2025 is certainly a strange time to be alive. Despite technology’s communal grip via social media, authentic social interactions seem to be further and farther between. Anxiety appears to be perpetually high while interpersonal skills are falling by the wayside. Thankfully, Mozi app has lofty goals to change that landscape.

Mozi — which does not permit posting of any videos, photos, likes etc. — is a dynamic private social network that aims to etch out a respective spot going forward. In a post-pandemic era where friends and family have been dispersed all around the globe, Mozi can make sure you never miss your people in real life.

Mozi co-founder & CEO Molly DeWolf Swenson was gracious enough to chat with Playboy’s Gabriel Santiago amidst a hectic holiday schedule. A Harvard grad, Molly exclaims that Mozi came about serendipitously—a mutual desire with tech mogul and Mozi co-founder Ev Williams. Of course, Williams is responsible for founding Twitter, Blogger and Medium.

Because when there is a void in the marketplace, sometimes all you have to do is fill it.

Playboy: Let’s start at the beginning—where were you born & raised, Molly?

Molly DeWolf Swenson: I was born and raised in inner-city Seattle. I’m a product of the public school system. My dad is a mime dancer performing artist. On the other side, my mom was a doctor-researcher, so there’s no traditional business or entrepreneurship background in my family. Although, both my parents were definitely inspirational in that they charted their own paths through their respective industries. The combination of growing up in a goofy performing art community, but also in this academic very rigorous/Type-A doctor community was definitely interesting.

Playboy: As early as you can recall, what was your first dream job?

Molly DeWolf Swenson: The first canned answer I remember having to that question was a veterinarian or a pet store owner. I must have been three, four or five years old then. I always loved animals, and I always wanted to be around them. Then, I realized that being a vet meant putting animals down.

I also was a performer growing up, so I wanted to act and sing. That was something that I thought of potentially as a career path, as well.

Playboy: What went into your decision to study at Harvard, and what were some of your most memorable experiences there?

Molly DeWolf Swenson: Believe it or not, deciding to go to Harvard was a relatively tough decision. It was the only school that I got into where I wasn’t recruited to play volleyball. Ultimately, Harvard is a very hard place to turn down. They gave me financial aid plus the weather was amazing when I visited campus. So yes, I was a bit misled about how miserably cold it was going to be in Boston.

You could say that my entrepreneurial journey began at Harvard. I was music director of the Opportunes, and helped start several student communities on campus, such as the women’s club volleyball program and a new Female Final Club, called La Vie (many colleges have sororities, Yale has Secret Societies, Princeton has Eating Clubs, Harvard has Final Clubs).

As a founding member of La Vie, the most amazing part is how active it has stayed over the last 15 years; we have a massive group of alumni and recent grads who are all helping one another, daily!

I left Harvard with this ingrained thought process, “Something doesn’t exist, but I want it to exist. How do I help make it exist?” That has carried on throughout my entire career.

Playboy: For those that are unaware, what makes Mozi different from the rest of the social networking marketplace?

Molly DeWolf Swenson: Great question! Like you just mentioned, Mozi is a social network, but it is not social media. it’s an entirely private network, meaning there’s no public profiles and we don’t have a searchable database for our users. The only people you are connected to on Mozi are those whose phone number you have that also have your number.

We start with the phone book as a basis for the network. We think that’s the best proxy for your real-world social network, more so than LinkedIn or Instagram because those have ballooned quite a bit. Again, think about a private social network with no features for multimedia, only features for actually socializing. There’s no posting photos or videos or links or reacting with comments or emojis at all.

What you’ll find in Mozi is where your people are and where they are going to be. That makes Mozi future-focused social networking, which is the opposite of most other platforms that highlight what you’re currently doing or what you have previously done. Mozi is all about what has yet to happen. All the features that we are building are in place to help you see your friends more in the real world.

Ever find yourself saying, “I wish I’d known that we were in the same place at the same time”? Then Mozi is for you!

Playboy: Personally, I love that Mozi puts that emphasis on connection rather than creative media—talk to me more about that line of thinking.

Molly DeWolf Swenson: It really just came from a personal need for both me and Mozi co-founder Ev Williams. We had these moments that were spurred by totally different experiences, but ended with the same conclusion.

Ev was trying to plan his 50th birthday party and started wondering where all his friends were—who to invite and where are they? From there, he had this realization that there’s no one place for a reliable directory of your people. He felt like he had underinvested in friendships. Ev didn’t feel like he had a community.

I had a very different situation: after 10 years in Los Angeles, COVID had hit, work went remote and I made the decision to move back up to Seattle to spend more time with both my parents. My amazing mom had been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s, so it was an incredibly trying, emotional time with family, and I was also without a local community for the first time in a decade.

People in Seattle didn’t realize I’d moved back, and when I traveled back to Los Angeles to visit friends, I would constantly hear, “I had no idea you were in town and I would have invited you to this thing!” And considering we were coming out of forced isolation post pandemic, it felt even more painful to realize I missed out on an opportunity to connect.

For Ev and I, it was so obvious that we were both acutely feeling that need even though we were in different life stages and had come to that conclusion very differently. I have found that I’ll go to social media with the impulse to connect, and that impulse turns into a motion to consume. 30 minutes later, I’ve watched a bunch of videos and bought something I didn’t need. I needed something purpose-built for staying connected with friends.

Playboy: Take me back to the beginning of Mozi. What were your initial thoughts and feelings upon becoming  Ev Williams’ co-founder?

Molly DeWolf Swenson: Ev and I were first friends long before we ever spoke about work. We actually met on a dance floor at a party in San Francisco. I was there with some friends the day after my birthday, and one of my best friends had just become Ev’s chief of staff, so I introduced myself. From there, we became fast friends.

Ev has that remarkable combination of brilliance and low ego – he’s created units of the modern internet (i.e. tweets) and achieved tremendous success, but still approaches just about everything he does with curiosity over certainty.

People close to us saw the potential in us collaborating, even before we did. Once Ev and I started ideating on what would become Mozi together, we were just having so much fun. I remember getting a text from him a few weeks into that ideation that just said, “So, should we start a company?”

Playboy: At this time, have you noticed any particular metropolitan regions that have caught on to Mozi’s connection builder faster than others?

Molly DeWolf Swenson: New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles are our biggest markets, but we have some really exciting international traction in places like London, Berlin, Tokyo, Toronto, and even Bangalore. We’re seeing Mozi mostly spread through distributed friend groups where not everyone lives in the same city so that they’ll know when they converge next.

Playboy: Do you have a New Year’s resolution for Mozi? If not, what in 2025 are you most excited for?

Molly DeWolf Swenson: I’ve been saying to our team for the past year that we’re running three concurrent experiments here at Mozi. First, can we build a beloved social network? Secondly, can we build a durable and profitable business within that? And three, can it be a company and a place we all still want to work at once we’ve accomplished that? That’s not necessarily a New Year’s resolution or what we hope to achieve in 2025, but we hope to be making progress towards each of those three goals!