An Interview With Candice Georgiadis
There’s a quote from Steve Jobs that my co-founder Tom and I love: “You can’t join the dots looking forward. You can only do so looking backwards.”
For us it sums up perfectly that — there’s no way you can predict the future exactly, and that your journey is going to change and surprise you in new ways. You can only make the best decisions in the present in order, to take the next step forward. Keep making these decisions the best you can and you’ll see that they build on each other in some way that makes your path uniquely you.
As a part of our series about women who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Nicole Tj.
Nicole Tj is co-founder and CEO of Travis — a travel startup with a mission to empower a new generation of creators to earn through travel. With 10 years of experience as a creator, influencer manager and strategy consultant at Deloitte Digital, she combines her industry experience with frustrations as a traveler, to pioneer a creator-led commerce future for the $800B online travel industry.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
My career path is something I definitely could not have planned for years ago.
I did a Bachelor of Music specializing in classical piano performance, and then a Master’s in Marketing. It was also at this time that I built my side hustle as a fashion/travel influencer for three years. This provided first-hand insight into how the relationship between influencers, consumers and brands were changing — and I’ve been fascinated by it ever since.
I also then founded my first business, anon, with my partner/co-founder Tom. Anon was a music and experiential design studio producing and performing in events in Australia and even resulted in an invite to perform at TEDx in Washington DC to 2,000 people.
We ran this part-time while I worked full-time in consulting at Deloitte Digital for five years, which was where most of my early career development took place. This experience taught me about building and launching new products and businesses for consumer industries, particularly in travel.
These experiences, combined with my personal frustrations in trip planning, now shapes our vision at Travis.
Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?
Creators and micro-influencers have been the biggest disruptors of the travel industry over the last 10 years. Not only have they changed how we discover travel, but they are also influencing real-world planning and booking decisions. With more creators than ever, ways to monetize travel have become more demanding. Travis is enabling creators to earn from their existing content and community with a vision for travel consumers to be able to discover, plan and book any trips based on creator recommendations.
There are 200 million creators in the world today (Linktree), of which 90% are micro-creators with under 100k followers. This is the biggest and fastest-growing segment facing the highest barriers in earning a recurring income. In fact, our research with 512 micro-creators shows that 48% of respondents want to move from being part-time to full-time creators within the next year. This shows the strong desire of creators to grow and monetize regardless of their audience size.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
I don’t recall a specific event in particular, but when you first start something new you’re doing everything possible that you can to try to bring it to life. This means turning dinner with friends into design testing sessions and spending incredible amounts of time just obsessed with moving things forward. Looking back, I’m sure some of it was ridiculous and very laughable, but the experience taught us to pick up new skills, adapt quickly and be resilient in making things happen.
We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?
I established several mentors while working in a corporate setting who played a huge role in my formative, early career years. They taught me to be confident in myself, build on my unique strengths and how to be an empathetic leader in working across teams, and highly adaptable — especially in stressful and ambiguous situations.
This set the foundations for my startup founder journey — and my adaptability and resilience in the face of adversity (hello COVID) has definitely been tested. As a small team, knowing how to flex and build on each other’s strengths — including having our complementary skills move us forward together as a whole — has been crucial.
In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?
Every industry evolves whether due to shifts in consumer behaviors, new technologies, or external factors — and such events require innovation within the solutions offered to keep up with behavioral change. To stubbornly refuse to innovate in this case would probably not go well! I think the biggest companies we use every day like Netflix, Airbnb and Uber are all examples of this.
‘Not so positive’ disruptions in my view are when innovations are driven purely from a technological perspective because these solutions usually result in empty innovations for a market that doesn’t quite need them — or know what to do with them.
Can you share 3 of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.
There’s a quote from Steve Jobs that my co-founder Tom and I love: “You can’t join the dots looking forward. You can only do so looking backwards.”
For us it sums up perfectly that — there’s no way you can predict the future exactly, and that your journey is going to change and surprise you in new ways. You can only make the best decisions in the present in order, to take the next step forward. Keep making these decisions the best you can and you’ll see that they build on each other in some way that makes your path uniquely you.
We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?
While there’s so much innovation to come in the travel industry, another important aspect I want to focus on is empowering young women of color to be able to speak up and act. There are lots of gender — and generational — bias in addition to expectations that need to be adjusted. It’s not something one person can do alone in a short amount of time. It’ll take many more inspirational women to come forward and tell the world that you can craft your own path.
Creators have helped the travel industry take a step towards showcasing diversity across travelers, travel styles, and even destinations. It’s something I’m passionate about and that we’re conscious of cultivating across our platform and community at Travis. We’re constantly asking ourselves: how do we enable more diverse voices to showcase travel experiences through their own lenses — which can be very different depending on your personal background — and allow that to be valued?
Very often it is the diversity of people and experiences - — whether because of race and culture, professional and creative backgrounds, gender and more — I often find the most exciting part. Discovering experiences by people with entirely different lives to you helps you broaden your perspective of the world we live in.
In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges faced by ‘women disruptors’ that aren’t typically faced by their male counterparts?
Well, being a woman and Asian, I inherently present myself in a different way to my male counterparts. While I (thankfully) haven’t had any awful experiences, over the years I’ve had to learn to be more assertive in putting my views forward whether in verbal, written, or body language — and also support these views despite challenges.
For example, speaking in a more direct, concise manner compared to something a little more conversational, which could come across as being too friendly and chatty. Being aware of my speaking inflections going up, or letting out an accidental giggle — which might work in a bonding manner with certain people, but could very well work against me in a setting with males who are 20 years older than me. This is especially so when pitching our vision at Travis — and our perspective on the future of travel.
Do you have a book/podcast/talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us?
How I Built This has had a deep impact. It provides insight to the journey of many great brands and companies that we know today humanizes the start-up founder process and reminds you that you are not alone in the challenges that you face in building something new.
The ones I enjoyed most were by Payal Kadakia (Classpass), Shan-Lyn Ma (Zola) and Melanie Perkins (Canva) — perhaps by no accident they are female founders who are of what would be considered diverse backgrounds, and without a technical engineering background. Each of their own paths - — successes, setbacks, and strong-willed resilience along the way — have been truly relatable.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
Take the opportunity to travel as much as you can. It is a luxury to be able to travel — the pandemic drove that home — but seeing more of the world beyond your every day has such power in teaching you about different people, culture, flavors and ways of life and you come back with a broader perspective and deeper empathy.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“We’re all going through life for the first time.” — Melanie Perkins, CEO of Canva
It’s always easy to think that other people have it all figured out, yet on the inside it might not be the case. It’s easy to have prejudice thinking of others, but when understanding that we’re going through life for the first time, it makes it easier to see things from other people’s perspectives.
How can our readers follow you online?
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicoletj/
Instagram: @nicoletj
Travis www.travistravis.co
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Female Disruptors: Nicole Tj of Travis On The Three Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.