerate Schibsted PLC (world-famous for their newsmedia tech platform). He also brings insider insights for blitzscaling; having done this with Fidel at Babylon Health.

Engineering Director

imran ali

Will orchestrate SWEN’s global tech delivery-org so we can rapidly scale/ diversify engineering outputs. Imran has done this whilst at PublicisSapient leading global on/off-shore digital transformations. He was also on the BBC iPlayer founding team and has designed patents for SKY, to produce iPads first news app, SKYNEWS on iOS.

AI Engineering Lead

Omid roshani

Has almost 10 years experience in designing / implementing / testing / delivering complex AI powered back-end enterprise applications with web and mobile apps. Including self learning ML-algorithms. Omid is a true AI and engineering fullstacker able to use every programming language whilst creating innovative AI + ML models.

Fullstack Lead

DASH jangid

Has over 10 years experience in software design/ development. He was previously systems architecture lead for TalkTalk and was responsible for a 200+ team building the technology to power TalkTalk’s TV service. Dash has significant exp building complex, distributed-microservice architecture implementations for broadcast media.

Dev-Sec-ML-Ops Lead

DANIEL GONZALEZ

Has 15 years exp with highly complex, secure, AL/ML infra environments having recently deployed geospatial mapping infrastructure for the UK-Space-Agency. Daniel ensures SWENs dev/sec/ml-ops and infra are built for global scale and durability. To scale user growth + engineering talent density with zero dips in productivity.

Design Director

franklin virtucio JR.

Will ensure SWEN’s visual identity and product experiences are coherent and empowering. Frank has been a university professor for UX, animation and human-computer interaction with significant UX and UI research knowledge to drive our data driven design processes across all SWEN products, services and apps.

QA and Mission Lead

sachin arora

Is scrum certified and has over 6 years experience in QA automation engineering. Responsible for SWEN’s quality of delivery and quality of software, deploying bespoke scrum and automated testing tools into our devops environment to ensure our global-engineering-org is run like a well-programmed machine/team.

“The idea is to have a decentralised, disentangled company where small groups can innovate and build their piece of SWEN independently, but in concert with everyone else. the “SWEN FORMATION” is a team headed up by a Chief or Lead SWENr. The team size is just right when you can feed them all with 2 pizzas. Which limits a SWEN FORMATION to six, to nine people responsible for a mission or aim. Working IN-FORMATION allows us to horizontally scale execution outputs so we can build new products simultaneously”

FIDEL ION | THE FOUNDER

We have worked hard to create an organisational design that intentionally catalyses innovation, performance, collaboration and single-threaded ownership by linking Horizon delivery to pay and SWEN equity-ownership. In our experience this creates an unstoppable fly-wheel to drive execution speed and quality across every domain at SWEN allowing us to diversify innovation.

Linking performance to pay in an open and transparent way lets us have policies like unlimited holidays, trusting SWENr’s to take a well-deserved holiday at the end of a horizon, once they had done all they needed to do, to secure their bonus and/or equity.

We have designed our culture, management and org structure to encourage teams to take time off together in celebration of a completed Horizon. To build friendship bonds, cementing the SWEN-Familia ideology: Allowing people to do their best work with their best friends, at scale. Creating the best place to work.

The SWEN Org naturally promotes self-organizing leadership (holocracy) at every level of the corporate structure through single-threaded-ownership of a Mission, Horizon, Aim or Focus.

With end-of-horizon performance bonuses we further solidify in every SWENr the sense and urge towards forward motion and execution momentum, quality and performance. Producing a scalable high-performance proprietary-culture with everyone incentivized to help everyone beneath them in order to acheive their own goals.

We then link promotions to performance via ranked data from completed horizons. Producing a true data-driven meritocracy where the measure for performance is helping colleagues achieve shared goals through delegation of Visions into Missions, into Horizons et cetera.