How to Obtain the Right Startup Mindset?
A chat with Elisa to delve into the ins and outs of getting the perfect mindset to navigate the startup world.
Elisa Lillicrap is working at Microsoft as an Account Executive with a unique perspective on the startup space. She graduated from the University of Sydney with a Bachelor of Commerce and has navigated different roles in the space with an innovative take.
What is your background, and what are you working on right now?
I am currently working at Microsoft as an Account Executive working with government agencies across Australia to accelerate their digital transformation journeys. Prior to my journey with Microsoft, I was very much involved in the startup ecosystem since high school, working in various growth marketing roles across the HR and edu-tech space.
I started my first marketing internship with an incredible social enterprise called MAMP. I met my first boss and mentor, the person who made everything pivotal for me and opened this whole world that I didn’t know existed before — the tech and startup world.
When I graduated high school, I became really involved in the ecosystem, attending events, and participating in hackathons. This led me to meet my future co-founder and build a startup for the first time. A year and a half later, I focused on the challenge of youth unemployment. As a current student at the time, it was a problem I was constantly surrounded by, through personal experience, friends and peers. And whilst the intention was never to turn it into a startup, I met two incredible co-founders who also shared the care and passion to solve this issue.
In that process, I was very fortunate to travel overseas and investigate the concepts of democratising employment and how we can better demonstrate young talents and skills beyond a piece of paper. I was interested in how to better quantify soft skills and showcase that through the process.
Focusing on your mentor, what about her influenced you?
I used to ask my mentor when she employed me, a fifteen-year-old with zero experience, “Why did you employ me?”
I used to have this imposter syndrome, thinking that it was all luck that she was willing to invest so much in my career and my development. She told me, “I believe in who you are as a person, your character and your mindset. It’s not to do with the quantity of your experience, but rather your potential.” Those words planted the seed. Five years later, I realised that it’s the key motivation to why I ended up starting my second startup.
It was my personal experience of having someone place a lot of faith in me when there was nothing “on paper” to back that up. She really focused on making my role learning-oriented, not just professional; she didn’t simply assign tasks for the sake of it, rather, everything was intentionally designed to help my learning and career development.
It’s important to have these figures in one’s life to check in on you and make sure you’re asking yourself the right questions.
How did you first get interested in startups?
My interest in startups first started to grow when I was involved in a high school leadership program. That’s when I got in touch with one of the program managers, who later started her own company.
At the time, I was in year ten, looking for work experience, and she asked me if I was interested in doing two weeks of work experience at her company. Two weeks later, she offered me a twelve-month internship, and the rest is history. What’s most interesting is how that started simply from developing organic relationships over regular coffee chats.
Most of the roles I took on in the startup space were based on referrals, and it wasn’t until I took on my first role at Microsoft that I submitted a job application for the first time.
After engaging in a wide range of different entrepreneurial activities, what is the most important lesson you have learned?
One of the key lessons I’ve taken on is to never tunnel vision your own interests and always adopt an open mindset to explore beyond your current comfort zone. It goes back to the broader question of: you don’t know what you don’t know. And you won’t know what you don’t like until you’ve tried, or else your judgement is purely based on assumptions.
So I think as someone who’s early in your career, it is so critical to never allow yourself to become complacent and too comfortable with where you’re at, and the second you do, you know it’s time to move or change things up. This is because there are so many different options out there. Ultimately, at the rate that tech is changing, the job landscape is going to change drastically.
The most important skills you’ll need are those most transferable — your soft skills, which you develop as you change from role to role.
Just like the saying: it is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change. And that very much applies right now. You won’t be able to learn that skill to adapt to change until you intentionally expose yourself. Doing so will bring a far greater level of insight and perspective, lined with a creative lens for everything you do.
How did you discover those different opportunities, and how did you balance them with your academic commitments?
My encounters with these opportunities have been completely organic. The most effective channel for me was developing relationships and engaging with people across different communities.
I immersed myself in the startup ecosystem pre-COVID, when we had a lot of events. I used every opportunity there to talk to people. It became a process for planting seeds, and a couple of years later, those ‘seeds’ came back in the form of job opportunities and project offers.
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