The Calm Power of Anna Zeiter. While the Whole World Is Watching.
PORTRAIT. Anna Zeiter. Written by the Editorial Team.
She left a senior corporate role to take on the most entrenched forces in technology, with twenty people and no guarantee it works. A privacy lawyer who talks about reading energy, improvisation and Reiki. None of it is what you would expect.
Say the words privacy lawyer, media law professor, and former Chief Privacy Officer of a global technology company, and most people brace themselves for dry.
Anna Zeiter knows this. She has spent years correcting the assumption. "Law professor sounds really, really boring," she says, laughing. "I always need to convince people, no, I am not boring, and we can do something fun here."
What she talks about instead is energy. Which rooms give it to her and which ones take it away. How she reads a negotiation before a word of the deal is discussed. The improvisation theatre classes that taught her to walk into a live television studio without flinching. And, quietly, almost as an afterthought at the end of a long conversation, the fact that she is a qualified Reiki master.
None of this was supposed to be the headline. Anna Zeiter is Chief Executive and Co-Founder of W Social, the European social network built on identity verification and human connection, and titular professor and lecturer in European data law at the University of Bern.
She spent more than a decade at eBay, latterly as Chief Privacy Officer, before stepping out to build something of her own at forty five, an age at which she says most of the pressure to prove herself had already fallen away.
Consider what that actually means. She is running a company of roughly twenty people, in its first year, still raising money and still building the product, and the competitors are among the largest and best defended businesses ever created: near limitless capital, billions of users, and decades of accumulated advantage.
She is doing it in public, with the whole world watching and commenting, on a platform that does not yet fully exist.
By any conventional measure, the odds are not close, and she is entirely aware of it. It simply does not appear to slow her down.
This is a portrait of what sits underneath the résumé: a leader who runs a fast-moving technology company on instinct, positivity and a great deal of quiet, considered energy management, and who is refreshingly open about all three.
Not as Different as It Looks
The move from privacy law into building a technology company from scratch looks, on paper, like a leap. Zeiter does not experience it that way.
"I actually thought it would be a big difference to go from legal privacy compliance to business. In the end, it is very similar, because I have a team, I have a budget, and I have a goal."
The stakeholders barely changed either, she says: authorities, media, users, competitors, all present in a compliance career and all present now. What has changed is the scale of exposure, and a myth about the top job that she arrived at CEO believing and quickly had to unlearn.
"I always thought, when I am the CEO, I do not have a boss. I think as a CEO you have many more bosses, because you have the shareholders, you have the board, then there is the media, there are regulators, other stakeholders who want to have a say. Everyone knows something about social media, and everyone has something to say."
She had also imagined the role as largely strategic. "In reality," she says, "you have to deal with the stuff that no one else wants to deal with in the company." The specialised teams she had at eBay, one for trademarks, one for government relations, one for communications, do not exist yet at a company of twenty people. Everything lands on a much smaller number of desks, including hers.
Ten Minutes on a Zoom Call
The idea for W did not arrive fully formed. It arrived as a feeling Zeiter could not put down.
It began at the Munich Security Conference, a moment she describes simply as a wake up call: the sense that Europe needed its own social media platform, that everyone seemed to agree on this, and that nobody was building it.
"At one point I felt Europe needs a social media platform, and I felt like someone needs to do that. Why is nobody else doing that?"
She talked to her network, ran informal workshops with friends, and kept looking for the right vehicle while still working for eBay. Nothing quite fit, until her husband, exasperated, forced the issue.
"My husband was like, Anna, you have been annoying me for months that you want to build a social media platform for Europe. And Ingmar told him the same thing. So he said, "I think you two need to speak."
The three of them got on a Zoom call together, Zeiter, her husband, and Ingmar Rentzhog, who would become her Co-Founder and Chair. "My husband was sitting there," she says, "like, what the hell is happening here." Zeiter opened by offering to help in the way she assumed made sense: as a lawyer, a privacy adviser, perhaps a board member.
"I said, look, if you ever need a lawyer, a privacy officer, a board member for your new social media company, think of me. And he said, no, we are looking for a CEO, would you be up for that role?"
