Your Ranking Model Is Optimizing the Wrong Thing with Zoe Weil

Zoe Weil, co-founder and CEO of Sequen, explains why ranking models optimized for clicks often fail to drive purchases for retailers, unlike data-rich social platforms. She describes how her team uses live behavioral signals—such as scroll speed and hover duration—to infer shopper intent without relying on user identity. The conversation covers Sequen’s architecture of specialized models, its Rust backend that serves dynamic rankings within milliseconds, and the evaluation harnesses that tie model improvements to concrete business outcomes. They also discuss the tradeoffs between advertising and organic revenue, continuous model improvement, and the fine line between useful personalization and surveillance.