About Us

Founding ELEVACAO has been a very personal journey.

During my corporate career in tech (18+ years) I was really confronted by the lack of genuine career support for females. Reaching out to female leaders for career advice, didn’t work. Either they would see me as a competitive threat and wouldn’t want to help, or worse they would pretend to help. Or they had the old school attitude - I fought my way to get to the top, there are a limited number of seats at the table for women, you have to do the hard yards yourself.

I got to a point in my career where I said enough is enough. Why can’t women help other women to be successful?  Men do it, even though they compete with each other!

When you are fired up about an issue, it’s incredible the people you meet to help realize your direction. I was living in New York City at the time and stepped into an elevator - and who was there but Karen Jacobsen - the Australian voice of Siri in your iPhone and GPS devices. Yes Siri is a real person!

By the time we get to the ground floor, we discovered that we share the same passion for elevating women to higher levels. Rather than talk about it,  we decided to do something.  We filmed a video together titled ‘Why Women Sabotage Each Other?’ As you can imagine this created significant buzz in New York and led to an event at the Harvard Club in NYC. The overwhelming response was to take our idea global.  

What started as a passion project wanting to elevate women to higher levels and foster environments where women and men actively help each other – led to starting a global organization ELEVACAO.

Our Mission is to empower women to build successful, innovative technology businesses, whilst creating collaborative environments where a woman’s ambition to succeed is embraced and actively supported by both women and men.

Marisa Warren | Founder & CEO @ ELEVACAO