What that experience taught me is that the best answers are usually hiding in plain sight. You just need to be willing to slow down and actually listen to what people are telling you.

As a part of our interview series about the things we can each do to make social media and the internet a kinder and more tolerant place, I had the pleasure to interview Thomas Donninger.

Thomas is the CEO of Wizz, a Gen Z–focused social discovery app, with over a decade of experience building mobile products. A computer science graduate from Epitech, he started in IT consulting before founding Vili&Ve, working with startups like Dreem and Frichti as well as larger clients such as Toyota. He later joined food-tech startup Bim, where he sharpened his focus on combining bold ambition with strong execution. In 2018, he joined Voodoo’s newly launched apps division, where he went on to build Wizz.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share your “backstory” with us?

Thank you for having me. I didn’t set out to be a CEO. I started as someone who just loved building things. My backstory is in computer science and mobile development, and early in my career, I realized I didn’t want to execute someone else’s vision. I wanted to create products that mattered.

I created my first company shortly after my studies and sold it two years later, joining another startup that didn’t work out. When I joined Voodoo in 2018, I saw firsthand what happens when you combine ambition with execution. That’s where Wizz was born, during a 2019 hackathon with co-founder Gautier Gedoux.

What started as a weekend experiment turned into something much bigger. We noticed Gen Z was struggling with loneliness in ways traditional social media wasn’t addressing. That insight became our North Star. Today, Wizz is used by millions of young people every day to make genuine connections, and leading this mission has taught me that understanding people should be at the core of any technology.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?

Early on at Wizz, we built a first version of the app in just two days and launched it almost immediately. The numbers that came back stopped us in our tracks. People were coming back to the app the very next day at a rate we hadn’t seen before. We were excited, but then every version we built after that fell flat. We couldn’t figure out why.

I became fixated on finding the answer. I spent months testing other apps, watching how young people behaved online, reading everything I could find about how people form connections digitally. Eventually, it clicked: loneliness was the real driver. Gen Z weren’t just looking for something to scroll through, they were looking for someone to talk to.

We rebuilt the app from the ground up with that in mind, making it as simple and frictionless as possible for two people to find each other and start a real conversation. What that experience taught me is that the best answers are usually hiding in plain sight. You just need to be willing to slow down and actually listen to what people are telling you.

It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

In my first startup, I was convinced we needed to build everything from scratch, in-house: every feature, every tool. I thought that was what building a company was and what “real” founders did. We spent months reinventing the wheels that already existed, and it nearly killed the company.

Lesson from there: your job as a leader is to get the right answer fast. Sometimes it means using what already worked before and focusing your energy on what truly differentiates you.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

We are doubling down on safety in a way that most social platforms our size don’t. We’ve partnered with organizations like Tech Coalition to hold ourselves to the highest industry standard. We believe that safety cannot be an afterthought, we baked it into everything from day one.

We’re building systems that learn from what’s happening in the broader world and adjust our safeguards ahead of time. Here’s a real example of why that matters. When the “Suicide Squad” is mentioned, that topic is flagged on our platform. Our safety tools, which are trained to catch different behavior patterns, started flagging conversations that were simply young people discussing something they’d seen on TV or streaming services. Completely innocent, but the filters couldn’t tell the difference. In the old model, you’d only discover that problem after the fact. We want to get to a place where we can anticipate that kind of shift and adjust before it causes confusion, or before a real threat slips through because the system is overloaded with noise.

The second thing we’re focused on is making sure users actually understand how we keep the platform safe. Most moderation happens invisibly, and that creates distrust. We’re working on giving people more transparency around how decisions get made, and building in gentle nudges that help users make better choices in the moment, not to police them, but because we think an informed user is a safer user. If someone understands why something was flagged, they’re far more likely to engage responsibly going forward.

Together, these two things represent a shift from safety as a rule system to safety as an ongoing conversation.

Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the main focus of our interview. Have you ever been publicly shamed or embarrassed on social media? Can you share with our readers what that experience felt like?

I haven’t had a massive viral moment personally, but when you run a social platform, you experience it by proxy constantly. People project their frustrations with the internet onto you.

I’ve been tagged in posts where strangers aggressively call out a feature or accuse the app of something, for example, removing the feature that people loved. It’s jarring, you might be at dinner with family, and your phone buzzes with someone telling you you’re terrible at your job. Even with thick skin, it triggers that fight-or-flight response. Your instinct is to defend yourself, which is almost always the wrong move.

What struck me most was how isolating it feels, even though it’s happening in public.

What did you do to shake off that negative feeling?

