Alexandra Debow

In her own account she writes that during the COVID-19 pandemic she left Hong Kong and lived in Miami and Toronto, where she met and reconnected with family members, and that they later returned home to Hong Kong so that she could graduate from high school in May.⁠[1]

In 2020 she began studying data science at NYUNew York UniversityNew York University is a private university in New York City, founded in 1831, and one of the largest private universities in the United States.Open the full entry Shanghai. She recalls that because of China’s strict COVID-19 regulations she could not leave mainland China during her stay, entering at 18 and leaving at 20; for two years she could not see people she had known all her life, including her family, and needed to create a new family in China. Through NYU Shanghai and the city’s expansive entrepreneurial network she found a new home, connecting with NYU Shanghai’s Program on Creativity + Innovation and with like-minded students and professors.⁠[2][1][3]

She recalls that after almost two years her Shanghai chapter also ended and she went on to study at NYU Paris, where the diversity of the student body let her explore ideas outside her usual sphere; she also took a train trip from Cape Town to Dar es Salaam, which gave her firsthand insight into global cultures that she says still influences her approach to learning and collaboration. She then came to San Francisco, where amid the wave of summer tech interns and Silicon Valley slang she found a new community of friends; NYU Tandon School of Engineering writes that she interned in San Francisco.⁠[1][4]

On August 31, 2022, she moved from San Francisco to New York; she writes that from that day she stopped saying goodbye and began saying “See you again somewhere somehow.” That year, to fulfil a lifelong dream of living in New York City, she transferred to New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering to study computer engineering; NYU Tandon School of Engineering writes that she came to Brooklyn to enter NYU Tandon. She explained in an interview that she learned the most when challenged and outside her comfort zone; she wanted to build something, wanted to be around more engineers, saw New York as a hub for technology and networking, and felt that computer engineering would help her accelerate building things.⁠[1][2][4]

In fall 2022, as a junior at NYU Tandon, she began building social apps, and within a few months the project became swsh; the company’s Medium post says the team started out in college dorms. The name swsh is an acronym of “somewhere somehow,” taken from the phrase “See you again, somewhere, somehow” that she adopted instead of saying goodbye; the company’s full name is Somewhere Somehow, and Washington Square News writes that the company was originally called “somewhere, somehow.”⁠[1][5][4][2]

Business Next wrote in November 2023 that she co-founded swsh in 2022 with her close friends Weilyn Chong and Nathan Ahn (the article spells Ahn’s surname “Ann”); Washington Square News describes the two co-founders as her high school friends. TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry introduces Weilyn Chong as an economics and computer science student at Princeton UniversityPrinceton UniversityPrinceton University is a private university and Ivy League member in Princeton, New Jersey. Chartered on October 22, 1746 as the College of New Jersey, it moved to Princeton in 1756 and adopted its present name in 1896. Undergraduate education leads to A.B. and B.S.E. degrees and emphasizes small-group discussion, independent research and residential college life. Graduate education spans the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and engineering. As of October 2026, Christopher L. Eisgruber was president. Its 2026–27 operating budget was $3.407 billion, including $342 million for undergraduate aid.Open the full entry, a board member of the Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center and a co-founder of The Entrepreneurs Network, and Nathan Ahn as a computer science student at Yale UniversityYale UniversityYale University is a research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Its predecessor, the Collegiate School, received a charter in 1701. Trustees chose New Haven in 1716; the institution became Yale College in 1718 and Yale University in 1887. Yale provides undergraduate, graduate and professional education and has 14 undergraduate residential colleges. As of October 2026, its president was Maurie McInnis, who took office in July 2024. In 2026, Yale expanded aid for incoming undergraduates and celebrated its 325th anniversary.Open the full entry who had been a software engineering intern at MetaMetaMeta (Meta Platforms, Inc.) is a publicly listed American technology company, renamed from Facebook in 2021, that operates social communication, digital advertising, virtual reality, smart glasses and artificial intelligence businesses.Open the full entry. A TechCrunch Brand Studio page says Chong was born in Singapore and raised in Singapore, Hong Kong and the Netherlands. She is chief executive officer, Chong chief operating officer and Ahn chief technology officer.⁠[6][2][7][8][9]