She had never run a company. Her honest first reaction, she says, was closer to disbelief than confidence.
"I thought, oh my god, I would die to get that role. But then I thought, I have no clue, I have never run a company. And then I thought: what would a man say in my situation? And I said, sure, I will send you my application."
The decision that would eventually put her on stage in Davos took, by her own account, ten to fifteen minutes.
What would a man say in my situation? She said yes, and sent the application.
Naive Enough to Start
People tell her, often, that the scale of what she is attempting does not add up. A first-time chief executive, a young company, and on the other side of the board some of the wealthiest and most powerful businesses ever built. She repeats the objection cheerfully, in the voice it is usually delivered in.
"People sometimes say, oh Anna, aren't you a bit naive? Who are you?"
Her answer is not a strategic riposte. It is closer to a shrug, and it is delivered with a laugh.
"We just want to build an alternative. It cannot be that difficult."
That lightness is not a lack of seriousness. It is, she argues, a conscious operating principle, and the reason the company exists at all.
"Building a social media platform is super, super difficult. If I had started with the problems first, we would never have done that. It also needs a bit of naivety."
Her logic runs the other way round. Aim very high regardless, she reasons, because even falling short of an ambitious target beats succeeding at a timid one. Start by cataloguing every obstacle, and you never begin at all.
"It is always good to start something. It is better than not starting anything and then being in bigger trouble in four years."
She is unusually comfortable with not knowing how it ends. That comfort, more than any conviction about the outcome, is what allows her to work at this pace without being crushed by the size of the thing she is standing next to.
If she had started with the problems, she says, there would be no company at all.
Throw Love at People
Ask Zeiter what she is building beyond the product, and the answer is cultural before it is technical.
"We are hiring very positive people, and we want to spread the positive energy. We believe that people are generally good, so we give people the benefit of the doubt. If you are a nice, generally nice person, just throw love at other people, and what shall they do?"
This is not confined to the team. When a competitor or a public critic goes after her directly, her instinct is not to escalate.
"Even with someone who is attacking me, I reach out and try to call them. I say, hey, can we have a chat, I think there is a misunderstanding here. We are both humans, and I assume we do not want to fight."
She is frank that it does not always work. Some people, she says, simply do not want to talk. Others do, and the conversation resolves what a public exchange never would have.
The philosophy scales in a way she did not fully anticipate. Because she models the behaviour, welcoming new users personally when she has time, her team began doing the same without being asked.
New users on the platform have started welcoming each other the same way, a small ripple that now runs three generations deep. Somewhere along the way, the internet noticed.
"Someone said Anna Zeiter is like the captain on a cruise ship, saying hello to everyone. And people made memes about it. But why not? Saying hi to new joiners gives them a good feeling."
The Night the Machine Switched On
Launch week ended, fittingly, with a party. Zeiter does not drink, so she was driving Ingmar Rentzhog back from the celebrations when he opened his phone to check the reaction online.
"He was like, haha, look on X, so many fun memes about us. And then suddenly it was, whoa, whoa, whoa, let us wait a second. There is apparently a bot machine going on. We saw new fake news about us every second. That was crazy. As if someone had switched it on."
Claims about the company multiplied within minutes, at a pace and a uniformity she says no genuine human conversation produces.
"That was definitely not a human campaign. This is the proof of concept. These are bots farms in the background, and someone switched them on."
The irony was not lost on her: a platform built to reduce exactly this kind of automated, coordinated activity had just become a live demonstration of the problem, days after launch. She and her co-founder chose to treat it that way rather than as a crisis.
"Sometimes haters are also good, because haters give you relevance."
It became, in her telling, an unplanned proof of concept, and a useful one. Traditional media picked up the story and, in trying to correct it, gave the company far more attention than a quiet launch would have earned.
Deciding What Deserves an Answer
None of this is handled alone. Zeiter is clear that knowing what to respond to and what to ignore took practice, and rests on a partnership rather than a single instinct.