I have a rule: I don’t instantly reply, and I will let it sit for a while. I literally put the phone in a drawer and go do something else to distract myself. The reminder: the digital world is not the whole world. Once I step back into real life, the comment usually shrinks. It goes from feeling like a crisis to being just one person’s opinion. That distance is everything.

Beyond that, I’ve found that the best thing I can do is redirect that energy into the work itself. If someone is angry about something on Wizz, that’s information. Instead of getting defensive, I try to ask: is there something real here that we should be paying attention to? More often than not, frustration from users, even when it’s expressed badly, is pointing at something worth fixing. That reframe has helped me a lot. It turns something that feels personal into something productive.

Have you ever posted a comment on social media that you regretted because you felt it was too harsh or mean?

Years ago, before I was building products myself, I was really into gaming and got caught up in a debate about a game update I didn’t like. I posted a pretty cutting comment criticizing the update. At the time, I felt I was making a fair point, but looking back, the tone was harsher than it needed to be and didn’t add anything constructive to the discussion.

Can you describe the evolution of your decisions? Why did you initially write the comment, and why did you eventually regret it?

At the time I just wanted to be right, and I wanted other people to agree with me. That’s a very human impulse online, you’re performing as much as you’re communicating.

What changed was building something myself and experiencing what it feels like to have strangers tear your work apart. I thought back to that comment and realized I had no idea what was going on behind the scenes for that team. They were probably exhausted, doing their best, proud of what they’d shipped. I walked in and dismissed it in a sentence. That’s easy to do when you have nothing at stake. Once you’re the one in the room making the decisions, you see it very differently.

When one reads the comments on Youtube or Instagram, or the trending topics on Twitter, a great percentage of them are critical, harsh, and hurtful. The people writing the comments may feel like they are simply tapping buttons on a keyboard, but to the one on the receiving end of the comment, it is very different. This may be intuitive, but I feel that it will be instructive to spell it out. Can you help illustrate to our readers what the recipient of a public online critique might be feeling?

Think about what it would feel like to walk into a room and have a group of people you’ve never met start criticizing you — but you can’t see their faces, you can’t tell if they’re joking, and you can’t respond in a way that feels heard. That’s the closest I can get to describing it.

Online, you lose all the signals that help you make sense of conflict. There’s no tone of voice, no context, no way to tell if someone is genuinely angry or just venting. So your brain tends to assume the worst. Even if only a handful of people are being negative, it can feel like the whole world has turned on you.

That’s actually one of the reasons we built Wizz without likes or follower counts. Gen Z has grown up measuring their own worth through numbers on a screen, how many people liked this, how many people followed me. We wanted to take that pressure off entirely and just let people connect without the constant score-keeping.

Do you think a verbal online attack feels worse or less than a verbal argument in “real life”? How are the two different?

It’s worse, and I think it comes down to two things: permanence and scale. If two people have a heated argument in person, it’s over when it’s over. Maybe a few people witnessed it, and within a few days everyone’s moved on. Online, that same exchange can be screenshotted, shared, and brought back up years later. It doesn’t go away. And the scale is just incomparable. In real life, it’s rare for fifty people to simultaneously pile onto one person. Online, that can happen in minutes. The human brain isn’t built to process that kind of volume of rejection at once. It’s an experience that simply didn’t exist a generation ago.

What long-term effects can happen to someone who was shamed online?

The one I see most often is that people stop being themselves. They get burned once and become much more careful, more guarded, less willing to put anything authentic or creative out there that could be used against them. The deeper effect is that it makes people wary of strangers altogether, where the best things in life come from meeting people you didn’t expect to connect with.

Many people who troll others online, or who leave harsh comments, can likely be kind and sweet people in “real life”. These people would likely never publicly shout at someone in a room filled with 100 people. Yet, on social media, when you embarrass someone, you are doing it in front of thousands or even millions of people, and it is out there forever. Can you give 3 or 4 reasons why social media tends to bring out the worst in people; why people are meaner online than they are in person?

First is distance. When you can’t see someone’s face, they stop feeling fully real. It becomes much easier to say something cruel when there’s no immediate human reaction in front of you. The second is audience. Online, you’re rarely just talking to one person, you’re performing for everyone watching. Being sharp or cutting gets attention. Being kind usually doesn’t. So the incentives push people in the wrong direction. The third is speed. These platforms are built for instant reactions. You see something, you feel something, you respond, all within seconds. That speed leaves no room for empathy or reflection. The fourth is the lack of consequences. In your daily life, if you’re consistently unkind, people notice and your reputation takes a hit. Online, you can delete a comment, move on, or just start over with a new account. The social cost that usually keeps behavior in check simply doesn’t exist in the same way.

