Welcome to the Jazz Shapers Podcast from Mishcon de Reya. What you are about to hear was originally broadcast on Jazz FM however the music has been cut due to rights issues.
Elliot Moss
Welcome to Jazz Shapers with me Elliot Moss, bringing the shapers of the business world together with the musicians shaping jazz, soul and blues. My guest today is Elizabeth Rossiello, founder and CEO of AZA Finance, an African payments and foreign exchange fintech company – try saying that too late at night. Beginning her career as a translator in the German parliament, Elizabeth speaks five languages – we’re going to be conducting this to you in those five, just so you know. Buckle up and get ready for that. It was while working as a microfinance analyst in Nairobi that she saw the lack of financial infrastructure available for growing businesses, which was blocking their trade with neighbouring countries. Encouraged by a seed investor, Elizabeth launched BitPesa, as it was then known, in 2013 in Kenya on a mission to power African trade by using blockchain to bypass traditional banking channels, enabling quick and cheap remittances. Rebranding to AZA Finance in 2019, they’ve since served over 2 million customers in over 190 countries with plans for further growth in Asia and Europe – aren’t many countries left, but there you go. Hello.
Elizabeth Rossiello
Hi.
Elliot Moss
Good to have you here. What does an African payments and foreign exchange fintech company do?
Elizabeth Rossiello
We trade money. We trade currencies, 55 of them, in Africa and I always use the example which is relevant to nobody but New Yorkers, if you couldn’t send money between New York and New Jersey, how would you, how would you live? And often so many small African countries, large African countries, different currencies, lots of trade, and there were a lot of barriers to trading across the continent, plus most people on Planet Earth will be African by the turn of the century and so how do we connect Africa to the rest of the world? How do we trade with them? As we see, you know, the US dollar may or may not be the, the main currency we trade in so it was it was really exciting to work and build this company to allow payments across Africa and between Africa and the rest of the world.
Elliot Moss
The woman from Queens.
Elizabeth Rossiello
Yeah, Queens accent.
Elliot Moss
New York. Queens accent. Yeah but it’s, no but it’s dialled down a little bit, I mean you could go full Queens on me.
Elizabeth Rossiello
Ony because I’m on radio.
Elliot Moss
Exactly. I’m getting, I’m getting posh Elizabeth here and we…
Elizabeth Rossiello
Wait till my phone rings and my mum calls.
Elliot Moss
Mom! Yeah, Ma, how are ya? Did you think in your wildest dreams that you would end up going to Nairobi, doing your thing, being a smart microfinance analyst – we’ll come onto what that really means – and then setting up your own business? Was this, was this part of the Elizabeth plan?
Elizabeth Rossiello
No, no, not all. And I always joke or, you know, cry about the idea that I only ever could dream a few, one or two steps ahead and I talk a lot about representation and didn’t have role models, I didn’t know of anybody who had even worked abroad, much less, yeah even worked outside of New York City, you kidding me, you know New York City was the centre of my universe so, you know, who works outside New York City? Who works even in Manhattan from Queens? You know I had one aunt who had made it as a secretary in AT&T and everybody’s like…
Elliot Moss
It’s like Working Girl, yeah literally.
Elizabeth Rossiello
Yeah, yeah. No, seriously like well she was a high-powered secretary, that’s how we spoke about her. She had other secretaries work, she once typed up so and so’s report. That was, you know, my role model as a kid, I didn’t know what a lawyer did, you know I never heard of anything like that so I only, as I started to go to better schools and meet other kids and you know wealthier kids, different classes, people who travelled, different parents, I started to be like oh wow, that’s available, that’s available and I was just, you know, youngest child, last born, just greedy and detached, just kind of like I can do anything, I can go anywhere, you know, 3.57 was done by the rest of my family, you know, the older sister, we say that a lot in the African continent, number one has to stay, number two has to support and the last borns can just, you know.
Elliot Moss
Yeah, whatever.
Elizabeth Rossiello
Go do what they want.
Elliot Moss
But it is an extraordinary thing because often again the cliché as well, you’re from New York, your, privilege is a big word but you come from a background that shows it’s inevitable that you go to a really good university, you went to Columbia and so on but actually in your instance, your case, not at all.
Elizabeth Rossiello
Not at all. No, I’m from South Queens.
Elliot Moss
So how did it happen though? But South Queens to here, this moment, massive journey. What, what, apart from being the detached, greedy third child that was allowed to go off and do whatever she wanted and no one really noticed, what else do you think is the reason why we’re having this conversation?
