Funding | Elevacao | Marisa Warren
Before the age of 11, Marisa had lived in three countries (England, US, Australia) and been to eight schools. Her 18 year corporate career in tech also saw quite a bit of change. She has worked in the US and Australia at companies like SAP, Microsoft and Workday, in channel leadership and direct sales roles. While in New York, she was struck by the challenges female founders had getting support. As fate would have it, she had a chance encounter which led her on a journey to set up ELEVACAO and has enabled Female Founders to raise over $50m. Marisa was kind enough to share her journey and insights about some of the challenges for female founders and how ELEVACAO has been helping.
From left Hillary Sinclair, Aimeelene Gaspar, Marisa Warren, Renee King, Sansan Fibri
Before the age of 11, Marisa had lived in three countries (England, US, Australia) and been to eight schools. Her 18 year corporate career in tech also saw quite a bit of change. She has worked in the US and Australia at companies like SAP, Microsoft and Workday, in channel leadership and direct sales roles. While in New York, she was struck by the challenges female founders had getting support. As fate would have it, she had a chance encounter which led her on a journey to set up ELEVACAO and has enabled Female Founders to raise over $50m. Marisa was kind enough to share her journey and insights about some of the challenges for female founders and how ELEVACAO has been helping.
What did you want to be when you grew up?
Not what I am doing today! I wanted to be famous, a singer. Thanks to the hit show ‘Young Talent Time’. I am tone-deaf, so singing would have been a tough career. Then I wanted to own and run hotels. Probably influenced by my parents and my favorite board game - Monopoly. I was always the banker and would somehow manage to have multiple hotels on the key properties.
What gave you the idea for ELEVACAO?
ELEVACAO has been a very personal journey.
During my corporate career I was really confronted by the lack of genuine career support for females. Reaching out to female leaders for career advice, didn’t work. Either they would see me as a competitive threat and wouldn’t want to help, or worse they would pretend to help. Or they had the old school attitude - I fought my way to get to the top, there are a limited number of seats at the table for women, you have to do the hard yards yourself.
I got to a point in my career where I said enough is enough. Why can’t women help other women to be successful? Men do it, even though they compete with each other!
When you are fired up about an issue, it’s incredible the people you meet to help realise your direction. I was living in New York City at the time and stepped into an elevator. And who was there but Karen Jacobsen - the Australian voice of Siri in your iPhone and GPS devices. Yes Siri is a real person.
By the time we get to the ground floor, we discovered that we share the same passion for elevating women to higher levels. Rather than talk about it, we decided to do something. We filmed a video together titled ‘Why Women Sabotage Each Other?’ . As you can imagine this created significant buzz in NYC and led to an event at the Harvard Club in NYC. The overwhelming response was to take our idea global.
What started as a passion project wanting to elevate women to higher levels and foster environments where women and men actively help each other – led to starting a global organisation ELEVACAO.
What does ELEVACAO do?
Founded in New York in 2015, ELEVACAO is a global pre-accelerator empowering women entrepreneurs to launch and grow successful tech businesses. Since ELEVACAO’s launch, we’ve helped 150+ women across the US and Australia prepare their businesses for investment funding and sustained growth.
How hard is it for Female Founders to get support?
The statistics paint a sad and indefensible picture:
· Less than 3% of venture funding globally goes towards women, yet female founded and funded businesses typically outperform their male counterparts by an average of 35% ROI.
· New analysis by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) shows that if women and men around the world participated equally as entrepreneurs, global GDP could ultimately rise by approximately 3% to 6%, boosting the global economy by $2.5 trillion to $5 trillion!
· WeWork got more money than female founders did in 2019!
An analysis of over 100 countries shows the 3 key challenges women led-businesses face are: access to capital, training to help build new skills and access to networks of power, aka social capital.
These are the same 3 key problems we identified when starting ELEVACAO and have seen our women achieve great success when we help solve them.
If we empower women and under-represented founders it benefits us all!
Why are you passionate about helping Female Founders?
The numbers speak for themselves. But I feel very strongly about it at a deep, personal level. Maybe it’s because I came from a long line of strong, successful women. Perhaps because I’m an older sister. Or even because I like challenging the status quo and seeing people achieve their full potential. Whatever the reason, helping more women tech founders to build sustainable, profitable businesses and get funded is my personal mission.
From left - Manuri Gunawardena, Sue Kim, Christy Laurence & Ally Neill
What is unique about ELEVACAO?
There are 5 key elements that make our programs unique:
It starts with our passion for solving the funding challenge women face. We’ve seen many copy-cats over the years but you just can’t replicate our passion.
Our ability to attract incredible founders of all backgrounds, ethnicities and ages. If we were a VC fund we would be out performing the majority on ROI.
Our program is designed specifically for women and caters for all learning styles.
We’ve built a priority approach to deliver our training that maximises learning and results in minimal time.