She recalls that the team first built and tested swsh with friends around her at NYU, quickly found traction among them and then contacted the NYU Entrepreneurial Institute; its venture associate Darren Yee became her mentor and encouraged the team to join the NYU Startup Bootcamp, where they learned rapid user interviewing and testing, and she also enjoyed exploring the Tandon MakerSpace. As the semester wound down the team applied to the Berkley Center for Entrepreneurship’s Entrepreneurs Challenge and to the J-Term Startup Sprint and was accepted to both; she writes that the Startup Sprint taught the team tactical lessons in forming theses, validating and invalidating them, and iteration cycles, and that the team made lifelong friends with other NYU startup founders and mentors.⁠[1]

In spring 2023 the swsh team became finalists in the Entrepreneurs Challenge; the NYU Tandon School of Engineering news story describes swsh as a finalist in the Stern 300K Entrepreneurs Challenge. She writes that the entrepreneurial waves the team built within NYU started spreading as they met more and more entrepreneurially minded students, with whom they formed startup communities, ambassador programs and events.⁠[1][4]

In September 2023 swsh released a public beta, at first open only to students at NYU and Princeton and available only on iOS, with an Android version coming soon and an official launch planned for early 2024. The app was then a mobile version of the party game “Most Likely To”: every night at 9 PM it posed five daily questions, users voted among their friends, earned superlatives and points based on the votes, and could debate in a comment section. She explained that the questions were generated with OpenAIOpenAIOpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product organization founded in 2015 that develops the GPT model series, ChatGPT, Codex and a developer API, and conducts research on image, speech, video and intelligent agents. After its 2025 restructuring, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its growth has involved large-scale fundraising and compute partnerships, and has also been accompanied by controversies over governance, copyright, privacy and AI safety.Open the full entry’s ChatGPTChatGPTChatGPT is a generative AI assistant launched by OpenAI on November 30, 2022. Through websites and applications, it provides conversation, writing, coding, search, file analysis, and image and voice interaction. It evolved from a free research preview into personal, enterprise and education plans, gradually adding deep research, Study mode and cross-application task execution. Its use has prompted continuing discussions about factual accuracy, personal privacy, copyright, education and teen safety.Open the full entry and curated by a four-person team. The team planned to add features such as posting photos after an event and sharing voice memos, which she said were meant to help people keep in touch after meeting in person.⁠[7][6][5]

The Business Next article noted that swsh had not published how it defined “friends” and a “friend circle,” so it was unclear how the friend options for each question were generated or to whom replies would be shown, and users might see strangers in the voting results among their close friends; Startup Gathering, the outlet that wrote the article, emailed the team and received no direct reply, and the team said it was still developing new features and would disclose the game details in later product updates.⁠[6]

That month she was invited to speak at TechCrunch DisruptTechCrunch DisruptTechCrunch Disrupt is a technology and startup conference organized by TechCrunch, combining interviews, product demonstrations, startup competitions and industry networking for founders and investors.Open the full entry in San Francisco, in a session called “Gen Z Founders You Should Know”; a TechCrunch Brand Studio page records that the breakout session was hosted by Sam Wiener, host of the Techsetters podcast, and that she and Weilyn Chong were the interviewees. She said that at first some attendees doubted that the two were invited speakers, and that they faced ageism, but that presenting their work onstage was rewarding.⁠[4][8][7]

On October 17, 2023, she published a post on Medium under the name “Ali Debow” announcing that swsh had raised a $1.7 million pre-seed round co-led by Stellation Capital and MaC Venture Capital, with angel investors including Glenn Solomon, Cory Levy of Z Fellows, Cyril Berdugo, Patrick de Picciotto, Ansh Nanda and Richard Li; the money was to speed up product development and iteration, fund key product and engineering hires and expand go-to-market efforts. TechCrunch published a story the same day, saying the money would help build the product and bring on engineering hires; Business Next put the sum at about NT$54.8 million and wrote that the team had taken less than a year to build the app and its beta and that the money would go toward features such as voice messages and photo posting and toward hiring app developers.⁠[5][7][6]

The post says that since fall 2022 the team had run invite-only TestFlight betas, on-campus activations and guerrilla marketing at NYU and Princeton, run a “see you somewhere somehow” campaign, spoken at TechCrunch Disrupt, made key product and engineering hires and obtained O-1 visas, which it calls a crucial milestone for international founders.⁠[5]