Elizabeth Rossiello
My parents, teachers, I don’t know, people, heroes along the way that plucked me out, you know, I went to these free programmes in my public school or state school as you call it here in the UK, for like gifted kids and each one of the teachers there was like we’re going to do a thing where we you know write reports on a new computer programme which no one had used before and we’re going to have the creator of the computer programme come in and teach you guys and New York City public school students how to use it, I’m going to take you to the Joyce Theatre, which is a incredible modern dance theatre in Manhattan once a month or the Met once a month for two years and we’re going to go see these special performances for students. And I just, you know, luckily when you’re in a urban area, you do have special things like that and when I, later on when I worked in sub-Saharan Africa in rural areas, I was like where’s your teacher who takes you to the museum, you know, yeah, your dad’s a jerk, your mum has no money but like where, where are these teachers, where are these other services and then I was like oh, they don’t exist in these markets and so the private market is even more important. So we can say what we want about the US but I think you know the public school system in New York City is, you know, gave me a lot of opportunities.
Elliot Moss
I mentioned Lin-Manuel Miranda. You were at school with Lin-Manuel Miranda. For those of you who don’t know, Lin-Manuel Miranda is the writer of many musicals, In The Heights, Hamilton, I’m going to forget the rest, there’s just too many, he’s prolific.
Elizabeth Rossiello
Moana, he wrote Moana, are you kidding, my five year old’s obsessed.
Elliot Moss
How could I forget Moana? And so many others and actually, he’s a polymath and he’s, he’s brilliant. He directed you and you’re a great dancer but you shouldn’t sing.
Elizabeth Rossiello
I mean….
Elliot Moss
Just give me the quick story.
Elizabeth Rossiello
Yeah, we went to Hunter College High School which is, you know, a pretty big high school in New York City, in Manhattan, for the Arts, they do a lot of musicals and things like that and, amongst other things, and I always a ballet dancer and I wanted to be in the musicals and Lin was great and he was always the assistant director or the director and he’d be like “come to the front of the stage, Beth”, as they called me then, he’s like “Beth, Beth great, front of the stage, lip sync, no sound, no sound, we don’t want to hear any sounds coming out of you” and you know, I think that was maybe one of the first lessons where you’re like I’m good at some things, I’m not good at all things and it doesn’t mean I need to hide in the corner, you know, it just means I need to do what I’m good at.
Elliot Moss
So what are you good at? Now that you’re in business running your own show.
Elizabeth Rossiello
I talk a lot about you know having a voice and having a direction and answering the question of what do you want, what’s the answer to this question? And you know really trying to think of you know not being in the middle where you’re wavering in the middle and just today, the last few days I’ve been doing this big strategic plan and talking to people like oh we could halfway or we could do a little bit and I’m like that’s confusing. So how do you have a strong direction, especially as a leader, you know and when we have a direction that’s unpopular like let’s support women or you know let’s focus on sub-Saharan Africa or let’s use a new technology like bitcoin or cryptocurrencies when it was popular, you know, a lot of people come at you but if you have that vision, of course supported by facts and you know product marketing etc., I think that’s so important because every day a lot of people are going to tell you they don’t like your voice or you know you should be quiet and if you want to build something and if you want to do something new, you have to have that voice inside of you and so you need to have your own inner direction, if that makes sense.
Elliot Moss
And of course there’s Newton’s Third Law of Motion, every action has a reaction. You seem like you’re the kind of person that says well I know that, thanks for telling me Elliot, I already know Newton’s First and Second and Third Law because I’m very smart, but you don’t seem to mind, so where’s that, that lack of worry or is there worry?
Elizabeth Rossiello
Oh of course there’s worry, you know, of course at night you know I always joke, I’m like talk to yourself in the mirror, I say that to an employee, I’m like go talk it out with yourself in the mirror.
Elliot Moss
You do that as well? I do that.
Elizabeth Rossiello
Of course, everybody does it. And then come in and tell your team the tough news. So of course there’s all that nonsense that happens with my, you know, my friends or my partner, or my diary or whoever, you let it out but on stage or at work you know you got to get it together, especially if you’re a leader. Now of course you can ask questions with your trusted people, I just think you know a lot of people look towards, so for the listeners, like investors, tell me what to think, what should I do and investors will come and tell you, “you know what, I just met you, this meeting’s four minutes in, why don’t you change your entire business model, I know nothing about this sector and by the way I just graduated from business school but clearly” and they’ll say it with direction and if you don’t have your own direction that wind will blow you over and I think if you’re building a product and you’re certain about it and you know, you know, you have your product market fit, you’re the one who knows your business, you’ve talked to your clients, you’ve worked in the field, at least in my case, I worked in the field, I knew the clients, I knew the problem, I knew the team, I saw the data, so I’ve got to make sure that the ship steers forward and I think a lot of young founders say oh this investor wants this or that investor wants this or I’m worried about you know projecting too much of that and you lose that very strong sense of director which makes people follow a CEO, makes people a leader and makes a business keep going over the years.
