Built By: Elsa Sze
Elsa Sze first moved to the US when the conversations of transferring Hong Kong’s sovereignty to China began in the 1980s. However, her parents decided to move back a couple of years later, and she ended up attending high school in Hong Kong. Despite the opportunity to go to college in Hong Kong a year earlier, Elsa wanted to return to the US and enrolled in the University of Chicago upon graduation.
Elsa started her career in investment banking but soon her desire to solve complex problems made her join the International Monetary Fund just 10 days before Lehman Brothers crashed in 2008. Watching the financial crisis unfold right in front of her, shaped Elsa’s entrepreneurial mindset, and led her to pursue a joint degree from HBS and the Harvard Kennedy School, combining her passions for business and democratic participation.
For Elsa, entrepreneurship is a way to solve hard problems that she’s passionate about. Her current venture, Agora, aims to strengthen democratic engagement — something she says she believed in ever since she was a student at University of Chicago. When she was canvassing for the Obama campaign in 2008, Elsa was helping a woman to go vote when her companion’s oxygen tank malfunctioned. Still, her companion insisted that they get to the voting booth before they went to the hospital. This made Elsa realize that democracy actually has barrier to participation — a problem that she set out to solve through technology. With Agora, Elsa and her team help people get their voices heard in their communities and identify the best ideas. Founded in 2014, the startup received its initial funding through the Social Enterprise Initiative at the Harvard iLab before raising a seed round of $500,000 from CRV, and is planning to close its Series A this year.
Having lived in Asia, Elsa has a unique perspective when it comes to civil participation in democracy. She believes that the ability to have a voice and actively partake in decision-making makes the US stand out. In addition, Elsa thinks that the entrepreneurial mindset is so ingrained in American culture that society is much more likely to accept failure compared to the culture in which she grew up. As a woman, an immigrant and a minority, Elsa considers the US more inclusive than other countries and believes that it’s the best country to build her business.
Elsa acknowledges that entrepreneurship is “the most difficult thing out there,” and especially so for immigrant entrepreneurs. Having learned the hard way, she knows that foreign-born founders are much more likely to get no’s because of their ‘outsider’ status that may make others challenge their worldview. However, she sees a strong link between immigration and entrepreneurship due to the risk and the courage both entail. She believes that to be successful you need to “make your own way, walk through walls, if you have to, and never take ‘no’ for an answer.”
Written by: Leia Ruseva of Ellis Project
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