Peter Boyce, founder of Stellation Capital, said in the TechCrunch story that consumer social has a history of being reinvented by young people, with Facebook, Instagram and Snap as examples, and that if things work out a young founding team like swsh could earn its spot next by inventing a new consumer platform.⁠[7][6]

Sources differ on the amount raised at this stage: NYU Tandon School of Engineering wrote on October 10, 2023, only that swsh had “recently closed” a pre-seed round, without giving an amount; Washington Square News wrote in May 2024 that during her junior year she raised “millions of dollars” in venture capital for swsh, and that the team had raised $2 million the previous year.⁠[4][2]

On November 10, 2023, the NYU Entrepreneurship blog published her article “The Journey to Somewhere Somehow,” about her many moves, the origin of the name swsh and the help the team received from NYU’s entrepreneurship programs. The author note at the end describes her as “Tandon '24” and as co-founder and CEO of Somewhere Somehow (swsh), whereas the NYU Tandon School of Engineering story of October 10, 2023, gives her as a computer engineering student of the class of “’25.”⁠[1][4]

On March 20, 2024, the Thiel Foundation announced the 20 members of the 2024 class of the Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry; she was second on the list, which gives “Hong Kong” after her name. The announcement describes her project in these terms: swsh will capture memories of every celebration, birthday and vacation with an AI-powered shared photo album, so that those unforgettable experiences can happen again and again. It states that the Thiel Fellowship, established in 2011, provides each fellow with $100,000 and access to a network of tech founders, investors, scientists and former fellows.⁠[10]

Washington Square News wrote that the fellowship provides $100,000 for fellows to take two years off school and work full time on a startup, and that she was taking a gap year from NYU to grow swsh full time, as were her two co-founders.⁠[2]

On May 2, 2024, the NYU student newspaper Washington Square News published an interview with her. The article opens by saying that she had always dreaded saying goodbye to people she had just met after nights out, and that after many missed connections she created an app to help people stay in touch with new friends. By then swsh had become a shared photo album: users create an album, add photos from a night out and share it with the people who were there; anyone in the album can tag themselves and others, including their Instagram and Snapchat accounts, and the app uses facial recognition to filter the photos for each user; after a party everyone can upload and download photos whether or not they have the app. She explained that she grew up in Hong Kong, where it was hard to stay in touch with people, and that she wanted to go deeper with a few meaningful connections after parties; she felt existing photo albums lacked AI features, such as helping users find their best photos or choosing which ones to share with a family group chat.⁠[2]

The interview states that swsh had thousands of users and that she was working on it full time with a focus on college students. Over the previous year the team had built five apps, including a social calendar and a personality game; she said the team realized they were using swsh themselves, which convinced them it solved a real problem. She and her co-founders worked with an engineer and a designer from a headquarters in New York’s Flatiron district, talking to users and investors, recruiting engineers and pursuing partnerships to expand swsh among college students.⁠[2]

She said swsh was partnering with fraternities and sororities at Vanderbilt University, Syracuse University and NYU to build a photo-sharing culture among students nationwide; her goals included reaching 100,000 users and high retention, and having people share swsh photos to Instagram stories and use the app at summer parties. The company was working with fraternities and sororities at suburban or rural schools with large Greek life, whose members take party photos and upload them to swsh, sometimes with a photographer sent by swsh; she said the team was partnering with them in the summer to launch with them in the fall and would scale its user base in the following months.⁠[2]

On August 1, 2024, the UNinvested podcast hosted by Sahil Seth released episode 32, “The 22-Year-Old Dropout Revolutionizing Social Apps,” with her as the guest. The show notes describe her as an NYU dropout and Thiel Fellow who founded swsh, a social photo-sharing app, and list topics including her biggest failure and the lessons from building five different apps, why she chose entrepreneurship over a traditional career path, the role of community and risk-taking in her journey, advice for young entrepreneurs on taking risks and de-stigmatizing failure, the path from early ideas to the successful launch of swsh, balancing social life with the startup grind, the role of mentors and networks in a startup’s success, strategies for cold outreach, the significance of product-market fit, and balancing founder instincts with user feedback.⁠[11]

On October 10, 2024, TechCrunch published a story on swsh’s shift to shared photo albums. It says swsh launched the previous year (2023) as a poll game similar to “Most Likely To,” later pivoted to the crowded market for photo-album sharing, where its rivals include Dispo, Lapse and Sunshine, and relaunched in February; Fortune, by contrast, wrote in 2026 that swsh launched in 2022 as a shared photo album for college campuses.⁠[9][12]