Elliot Moss
Great followership. Much more going to be coming up from my guest, Elizabeth Rossiello in a couple of minutes, don’t go anywhere.
You can enjoy all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast and you can hear this very programme again with Elizabeth if you pop Jazz Shapers into your favourite podcast platform. My guest today is Elizabeth Rossiello, founder and CEO of AZA Finance, an African payments and foreign exchange fintech company. This journey that you took and then the world of microfinance, just in English describe what microfinance is before we go into all the other, other bits I want to ask you.
Elizabeth Rossiello
Well it’s a very big sector but in the end it’s small amounts of finance so, bank accounts with small amounts in them, loans with small amounts in them, you know, asset financing house mortgages with a little bit of money so I think when we were first doing it, Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize for establishing Grameen Bank in Bangladesh and his idea…
Elliot Moss
Part of the Telenor company, is that that one? Grameen was part of, was it, was it connected to the telecoms business?
Elizabeth Rossiello
Afterward, it started to use Mobil money to pay out.
Elliot Moss
Right
Elizabeth Rossiello
But originally, and this is a concept all over the world, South America, even Germany, West Africa, they call them susus, a bunch of women get in a group and they all save a little bit of money and they help each other save. Another way could be a merry-go-round where every month everybody puts in $5 and they give the whole amount to one woman and maybe every ten months it’s your turn to get the big sum, that’s called the merry-go-round. There’s a lot of permutations of this, that’s the way it, that started, these community savings groups, when there is no banking available because you live in a poor area or you’re female then you create your own little banking sewing circles groups and they kind of developed into bigger and bigger things and in Bangladesh, Grameen Bank formalised and it became one of the biggest banks and there was also in Mexico, Compartamos, which then had the IPO…
Elliot Moss
We share, literally, compartamos.
Elizabeth Rossiello
Yeah and then you know all across Africa people started investing in them, saying this is the new kind of social investing, it’s like instead of donating, we invest in a business that makes money and we’ll help these businesses across the continent or across the world and then we feel a little less guilty about donating money. And so microfinance became this huge sector where you had a lot of international donors and a lot of data, I was a rating analyst, now I think a lot of that’s morphed into fintech and a lot of telco’s and a lot of fintechs are now offering micro financial services, so I have a lot of friends that run fintechs and they have taken the place of these community banks and you know maybe digitised it but traditionally it was done pretty low tech.
Elliot Moss
I read somewhere this kind of you being an analyst in this space then morphing into some were saying why don’t you set your own thing up and I’m shortening years of your life in a sentence there. Did you need the nudge? Had you ever thought about setting up your own thing?
Elizabeth Rossiello
Yeah, I would meet with Charlene, who was my, we started the company together, she’s here in London now, and you know back in the day we’d meet weekly in Nairobi and we’d be like everybody around us is starting their own thing, why don’t we start our own thing, you know, why can’t we do this and then we were like oh well we just don’t have the entrepreneurial spirit or I’m just not a singer, you know, and then this one guy said there is no entrepreneurial bone in your body, you just do it, and that…
Elliot Moss
Do you believe that? Do you think that’s right?
Elizabeth Rossiello
100%. I think you just do it, if you want to. I think people find other reasons not to do it, it’s a privilege to do an entrepreneur, you don’t make a lot of money in the beginning, so I had to be in the position where you know I’d saved some money or I had no other choice, I wasn’t making any money anyway at that time.
Elliot Moss
You weren’t.
Elizabeth Rossiello
No, I had just had two kids and I was really struggling to find a job again so…
Elliot Moss
Interesting so, there was no choice for you as you saw it, why not.
Elizabeth Rossiello
Yeah, why not, I was already at rock bottom, like so I think people say you know can you do it, yeah, anybody can do it. Do you want to do it? It’s like going to the gym, anybody can go to the gym, will everybody go to the gym and be successful? No. Could anybody, unless you have you know a physical impairment, probably you could go.