"Ingmar is extremely experienced with public communication and investor communication. He knows exactly when to react and when not to react. I am, by training, a media lawyer. He knows the practical side, I know the legal side, and this is why we work well together."
The rule underneath it is simple, and she says it without hesitation.
"The truth is: never freak out, and never directly engage with the haters. Stay your ground. If you believe in something, just continue."
There was, she notes, an odd comfort in the shape of the criticism itself. Attacked from one direction as too radical and from the other as too establishment, in the same week, she read it as a signal rather than a wound.
"It was so exaggerated that at one point I thought, that is great, because the centre of society seems to be happy. If the extremes cannot decide whether we are left wing or right wing, we must be somewhere in the middle, which is true. And that is the market we want to reach: the silent centre."
If the extremes cannot agree on what you are, you are probably exactly where you meant to be.
Bringing Back Hope
The emails that have stayed with her most are not the technical ones.
"Among the messages we have received over the last couple of months, many people said: you bring back hope. You bring back pride to Europe."
She holds that warmly and honestly. "That is a lot of burden on our shoulders, I have to say," she admits, before adding that it also fuels the team on the days the work is hardest. Nobody, she is quick to say, knows how the story ends.
"We do not know how everything plays out. Maybe we will be medium, maybe big, maybe we will be gone in five years, nobody knows. But it is always better to try than not to start anything and be in bigger trouble later."
The Holy Lunch Break
Ask Anna for her secret sauce and she does not reach for a hack. She reaches for a rhythm, one she has protected for years and refuses to apologise for.
"I work from home, and I try to be with the team at least once a month in Sweden. When I work from home, I start around half past eight, work until noon, and then I have a two hour lunch break. I call it the holy lunch break."
The lunch break is not administrative. It is swimming in the lake, seeing friends, tanning, running errands, anything that takes her fully out of work mode before the afternoon begins. She traces the rhythm back to her eBay years, working California hours from Europe, and has kept it purposefully ever since.
"Sometimes when I am in Stockholm with the team, I am really like, where is my holy lunch break? I need that, because otherwise I feel like I am in a hamster wheel, and I do not have time to reflect on what I am doing."
The week itself is planned in advance, not improvised. "On Sunday, I plan the week," she says, and every day carries a quiet question underneath it: is there enough time built in for herself, even half an hour with a coffee and a newspaper, alone.
"I need time alone to reflect. If I am always caught up in the daily drama, the daily busyness, I never take a step back, and I never see the full picture."
The energy audit extends into how she reads people and rooms, a skill she now applies as readily to hiring decisions and partnership meetings as to her own calendar.
"I try to be very thoughtful about what situations give me energy and what takes it away. We all know the feeling of walking into a room and thinking, amazing people, something is happening here, or walking into a room and thinking, everyone is sucking my energy. I try to listen to my gut feeling a lot, in negotiations, in hiring. Do they add good energy to the team?"
Water runs through nearly everything that restores her.
"For me it is being close to water. Being in the water, swimming, being at the lake, sailing, being in nature gives me energy. I need to carve out at least one hour a day to go outside, be close to water, and be alone."
She laughs at the idea that any of this makes her introverted in the conventional sense. "Nobody would guess that I am an introvert, because I am happy to spend time with people," she says. "Maybe I am an ambivert, a little bit of both."
Calm Brainwaves, Better Decisions
Underneath the rhythm is a conviction she holds with something close to scientific certainty.
"I feel I can only execute well when I am super calm. There are studies about brainwave activity, and when your brainwaves are calm, you can execute better. I know exactly when I am stressed, probably my brainwaves are high frequency, and then I am not effective. So I calm myself down, usually during the lunch break. Then I am calm, then I execute."
She has also made peace with not being a morning person, against a great deal of leadership orthodoxy that insists otherwise.
"I am also not an early morning person. I never believed in this idea that you need to wake up at five. No."
The Japanese Art of Managing Energy
Near the end of the conversation, almost in passing, Zeiter offers the detail that reframes everything before it.
"Five years ago I started Reiki, the Japanese art of managing energy, and for a couple of months now, I have been a Reiki master. During the courses I learned how to protect my energy, how to receive it, and how to spread it to other people."
