Female Founders: Anastasia Sliusari On The Five Things You Need To Thrive and Succeed as a Woman Founder
An Interview With Candice Georgiadis
Being a female is actually more powerful than we think. When I first started I was shy, especially because most of the business people I interacted with were men and I thought that I had a big disadvantage in being a woman. Later I found out that we have a big advantage. We are women. And that’s our biggest advantage.
As a part of our series about “Why We Need More Women Founders”, I had the pleasure of Anastasia Sliusari.
Anastasia Sliusari is a London based Entrepreneur & Businesswoman. She is the founder of a few companies in the tech, financial and advertising space. Since the age of 16, she has been involved with starting, operating and growing profitable businesses. Some of her clients are backed by incubators and firms like Y-Combinator, 500 Startups, Shark Tank, Sequoia Capital, St James P., Morgan Stanley.
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?
Contrary to most entrepreneurs, I did not aim to have a business nor to be an entrepreneur. It wasn’t my intention whatsoever to start a company, it just happened along my journey. Funnily enough though, I can remember as a kid I had different ideas. One day I wanted to become an astronaut, the next day I wanted to be a professional horse rider and one week later I wanted to form a band… so I believe at this point I did not choose my path, but instead my path chose me. Entrepreneurship and business are all about value creation.
And looking back it is really funny that I have multiple companies today. I remember as a young kid listening to my uncle -specifically- and other adults always talking about business, marketing, banks, and of course without even understanding what they were talking about I hated it.
My main goal as a kid was to enter one of the best universities which I kind of did. I received really great offers for Politics and International Relations which is what I wanted to pursue, but I decided to reject all the offers. I wanted something more that the current educational system -which is broken- could offer.
At the age of 16 years old I started having really bad depression, and I started self harming. Now, for me it is easy to talk about it and I talk about it very openly because I found that sharing it helps other people who experienced the same, but before it wasn’t. It is not something I am proud of, but it is part of my journey and I accept it without hiding it. Nobody noticed anything, not my ‘friends’, the people I used to call friends at the time, nor my family. Some of them are shocked when I tell them what I have been going through and upset because they did not notice.
The same year while going through severe depression I got a job without my mother knowing, just to distract myself a bit. I was teaching kids between 3 and 5 years old horse riding in central Rome since I used to compete. I remember the first day my employer told me I would have been paid 3 euros per hour. That was a shock for me and I remember thinking “so people go through years of education, they spend time, energy and money to be paid nothing?”
I soon realized that University won’t make you rich.
Graduates made approx. £60k-£100k per year. Not enough for what I wanted. Not enough for the lifestyle I wanted. After paying tax on my income, I’d barely have enough to live and I’d be spiraling further into debt. I’d be a house cat forever unless I figured out a mechanism that would allow me to escape.
In my free time I used to read non fiction books. Books such as Think and Grow Rich, Rich Dad Poor Dad, Principles by Ray Dalio, The Intelligent Investor and Money Master the Game. And meditate almost one hour a day.
At 17 I moved to London and before starting university (which I then rejected) I worked for two ultra wealthy families living in some of the most affluent areas of London — Kensington and Chelsea. I worked as a nanny, as a personal assistant and as an au pair.
It did not take long for me to realize that making £2,000 — £6,000 wasn’t lots of money for a city like London. I had ups and downs, more downs than ups but I gained lots of experience thanks to these families. Experiences and knowledge that allowed me to build multiple successful businesses in the advertising, fintech and digital space and move to Kensington myself at the age of 19. In my own house. Funnily enough the first family I worked for lived in High Street Kensington and I remember thinking at the time “I do not want to work here, I want to own this house”.
Sometimes people see me and wonder what I do and how I can afford my lifestyle at such a young age. I often get comments such as ‘She probably has a sugar daddy’ or she has a rich family. It’s really sad that we are in 2022 and people still make those sorts of judgments without even knowing the person.
One of my mentors says that you either start a business out of inspiration or desperation, sure for me it wasn’t inspiration. I had to. And glad I did.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company?
That’s a great question, and to be honest I don’t have an answer. Every day I have something interesting going on with my business. Every day there are new things that come up.
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?
For some reason I thought in order to be in business and have success you had to be boring and always dress in black and super professional. Don’t ask me why, I do not know where it came from.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
My mother. I am what I am today thanks to my mother. I grew up without a male figure in my life and my mother has always been there for me and supported me along the way. I am really grateful -and will always be so- for the courage she had in letting me go and take my own path when I was only 16. Most parents would never let their children go at such a young age.
Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview. According to this EY report, only about 20 percent of funded companies have women founders. This reflects great historical progress, but it also shows that more work still has to be done to empower women to create companies. In your opinion and experience what is currently holding back women from founding companies?
Fear. I personally believe women are way more perfectionist than men are and it is not something we should always be proud of. I am surrounded by amazing women with great ideas and unbelievable potential but they do not take action. And that is because of fear. There’s this friend I am thinking of right now. She is only one year older than me -a great person- and the ideas she has have so much potential, but for some reason she is not taking action. I understand everyone goes through their own journey but a door won’t open if you don’t go and knock on it.
Women are some of the greatest untapped resources. Right now there are so many brilliant ideas locked up inside the hearts of women, kept closely guarded under lock and key because of systemic conditioning. That’s roughly 50% of the population who have been conditioned to keep their mouths shut.
I truly believe that now is our time. More than ever. We are needed. Every single one of us.
Can you help articulate a few things that can be done as individuals, as a society, or by the government, to help overcome those obstacles?
Women like us who are already in business should push a bit more for younger women to join, and show them that there’s nothing to be afraid of. Business is a space crowded by men and I thought they were the reason why there are so few women. Let me tell you that it is in fact the opposite. I sincerely believe that in business there are so few women because the women who are already at the top are very keen to keep their power, and with the first competitor they see, they are willing to destroy them.
This might be intuitive to you as a woman founder but I think it will be helpful to spell this out. Can you share a few reasons why more women should become founders?
Because women have equal power. We can and we should. Why not?
What are the “myths” that you would like to dispel about being a founder? Can you explain what you mean?
There are so many. One of them is that you need money to start a business. Not true. In my opinion you need to know how to leverage two things. OP and OPM means other people and other people’s money. That’s it.
And the second one is that some people believe that if you create a good product then you will be able to sell it, not true at all. First, go and ask the marketplace what they want, then you sell and build the actual product comes last. Most startup companies fail because they build products that have zero need and products that people do not want. They spend huge sums in R&D (research and development) and then nobody buys.
Is everyone cut out to be a founder? In your opinion, which specific traits increase the likelihood that a person will be a successful founder and what type of person should perhaps seek a “regular job” as an employee? Can you explain what you mean?
Yes and no. What I mean by that is that you should become a founder and fund something only if you are passionate about it. If you follow your passions then yes, every woman can be a founder because I believe that every woman has passions. Whether it is cooking, flowers, dogs or art doesn’t really matter as long as they are passionate about it. Coming back to the woman I mentioned earlier, she founded a media agency months ago but was struggling and then closed it and got a job. That’s because she wasn’t following her true passion. Now, as far as I know she is educating herself a bit more on coding, NFTs, the metaverse, DeFi and I truly believe that she will crush it because it is her real passion.
OK, super. Here is the main question of our interview. What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why? (Please share a story or example for each.)
It is simple, but not easy. What I mean by this is that everyone nowadays can Google how to start a business, how to be a millionaire etc. We live in the information era and there’s so much information out there, all you need to do is look for it or ask around. But more information isn’t necessarily a good thing. Furthemore, it takes so much more than that. Teachers, for example, have a lot of knowledge yet are some of the lowest paid people out there. It takes a specific type of information, a specific type of person, passion, persistence and faith in what you are doing.
Age does not matter. When I started I was afraid that people wouldn’t take me seriously because of my age. This was not true at all. They were actually impressed and open to helping. I got my first clients at 16 or 17 I believe.
Being a female is actually more powerful than we think. When I first started I was shy, especially because most of the business people I interacted with were men and I thought that I had a big disadvantage in being a woman. Later I found out that we have a big advantage. We are women. And that’s our biggest advantage.
You can change direction to get to your goal. Keep only in mind the big picture and do not get caught up in the small details. The path does not really matter, what does is the destination. As the saying goes, ‘all roads lead to Rome’.
How have you used your success to make the world a better place?
First of all, I do not believe I have achieved any success yet. I am at the beginning of my journey. But one thing I am doing is charitable work and supporting different initiatives including female empowerment, environmental change and recently I have been helping in giving support to refugees from Afghanistan.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good for the greatest number of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
I’d love to see more young females funding and building companies, sharing their ideas and raising their voices. Girl, take risks!
We are very blessed that some very prominent names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.
Anna Wintour. I’d like to get some of her wisdom over a breakfast at The Ritz in London. Perhaps in my dreams?
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.
Female Founders: Anastasia Sliusari On The Five Things You Need To Thrive and Succeed as a Woman… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.