Elliot Moss
Can I ask you a question, Elizabeth, well I mean I can ask you a question because this is, this is what we do.
Elizabeth Rossiello
I did sign up for that, yes.
Elliot Moss
I ask you the questions and you, you signed up for it and you went yes, I will, Elliot, I will do that. It feels like to me just looking at the way your life has gone, well I was the gifted kid and I was put in here and I went to that and I did this, the doors keep on opening but you keep on pushing through them, not because you’re premeditated, not because you’re more than one step ahead but just because, because you’re there, was it like that in that moment, was there anything big to you about the decision to set up a business or was it just like all the other decisions that you made along the way?
Elizabeth Rossiello
Well I, I was turning 30 so hopefully I was a little bit more self-aware at that point.
Elliot Moss
No, but I don’t mean in a sort of, but did you, did you realise the enormity of what you were sort of signing up for?
Elizabeth Rossiello
No, I was like I just need to do something to get paid, you know I need a job, I want to create my own job and also I was just really sick, I talk about this a lot, I was just sick of working with toxic people, I had just after working in microfinance, I had been working in kind of consultancies in Kenya and I worked at one where they sent an email that said something very racist and very awful and I said I can’t work here with these people, this isn’t my values you know, I’m a capitalist, I worked at Goldman Sachs but I can’t have this, I can’t have somebody say something so wild in an email with my name on it and so I quit in an act of “No!” and then I was like well now I’m broke. So, you know, how do I have values and pay my rent? I guess I have to create my own company, you know, and I think that’s where I really was at as well and so I think a lot of founders hit the wall, either the problem they’re solving is something that’s really hurt them, you know, “I couldn’t find this thing in the market and I need it” or “this happened to me and this will save me now and I’m building this so that other people don’t have what I had” or you’re really like you know I need to move forward and I need to feed my family or I need to get this going and my dad’s yelling at me to get a job and I need to think of something quick and you, you build it yourself. Now some people would just say, “let me just apply for another job.” I was in Kenya, it wasn’t as easy at the time to get work, you know, so I won’t say that you know I had to do it but I think I had also been the benefit of a lot of entrepreneurial spirit that was happening around me and one thing about moving to sub-Saharan Africa, you know, in 09, 2009, was everybody was running these small businesses and in microfinance I had seen women with nothing and I’d been to their houses because I had counted their assets as part of the job and I would say like you have literally nothing and you’re starting a business? And that was inspiring so, all of that was in my head and I think if I had to credit somewhere, I’d credit all these women who I visited and worked with who were making something out of nothing.
Elliot Moss
It’s almost like the broken windows theory in reverse, it was all around you and you felt empowered and you did it. And we’re here talking about that, it’s Elizabeth Rossiello and she’s my Business Shaper today. She’s the CEO and founder of AZA Finance. You’ve built a big team, how many people work for you today?
Elizabeth Rossiello
Well, at our peak we were 250, then we slimmed down in the last cycle, now we’re 130.
Elliot Moss
Do you think you manage them in a way that is, I mean you talk about values which I want to come on to, in a way that reflects your upbringing? Has that ever, does it, does it?
Elizabeth Rossiello
Yeah, good and bad, I think at the beginning I was a little Queens, a little loud.
Elliot Moss
Yeah and what is ‘a little Queens’? Loud?
Elizabeth Rossiello
A little bit loud.
Elliot Moss
In your face?
Elizabeth Rossiello
Well, I think I was learning how to, how to communicate. I mean I just came out of investment banking and then I had worked in the field doing fieldwork where I was listening a lot and this is my first time, you know building a team together and I didn’t know how to keep some of my stress out of the office, you know, and that’s something I talked to other CEOs and founders a lot, what are you doing on your brain, on your body and your family or your friends and then you come into the office and you’re on stage, you have to perform peak, peak professional performance and you talk to a lot of the bigger CEOs in the world and I always quote this like Harvard Business Review article I read which mapped out the day of like five of the biggest CEOs, all of them were either religious or really into meditation or into spirituality or like therapy.
Elliot Moss
Because?
Elizabeth Rossiello
Because you need to fix that part of your body. Then they all did something physical, whether it was, then they all did something with their kids or their spouse, then they all had a gatekeeper that protected their schedule, then they all did things that like nourish them and then they were like peak performance.
Elliot Moss
Yeah, you need all those things.
Elizabeth Rossiello
Yeah.
Elliot Moss
Otherwise you’re just going to be on the wheel and you’re going to be spinning and spinning.