She does not present it as mysticism. She presents it as a practical training that maps directly onto the job.
"I feel at W I am doing nothing more than gathering good people, sending them in the right direction, spreading energy. Of course we need to build the technology too, but that helped me a lot."
She is equally clear about where she draws her own line with it.
"It is a bit esoteric, but you can take parts of it and use it for business purposes. I am not so focused on the esoteric side, more on: how can I protect myself."
Gathering good people, sending them in the right direction, spreading energy. That, she says, is the whole job.
Learning to Be Seen
Visibility did not come naturally to Anna, and she does not pretend otherwise.
"It was never my goal to be in the centre of attention. I am a rather introverted person, but now I feel like I have to do it."
What prepared her, unexpectedly, was a course she had taken years earlier for reasons that had nothing to do with running a company.
"What I did a couple of years ago: improvisation theatre. That helped a lot. I tell myself, this attention is not about me, it is about the project, and I am playing a role here. It is just a show, and I see it as a fun show."
The training was tested for real earlier this year, when she was invited onto German television, ZDF and Tagesschau, during the World Cup.
"I was sitting in the ZDF studio in Brussels, and they told me, you have ten seconds to go, then you have four minutes to speak. Remember, the entire nation is watching, because we will be showing this in the half time break of the German football game. Have fun, here you go."
She describes the seconds before going live with the same lightness she brings to most difficult moments.
"I thought, I can either freak out, or I think of my improvisation theatre training. And then the presenter said, hello Brussels, and I thought: good evening Germany, Brussels is speaking. It is fun. This is a story I can tell my grandchildren one day. I go with the flow, I always say yes. Do not be afraid. In the end, they are all people, and if I mess up, then I mess up on German television. It can be worse."
Her advice for readers who feel the pull towards visibility and the fear of it in equal measure is not to wait for the fear to disappear.
"Not at all. And if I mess up, then I mess up. We are all humans."
Beneath the practice and the performance, Zeiter protects an ordinary, well-tended private life. Her husband, who first pushed her towards this path almost by accident, remains part of the story he set in motion. Two weeks before this conversation, she hosted a large summer party and invited everyone she knew, a deliberate act of replenishment in a job she describes as, at times, deeply energy draining.
It is a life built, quite consciously, to hold both things at once.
"I feel I am very busy, but very relaxed at the same time, because I carve out a lot of time for myself."
What Calmfidence Means to Anna Zeiter
Zeiter turned forty seven this year. She traces something like a turning point back two years earlier, to forty five, and describes what followed in terms that will land with a great many readers of this magazine.
"I am now forty seven, and at forty five I discovered I had reached everything I wanted to reach in my life. Now the fun part starts. I do not need to prove anything to anyone anymore. My husband thinks I have been in a total midlife crisis for two and a half years, but I feel it is very liberating to be a bit older. I can just do this start up thing, and see how it goes."
It is, in its way, the clearest statement of Calmfidence in the whole conversation: not the absence of pressure, of which there is a great deal, but the freedom that comes from no longer needing anyone's permission to try.
About Anna Zeiter
Anna Zeiter is Chief Executive and Co-Founder of W Social, the European social network hosted under European data protection law. She is titular professor and lecturer in European data law at the University of Bern, and previously served for more than a decade at eBay, latterly as Chief Privacy Officer, with responsibility for data protection and artificial intelligence policy. She holds a doctorate in media law from the University of Hamburg and studied in Osnabrück, Florence and at Stanford.
Since the conversation, W has received the European Future Award 2026 in the category Innovation & Business, presented at the inaugural ceremony in Berlin. The award celebrates people who defend freedom, human rights, solidarity and diversity. The jury highlighted the work of building W as a European social network centred on trust, responsibility and democratic values, and Zeiter credits her team, partners and early community for making it possible.
One sentence from her speech sums up the belief behind W:
"Trust and responsibility can become competitive advantages."
Connect with Anna on LinkedIn.
Calmfidence World. From Pressure to Calm Power.
