Meet Chloe Duckworth

Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Chloe Duckworth. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Chloe, thank you so much for joining us today. There are so many topics we could discuss, but perhaps one of the most relevant is empathy because it’s at the core of great leadership and so we’d love to hear about how you developed your empathy?

My life as an entrepreneur started in high school with a hospital program I created to advocate for patients in a hospital that supports low-income people. It was called the Sunshine Cart, and it was a patient advocacy service that helped patients who had concerns with their care, language-barriers, and those that were unhoused, ensure that they received the same quality of care and post-discharge support. This program then expanded into a nonprofit I cofounded during COVID to support unhoused people across California that were, and still are, at significantly increased risk of hospitalization and death. In these experiences, I realized there were significant gaps between the help that people need and the help that those helping wanted to provide. And this lesson was essential for later starting my company: in order to build what people need, we must learn to listen. There are so many misconceptions and frankly dehumanizing beliefs commonly held about unhoused people, but in this work I have learned to truly listen to other humans and build community. As Audre Lorde says, “What we must do is commit ourselves to some future that can include each other and to work toward that future with the particular strengths of our individual identities. And in order for us to do this, we must allow each other our differences at the same time as we recognize our sameness.” That is empathy.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

I started a company called Valence Vibrations with my good friend turned cofounder Shannon Brownlee while in college. During the COVID lockdowns and online schooling, we saw firsthand how disconnected and inaccessible videoconferencing was.

Valence builds emotion AI models to help people better understand each other across virtual screens and different demographics. We initially launched a consumer neurodiversity app called Vibes on Apple Watch, which delivers haptic feedback with the emotional tone of each person in a conversation to deliver emotions as a sixth sense. Since then, we’ve expanded to enterprise APIs that analyze vocal tone across video conferences, contact centers, and AI agent interactions. Ultimately, we’re building the emotional subtitle of the internet, and proving that emotional context is necessary in conversational intelligence.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

1. I’m guided by my innate curiosity from a young age to learn constantly, and not settle for easy answers.
2. I’m also relentless in pursuit of the world I want to create. Being a founder means dealing with people that do not understand what or why or how we are working, but I constantly remind myself that if what we were doing was obvious to everyone, it would already exist.
3. I’m mission-driven. Inclusivity in communication has been built into the DNA of Valence from day 1, and I’m proud to be apart of a group of people that obsess about how to promote human understanding and flourishing equitably.

There are so many ways to define a brand and corporate values, and many opportunities for founders to lose sight of these values, but I believe it’s incumbent on us to set strict standards and hold them tightly.

One of our goals is to help like-minded folks with similar goals connect and so before we go we want to ask if you are looking to partner or collab with others – and if so, what would make the ideal collaborator or partner?

We are building a community for responsible, empathetic AI and we’re looking for partners that wish to build emotional context into the next conversational platforms of the internet.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.valencevibrations.com
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chloe-duckworth/
• Twitter: https://x.com/duckworthchloe
• Other: https://www.linkedin.com/company/valencevibrations

Image Credits

Photo Credit: Katie McMahon and California Neurotech Conference