International Women’s Day: Three tech powerhouses on their path to success

Ahead of International Women’s Day three high-flyers from the world of tech outline their journey to the top.

Suzy Nicoletti, MD at Twitter Australia, Mina Radhakrishnan, Co-founder at Different, and Eva Ross, CMO at Sendle.

When Suzy Nicoletti, managing director at Twitter Australia, became the first woman to have a baby while working at the social media giant’s Asia Pacific business, she had more than her own maternity leave arrangements to contemplate.
She had to design a policy for the entire Australian division.

When she joined the company in 2016, it was a smaller operation. “We had minimal roles, so the conversation to decide how parental leave would work wasn’t just for me, but for the entire company,” Nicoletti says.

Fortunately, she had support and guidance from Aliza Knox, another tech high flyer she counts a mentor.

Nicoletti is one of three successful women with pedigrees from the biggest tech companies in the industry and the world – Twitter, Google, Uber and Airbnb among them – who have shared their path to career success with The Australian.

Critical to their achievements, they say, are female mentors and champions who have provided wisdom in the areas of work life balance, starting a family and leadership.

Nicoletti and Knox met working at Google in Sydney when Nicoletti, an American with a sales background, was 29. Nicoletti spent eight years working at Google, from 2005 to 2014.

She prefers “champion” to “mentor” when describing their relationship. Having Ms Knox support her in taking on a bigger role while she balanced her career and being a mother meant “everything”.

Mina Radhakrishnan, Co-founder at Different

“What never wavered was her (Aliza’s) confidence in supporting the employee and that was what gave me the stability to take risks, even if I failed publicly,” she says. “It was never about running numbers for Aliza, she put me as a person first, which is something I’ve really tried to carry on now that I am running this business. Making sure I create the right policies that suit people and their needs is at the heart of everything.”

Mina Radhakrishnan, an ex-Silicon Valley tech whiz and co-founder of a property tech start up Different, counts as her mentor one of the biggest names in tech – male or female.

Marissa Mayer was one of Google’s first female engineers, leaving the search behemoth to become president and chief executive of Yahoo in 2012. At Google, Mayer created the associate product manager program at the search behemoth, which Radhakrishnan says showed her a way into the industry. The pair worked together at the company which Radhakrishnan was at from 2007 to 2010. She then headed up Uber’s first product team, working at the ride sharing app from 2011 to 2014.

Marissa Mayer. Picture: AP

“One thing I learnt from Marissa was finding a way to manage the things that are being thrown at you all day long. Marissa was in charge of so many things at Google, and the conversations I would have with her really helped me get to a place where creating priorities was one of the best ways to overcome challenges, big and small,” she says.

“Holding on to some arbitrary distinctions of work life balance is not the best way to set you up for happiness.
“The way Marissa explained it really stuck with me, in that she said if you find yourself in a place where you are resentful of your work for taking away your time from other things, that’s the point at which something needs to change.”

Eva Ross, CMO at Sendle

Eva Ross, who raised in Hong Kong, spent seven years at Airbnb and ran the accommodation platform’s marketing operations in Singapore in 2017, an experience that shaped her outlook in business. At Airbnb, she says, the focus was “really trying to convey that concept of belonging that you get when you are connected to another person”.
That “sense of connectedness and community” became central to her career, and her role today as chief marketing officer at Australian delivery company Sendle, the nation’s first carbon neutral delivery service which has ambitions to challenge Australian Post.

Alex Dimiziani, ex-Global Marketing Director at Airbnb, helped Ross foster “the idea of humanity and authenticity which comes through in the way you lead, in the way you present and also in the way you portray your brand”.

“The thing I fall back on is being authentic and staying authentic in your role. Being able to stay true to that when delivering a message and building connections was something Alex was instrumental in sharing with me,” she said.

“I remember early on being quite nervous about presenting and she said just present everything.”

“The mentorship very much happened naturally. It came out of long lunches and walks, so the relationship continued long after those early days.

“The biggest thing you can work on with your mentor is a way to leverage with them so they help you find your purpose and once you find it, how to keep on track in order to fulfil it.”