Elizabeth Rossiello
Yeah and you know I had a one and a two year old when I started the company, I didn’t know what I was doing, I had no money and we were doing something where everywhere we went people were like “What? Bitcoin? Huh?”
Elliot Moss
Well I was going to say, bitcoin and I mentioned blockchain as well, very early.
Elizabeth Rossiello
2013 it was nobody was doing this.
Elliot Moss
Nobody, nobody.
Elizabeth Rossiello
We went to the Central Bank of Kenya and they guy was like, “Who is Mr Bitcoin?” and we were like, it’s like our internal company joke forever and we were like er it’s…
Elliot Moss
Well now you’d say Donald Trump.
Elizabeth Rossiello
No I was so stupid and I was like it’s all of us and I was like oh it’s such a bad answer and he was like…
Elliot Moss
No, no, yeah, whoops, excuse me. What is this, The Matrix?
Elizabeth Rossiello
I’m like let me do this again. You know, nobody knew what we were talking about, there was no positive feedback I’d say.
Elliot Moss
So that balancing act, those things we just talked about, the spinning wheels from the Harvard Business Review but what do you do now to manage all those bits?
Elizabeth Rossiello
Well now well first of all I grew up. I’d been through it all and you know after first couple of typhoons hit the company, you know we had this big battle with the Central Bank of Kenya, the big battle was so far I’d come, I moved the whole company to Nigeria at one point, we bought a company in South Africa, we had an explosion with FTX, I mean a million things happened along the way and now when I see the typhoon coming I’m like oh that is a typhoon, it shall come and then it’ll be over and the team is always like what, aren’t you going to, and I’m like nope, and now my senior managers and a lot of them have been with me seven/eight years now, I think our senior team is together on average eight years and the next level of like 45 people has been there over six years, you know, we all really stick together and now we have this calm in the face of volatility and we trade currencies and we trade emerging market currencies so volatility is our daily bread so, you have to be calm in the face of volatility. Now how do you become calm in the face of volatility? Are you a cowboy with no nerve endings? A lot of founders are.
Elliot Moss
Are you?
Elizabeth Rossiello
Maybe I was in the beginning then I realised maybe that’s not a sustainable way so how are you calm in the face of volatility? You have inner calm, you know you use your judgement, you plan, you do scenario planning, so all these things helped me be such a better manager over the years and I…
Elliot Moss
Is there a silver bullet on the, in the face of volatility, if there was one thing above everything else, Elizabeth, that you would preach, what is it?
Elizabeth Rossiello
Go to the data, you know, yes there’s volatility but look at the data that you know this will turn, this is the cycle, what goes up must come down and in all good markets things must go down and so you have to remember that, it’s not a healthy market if it just goes up.
Elliot Moss
On that cheery note, Elizabeth will be back for our final chat and we’ve also got some music from Professor Longhair, that’s in just a moment, make sure you don’t go down too far.
Elizabeth Rossiello is my Business Shaper just for a few more minutes. Accolades galore, I say to you. Most Influential Women in Payments, American Banker 2025, Fintech Leader of the Year, London Fintech Awards, Inspiring Leader this and that and Top 30, pretty cool huh, does it, does it make any difference for you?
Elizabeth Rossiello
I think it makes a big difference because there’s so few female founders in fintech, FFF, you know there’s like really none of us and there were even fewer thirteen years ago when I started and a lot of investors and people in the Press or other founders still to this day tell me, “stop talking about the female thing” or like “enough with the female thing” or “are you complaining?” and I’m like no, I am reporting from the frontline, you know, so…
Elliot Moss
And advocating because you’re not just reporting and does that advocacy ever end?
Elizabeth Rossiello
No, and it gets louder. Now that I’m older, now that I, we’re at the cycle where we’re looking to exit and you know thirteen years in there’s a lot of consolidation happening in the market, now is the chance to use my voice and I think obviously I’m not one to be quiet in general but I did hold my tongue quite a few times in the early years and you know it’s hard and I think one thing that excites me about building my own business is that it does give me a platform to speak out for people who I haven’t had that opportunity and a lot of women come up to me at conferences, you know in the bathroom and are like “oh you really inspired me” or “I didn’t know that before I saw your video” or things like that. That keeps me going, you know, and I think when we see these awards, does it mean much, no obviously, I got a lot more compliments in one of those awards than when I graduated from college you know, but I think it’s like when I bought my first car, my dad was more excited than when I graduated college, he was like, “wow, nice car.”