If you had the power to influence thousands of people about how to best comment and interact online, what would you suggest to them? What are your “5 things we should each do to help make social media and the internet a kinder and more tolerant place”? Can you give a story or an example for each?

This is actually something we think about constantly at Wizz. If we could just tweak the way people talk to each other by even 1%, the compound effect on the internet would be massive. Some of my suggestions include:

1. Embrace the “Friction” Pause.

We are so used to instant gratification, type, hit send. My suggestion is: if you feel an emotional spike when reading a post, force yourself to wait 60 seconds before typing.

2. Assume “Typos,” not malice.

Since online communication is text-based and flat and lacks tone, facial expressions, and timing. When someone says something that sounds rude, assume they typed it in a rush or English isn’t their first language, rather than assuming they are attacking you.

3. Be an “Upstander,” not a Bystander.

If you see someone getting dogpiled in a comment section, don’t just scroll past. You don’t even have to fight the bullies, just say something kind to the person being attacked. Dilute the toxicity.

4. Take the “Dinner Table” Test.

Since this is the golden rule. Before you post anything, imagine you are sitting at a dinner table with that person, their parents, and your boss. Would you still say it, using those exact words?

Freedom of speech prohibits censorship in the public square. Do you think that applies to social media? Do American citizens have a right to say whatever they want within the confines of a social media platform owned by a private enterprise?

My view is that a social platform is not the public square, it’s private space with its own rules and culture. If you come into someone’s home and start making the environment hostile for everyone else, being asked to leave isn’t censorship. It’s just a basic standard of behavior.

Platforms have both the right and the responsibility to set those standards. The ones that don’t tend to become places where the loudest and most aggressive voices dominate, and everyone else leaves. That’s not free speech, it’s just noise. Most people want to be somewhere they feel comfortable, and that requires some level of stewardship. At Wizz, we work hard, including some AI tools that can prevent that from happening and keeping the platform both safe, and pleasant to everyone.

If you had full control over Facebook or Twitter, which specific changes would you make to limit harmful or hurtful attacks?

I’d slow things down. The entire design philosophy of most big platforms is built around making it as fast and easy as possible to share and react. That works fine for positive interactions, but it’s a disaster for negative ones. Anger travels faster than anything else online, and the architecture actively accelerates it.

I would build in friction for anything that looks harmful, not to block it outright, but to give people a moment to reconsider. An extra step, a prompt, a small pause. I’d also rethink the tools that let people pile on, the ability to mass-share something with a single tap, or to quote someone in a way that’s designed to invite a mob. The goal wouldn’t be to silence anyone. It would be to make sure that when people do speak, they’ve actually thought about what they want to say.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“Ship it, learn from it, improve it.” That’s how we operate at Wizz. Waiting for something to be perfect before putting it in front of people is a trap, you end up building in a vacuum, solving problems that may not even exist. We’d rather get something real into users’ hands quickly, watch how they actually use it, and let that shape what we build next. The goal was never to get everything right on the first try. The goal is to learn faster than everyone else.

We are blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them :-)

If you had asked me a few years ago, I would have said Steve Jobs without hesitation. When I was first building products, I was fascinated by how he thought about simplicity and what technology could mean for people’s everyday lives. That still influences me. Now, I am more keen to learn from people that are wrestling the same questions, just at a different scale or from a different angle.

On the product side, I’d love to sit down with Nikita Bier. He’s built and sold multiple social apps that genuinely resonated with young people, and he has a rare instinct for what that audience actually wants versus what everyone assumes they want. That kind of insight is hard to come by and even harder to replicate. And then there’s Daniela and Dario Amodei at Anthropic. What they’re building matters far beyond their own company. They build safety into innovation and foundation when building safer AI systems, a similar philosophy that we are trying to apply at Wizz. I’d want to understand the hard calls they’ve had to make along the way, because I think we’re navigating some of the same tensions, just in different contexts. Seeing this level of investment in the future of AI gives me a lot of confidence in where technology is headed.

How can our readers follow you on social media?

You can follow everything we’re building at Wizz on LinkedIn and if you want to connect directly or follow along with my own journey, you can find me personally at Thomas Donninger. I’m always happy to hear from people who are thinking about these same questions around connection, safety, and where social technology is headed, and always from Wizz users.

Thank you so much for these insights! This was so inspiring!

About The Interviewer: Yitzi Weiner is a journalist, author, and the founder of Medium’s Authority Magazine. He is also the CEO of Authority Magazine’s Thought Leader Incubator, which guides leaders to become prolific content creators. A trained Rabbi, Yitzi is also a dynamic educator, teacher and orator. He currently lives in Maryland with his wife and children.