The features it describes include filtering out photos with alcoholic drinks and red Solo cups and requesting that certain photos be hidden (for example ones in which someone looks visibly intoxicated or has their eyes closed); an opt-in AI facial recognition tool that finds photos of oneself, with hosts able to limit users to seeing only their own photos; automatic tagging that lets people find someone by name to reconnect; and individual profiles and collaborative groups with friends. swsh also targeted college fraternities and sororities, helping their presidents manage events and large volumes of photos, and planned to roll out later that fall customized albums with themes for celebrations, holidays and concerts, and “Recaps,” a collection of photos from past events.⁠[9]

In the story she says that people routinely asked for photos after parties, which she calls a “social contract,” and that she realized there was a strong need for the best shared photo album.⁠[9]

The story says swsh still lagged far behind its competitors in popularity and gives a Sensor Tower estimate of about 3,093 installs, while swsh said its user count was growing 47% month over month. swsh’s most recent round brought in $700,000 of new capital, led by BoxGroup, with participants including Alexandra Burbey, an investor at Sound Ventures; Amy Moussavi, a former AppleAppleApple is a public technology company founded in 1976 and headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Its business includes the iPhone, Mac, iPad, wearables, and services such as digital content, payments, and cloud storage. The company builds its product system through in-house hardware, operating systems, and services.Open the full entry employee; David Rosenberg; Krish Jayaram, a former director of product at Snap; and Sergei Sorokin, a former vice president of product at Discord; swsh had raised $2.4 million in total.⁠[9]

On June 16, 2026, swsh announced a $4 million seed round led by Game Changers Ventures, with Stellation Capital, SignalFire and MaC Venture Capital participating; angel investors included Scooter Braun, Guy Oseary, Julie Greenwald, Cory Levy, Hans Tung, Austin Rief of Morning Brew, Chris Detert, an executive at the influencer marketing firm Influential, and Shachar Scott, a former senior leader at Meta, among others. Fortune’s exclusive that day called her a Thiel Fellow and the founder and chief executive of swsh, which it described as a fan engagement platform for live experiences; Music Business Worldwide wrote that swsh is headquartered in New York.⁠[12][13][14]

Fortune wrote that she was building a photo-sharing app for sorority members when she found the opportunity; swsh launched in 2022 as a shared photo album for college campuses, used by sororities, fraternity parties and anyone who wanted to find photos of themselves from the night before. Users began taking swsh albums to sports and artist events, which showed her that brands and artists also wanted to connect with fans, so she restructured the business: the fan-facing side stayed the same, while the back end is sold to Sony, Warner, UMG and “hundreds of artists” who use it on tour to collect fan uploads. swsh routes fan-captured photos and videos into AI-parsed media libraries that can identify sponsor logos in crowd shots, clothing and merchandise, and demographic patterns by time of night; she likened this to having “100,000 documentary filmmakers” capturing what happened. Addressing the class actions that AI photo-discovery tools have faced under state biometric privacy laws, she said swsh puts a consent screen covering rights ownership and commercial use on every upload, that fans cannot upload without agreeing, and that each partner has a content review workflow in which uploads can be held in a waiting room before going live.⁠[12][13]

In the funding announcement she said that brands, artists, teams and agencies rely heavily on live experiences to engage audiences but often leave events without structured insight into who participated or what resonated, and that swsh turns fan-captured content into shared albums that organizations own, providing content libraries and first-party engagement data. She said fans already document concerts, games and brand activations, and that swsh turns those moments into measurable data while strengthening superfan communities.⁠[13][14]

Digital Music News wrote that swsh was four years old and had seen a record number of users the previous month, and that its next steps were building out the team, upgrading the core product and expanding into adjacent sectors, including sports and brand and experiential agencies that manage large activation portfolios. Music Business Worldwide wrote that the new capital would support swsh’s expansion across music, sports and brand experiential marketing and was earmarked for team expansion, product and infrastructure, acquisition channels and enterprise partnerships.⁠[14][13]