Elliot Moss
Look what she’s done, she can afford a car. But it sounds like you, I’m going to use the phrase, ‘be more Queens’, you’re more Queens now than you probable were comfortable being when you…
Elizabeth Rossiello
Well I don’t think I could ever shake my Queensness but I think what I am now is I talk more about, I think I always talked about Queens because that was clear, I am from there, but I didn’t talk about being female enough I don’t think and I talked a lot about being white in Africa and I talked a lot about race, I talked a lot about class and now I’m realising a lot of it’s female too and you know those three centre points I see all the time, everywhere I go and I think it’s hard not to talk about it and now, I was just saying, we were sharing notes and I just saw Cherie Blair speak and she said to this group of executive women that I’m part of, she goes “pretty much now the only thing I give extra time to is things that are involving gender” and a lot of these C-suite women who have very little time are like if someone asks me to volunteer, I’m like what’s it about. So you know I don’t know what that says, whether we’re getting more closed off or in tough times when funding dries up and you know under represented areas get it less, people feel it more or maybe we just have more outlets like I have this podcast and you know I’ve a lot of podcasts and now we have the ability to say what we want and so people are actually talking about it.
Elliot Moss
And if there was to be a time with more time, what’s Elizabeth going to do with her time in that, in that future state?
Elizabeth Rossiello
Well now I think it’s exciting I’m, I’m doing a lot of mentoring, which is cool because a lot of people will ask me these very simple questions to me and to them they’re like “I had no idea” and I’m like just do this, and like “oh so helpful” and I’m thinking back to the time when people kind of took the lid off a lot of that stuff for me so, paying it forward, paying it backwards, you know, paying it all around, just sharing what we’ve been through. I think there’s a lot of glorification of the founder story, you know, oh it’s so amazing and then you’re a billionaire, you know, or we’re like he sleeps one hour a night, wow, you know you’re like that’s a terrible idea, you know, nobody should be in charge of other people if they’re sleeping one hour a night you know or he doesn’t wear shoes, wow, you know, how cool is that.
Elliot Moss
You’re talking about one of my last ten guests, I don’t know, I don’t know this is terribly pejorative.
Elizabeth Rossiello
It’s like if they haven’t showered and they can’t cut their toenails, they shouldn’t be in charge of other humans, you know, like I think if I stand with a mother or a father at the school run who was like unshowered and hadn’t cut their nails and you know was like I sleep one hour every night, you might call Child Services, right, so why do we think that’s what somebody should do as a, as a founder. And I knew another woman who was at Goldman Sachs forever and she started a company and she’s like “it’s a scam, I would have been so many more millions if I’d stayed at Goldman, they tell me that starting a company is going to make me wealthy and I’m going to do all this stuff but all of these VCs come in and the offers they give me and the terms they’re giving you, it’s almost impossible to get your head above water” and I think we have to remember that out of a lot of founders, very few make it all the way and I think not only am I one of the only females, I’m one of the very few who’s gone over a decade and in Africa, of the fintechs that I started with, my cohort, very few are still there and you know I’m good friends with those founders but there’s a lot of bodies on the side of the road because I think it was not only very early for the African continent but very early for a lot of the infrastructure, a lot of the investment cycle so, I am quite proud and a lot of these awards speak to that and it took a long time to get our name out there.
Elliot Moss
It’s been great talking to you, thank you for your honesty, thank you for being from Queens and I can’t imagine you any other way. Just before I let you disappear into your future state, which I’m sure you will enjoy immensely, what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Elizabeth Rossiello
Take The ‘A’ Train. My brother used to play this on the saxophone all the time and I live between the ‘J’ train and the ‘A’ train so, and I went from Queens all the way to Harlem to school and I spent sometimes two to three hours on the train every day from age 12 to 18 so, here we go.
Elliot Moss
Duke Ellington there with Take The ‘A’ Train, the song choice of my Business Shaper today, Elizabeth Rossiello. What’s the answer to the question? Have a view because that is the point of being a leader. Go to the data, in the face of volatility be calm but the way to be calm is to actually root your answer and your view of things in the data itself. And finally, in her view, people are not born entrepreneurs, they become entrepreneurs sometimes because they have to and sometimes because the opportunity is just too good to refuse, but be under no illusions, it ain’t easy. Really honest take on life as a founder. That’s it from me and Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
We hope you enjoyed that edition of Jazz Shapers. You’ll find hundreds more guests available for you to listen to in our archive, to find out more just search Jazz Shapers in iTunes or your favourite podcast platform or head over to mishcon.com/jazzshapers.