Our experts are industry leading C level - founders, investors and corporate executives.
Biggest challenge you have faced so far?
As I turn 41 - wow that sounds old - I’m reflecting back on my life especially now we are still in COVID ISO. Having a baby at 39 has been the most challenging time in my life. Corporate and startup life is easy in comparison!
When my daughter arrived, I faced a real identity crisis. I had been this fast charging female exec working full time since I was 17, with the freedom to go where I wanted, do what I wanted, and when I wanted. Now I had this gorgeous baby girl needing me 24/7. For the first six months I just didn’t identify as a mother. The term seemed foreign to me, almost like I was rejecting it as I was grieving over my pre-baby life.
I was supposed to have 3 months off for maternity leave. By month 2 I was itching to get back to work and tried to juggle looking after baby, work and our house reno. All while my partner was travelling for work. Let’s just say that did not work!
Don’t get me wrong I LOVE being a mother. We had planned for it, and I’m very lucky how easy it was for us to get pregnant. It just took me longer to settle into the role than I expected.
Fast forward to today, our baby is now a toddler at 16 months old. She is sleep trained, which is the best parenting tool ever! Steven and I have a really good routine where we share all the baby and domestic work. Steven often comments that I wouldn’t have it any other way. And he is right! Why should I do all the work just because I’m a woman!
Some success stories?
Proud to say we’ve had many great results.
A significant milestone in our business was in 2017 when ELEVACAO partnered with TechCrunch to bring TechCrunch Battlefield to Australia for a 1 day event. Approximately 500 people attended the event with more than 1 million viewing the livestream.
The cream on the top was seeing one of our alumni Manuri from HealthMatch win TechCrunch Battlefield Australia.
A sample of ELEVACAO alumni's success post-graduation include [we need to link all of these] :
· Our alumni have raised in-excess of $50m
· Lisa Wang, Founder @ SheWorx (2015 alumni) whose business was acquired by Republic in 2019
· Christy Laurence, Founder @ Plann (2017 alumni) has surpassed 2 million downloads across 160 countries and ranked top 800 grossing apps in the world - all bootstrapped
· Manuri Gunawardena, Founder @ HealthMatch, (2017 alumni) went from idea, going through our program to launch and $1.2 m seed funding within 12 months.
· Dr Silvia Pfeiffer, Co-Founder & CEO Coviu Global (2016 alumni). Spinout from CSIRO with $1m seed investment from Main Sequence Ventures. Before COVID, they did about 400 telehealth consultations a day. To now doing more than 25,000 consultations a day!
What tips would you have for female entrepreneurs?
The number one challenge our female founders face is the fear of the investor process. I’ve had incredibly talented, experienced and successful women tell me how scared they are of the investor process and asking for money. Almost like it is shameful. So three key things:
1. Mindset is absolutely critical. We often coach our women around the concept that they are the prize. Not the other way round.
2. Ask for help - women are notoriously bad at asking for help.
3. Build your network of people in the startup world - including investors, fellow founders and techies.
Who is a great example of someone (VC, Incubator, Corporate) who is setting a leading example?
Hum this is a tough one - still working on answer here. I haven’t seen anyone really nailing it yet.
Fast forward a decade, how would the startup ecosystem have changed for the better?
Founders get funded based on their individual attributes and their businesses. No matter where they grew up, how old they are or whether they are male, female, black or white.
There is a long way to go. We do need quotas to get there, we certainly need more people to talk about the issue and to acknowledge more needs to be done.
What is your focus now? And for the next couple of years?
Continuing to help female founders build amazing businesses and get founded. I’ll be on the other side of the table funding them - whether that’s a partner in a VC firm or my own fund.
What are the one or two lessons/principles/ you carry with you into everything you do?
Getting exposed to different cultures growing up as my family moved around has certainly shaped who I am today. I believe you should never be afraid of change or building businesses and relationships from the ground up.
I also believe there is always a silver lining and everything works out for the best. A lesson I learnt from my mother at a very young age, and has helped me through the lowest of lows that happens in startup life.
The other is think big - if you have the idea you can execute it. You just need to figure out how and who can help you.
How do you balance your personal time and your ‘work’ time?
Balance. Ha definitely something I’m always working on. My line between business and personal is constantly blurred, and in fact always has been. Why? I love business, I love what I do and just can’t switch off this brain!
But I’ve also been through burnout a couple of times in my career. So I know now when I’m pushing myself too hard and when to slow down...well eventually.
The way I seek balance is ensuring I do things that make me happy every day. That includes getting up at 6am to exercise, meditating for at least 20 mins every day, spending quality time with my Steven and Caia, spending time in nature and doing what I love.
11eight is a specialist advisory firm helping Corporates get better results from their innovation and helping start-ups get ready to work with Corporates. Please sign up to our Newsletter and you can contact us here.