Roger EhrenbergRoger EhrenbergRoger Ehrenberg is an American venture capitalist who founded the early-stage investment firm IA Ventures, led the seed round of Wise, and is now managing partner of Eberg Capital, an investment firm focused on sports.Open the full entry, managing partner of lead investor Game Changers Ventures, said live experiences are becoming one of the most important environments for understanding audiences, that as organizations shift toward first-party audience relationships swsh is the infrastructure for capturing the moments that define live culture, and that in a world of infinite AI-generated content “real human UGC will stand out and outperform.”⁠[13][14]

As of November 2026 the team list on the “About” page of swsh’s website gives her as CEO, Weilyn Chong as COO and Nathan Ahn as CTO, together with an account executive, a content lead and a design engineer. The page says swsh announced a $4 million seed round in June 2026 and has raised nearly $7 million to date, and it lists customers including ForbesForbesForbes is an American business media brand that began with Forbes magazine, founded by B.C. Forbes in 1917. It is known for rankings such as the Forbes 400, the World’s Billionaires list and 30 Under 30, and operates Forbes.com, ForbesLive events and licensed editions in 81 countries. Since 2014 a majority stake has been held by the Hong Kong investment group Integrated Whale Media; a 2021 plan to list on the New York Stock Exchange through a special purpose acquisition company was terminated in 2022. It is headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey.Open the full entry, Live NationLive Nation EntertainmentLive Nation Entertainment, Inc. describes itself as the world’s leading live entertainment company, made up of Ticketmaster, Live Nation Concerts and Live Nation Media & Sponsorship.Open the full entry, Universal, Rolling Loud, EDC and Insomniac; the copyright holder shown on the page is Somewhere Somehow Inc.⁠[15]

She was born and raised in Hong Kong and is Canadian. She writes that Hong Kong is a city of constant movement, where she learned to make friends quickly and to say goodbye just as fast, with family and friends scattered around the world; TechCrunch writes that in Hong Kong she met many expatriates who never stayed for long. Business Next wrote that she had lived in five cities for school and internships.⁠[4][1][7][3][6]

Sources give differing ages: Business Next gave her age as 25 in November 2023; the title of episode 32 of the UNinvested podcast calls her a “22-Year-Old Dropout”; Fortune gave her age as 24 in June 2026.⁠[6][11][12]

Before founding swsh she started Alive Vibe, a virtual events marketplace that connected more than 30,000 members of Gen Z during the COVID-19 pandemic. In Shanghai she started Entrepreneurs in Action, a founders’ dinner series; The Entrepreneurs Network, a podcast network for women entrepreneurs; and the WHY WAIT? Collective. NYU Tandon School of Engineering and her TechCrunch author bio call the WHY WAIT? Collective China’s first Gen Z-led women’s entrepreneurship conference, while the TechCrunch story calls it the first Gen Z-led women’s entrepreneurship event in Shanghai. Her TechCrunch author bio gives The Entrepreneurs Network six shows and an audience of more than 20,000, and NYU Tandon School of Engineering writes that the podcast network attracts an estimated 20,000 listeners; the TechCrunch story lists Weilyn Chong as a co-founder of The Entrepreneurs Network, and a TechCrunch Brand Studio page says Chong co-founded a network of six podcast shows supporting women entrepreneurs around the world.⁠[4][3][7][8]

She worked at AlibabaAlibabaAlibaba is a technology group focused on commerce, cloud computing, and AI. Founded in 1999 by 18 people led by Jack Ma, it received a major investment from Yahoo in 2005.Open the full entry’s Entrepreneurial Program in Hangzhou and on GGV Capital’s infrastructure investment team.⁠[8][3]

She argues that social media conflates friendship with followers, that back-and-forth text chains are draining, and that there should be a middle ground; she divides existing platforms into one-way announcement platforms such as LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry, Instagram and Twitter and purpose-driven messaging apps such as WhatsApp, iMessage and Telegram. In 2023 she said, “Social media stretches wide, it does not stretch deep,” and that her feeds were governed by “an algorithm that knows everyone but no one.”⁠[7][6][4]

In Fortune’s 2026 story she said that the entire marketing industry is mid-pivot, that search engine optimization was gamed and that influencers lost the room; she said, “There's a degradation of trust,” adding that people do not trust one brief photo from a Taylor Swift concert but do trust seeing 20,000 videos in their feed.⁠[12]

swsh: Official website: https://www.joinswsh.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[15]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[16]

LinkedIn: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandradebow/ (opens in a new window).⁠[15][3]

X: Public account: https://x.com/ali_debow (opens in a new window).⁠[3]