5 Questions For Founders with Maria Sipka

Letting Go, Exploring & Connecting to Find True Purpose

My current company, Linqia, was founded out of a social vision. At a cellular level, the question I asked myself was: with the limited time that we have on this planet, where can we direct our energy that’s connected to our passions and focused on an area of significant need? After discovering the area that needed attention I then reverse engineered the company that would be required to solve for this need.

Going back to where it started, I was 27 years old and had just spent the last eight years building two companies in parallel. One was focused on building wealth through residential real estate and the other a content marketing agency, both of which were purely tied to my vision of becoming financially independent by 30. During this time, my partner and I lived across the road from our office in Sydney where we worked around the clock in our content marketing business, and directed all the profit into accumulating a real estate portfolio. That allowed us to achieve financial independence, which to me meant freedom — doing what you want, when you want, with who you want. It gave us the creative space to just truly explore our potential and who we were.

The downside however was we both felt exhausted with all of our time being consumed into building these two companies to achieve our financial goals. My partner was an avid reader having read over 1000 books on every topic, from business to personal development to psychology which he would share his learnings with me daily and we attended countless events. In less than a decade it felt like we had lived multiple lives. And when we reached the top of the mountain, I arrived at a cross road and asked myself a question that nearly every entrepreneur asks themselves: What’s next? What do I want from my life? And more importantly, what’s my purpose? What’s my mission, what are my gifts and where can I create impact? When all these questions arose the universe opened up. Intuitively I felt that in order to go in search of my purpose and find the answers to these questions, I had to surrender and give everything up. Everything. I left my eight-year relationship, my family and friends, wound my business down, locked up my assets, surrendered my identity — one would arguably say I abandoned a perfect life.

I was curious to meet my deepest self, and so I embarked on a 10 day Silent Retreat. What I discovered was complete peace — where you fully grasp that nothing real is ever being threatened. I realised it was all in my mind, all of the stories and engrained emotions that are accumulated and tucked away in our psyche and bodies, and that anything I could dream of is possible. After this experience, I left Australia and travelled around the world for two years. I would go from one city, one country to the next — exposing myself to new cultures and strangers of all walks of life. Through these experiences, I discovered my purpose and my unique gifts: I discovered in myself a deep passion for storytelling, for people and connecting ideas and opportunities. As I met people I’d listen to their stories that would trigger emotions and ideas. I felt unleashed, and I wondered: how do I bring this to the world? How do I connect people and ideas to one another? That became the driving force.

Discovering my passions also led me to ask another critical question: where is there a need to create impact? I started to explore this question in my area of expertise: advertising, marketing & communications, and that’s where I discovered my life purpose: to bring more consciousness into advertising. This purpose led me to coming up with the idea for my current company, Linqia, in 2004, which today is a leading enterprise influencer marketing technology and services platform. Together with my co-founder Nader Alizadeh, our extraordinary team has built a technology company, and an ecosystem around a million storytellers and influencers. Each has founded their communities from their passions and interests — around a shared interest and topic. Infinite opportunities and possibilities come to life in these communities, through stories, images, videos and narratives, and every story is unique and different.

One thing I wish I knew was how important having a community can be. Currently, my community is my greatest asset: the community that I have built globally, my contributions to that community, and how that community has contributed to the larger ecosystem — that has become the foundational asset for how I create success in any realm. I believe that how you can create impact in the world is determined by the size and strength of your community.

For the first eight years of my entrepreneurial journey — late teens and twenties — I felt very isolated. I lived across the road from my office and my boyfriend was my business partner. I spent all my time with him. He was the one that read thousands of books and went to the hundreds of events. So in a way, we were exposed to a tremendous amount of knowledge and tools to work on ourselves. I had a team of 10 people and our customer base, but I personally didn’t spend any time networking — I didn’t spend any time in my community creating, nurturing or fostering connections across a number of different levels in any of the areas I was really passionate about. In those eight years, that community would have undoubtedly had a significant impact on the trajectory of my life and on the leverage that I could have had as an entrepreneur. I wish I had invested significantly into being at the right places, meeting the right people, and finding ways to contribute into that ecosystem — I believe community is one of the greatest assets we have as human beings.

What drove me to build my first company was financial freedom. A goal that was “me focused” — my wealth, what I can accumulate, how I can create a better life for myself. My turning point in founding Linqia was shifting this focus from me to we and anchoring success to creating impact — reverse engineering where I wanted to be in ten years and beyond. From the outset I knew Linqia would be my last company. That I would arrive at a point where it would no longer be about my next company. Instead, it would be about how can I take everything that I’ve learned and who I am, and where can I direct my energy to create maximum impact. To leverage all of the tools, knowledge, wisdom and network I’d been gifted over the past three decades.

My vision is to collaborate with social impact entrepreneurs, and help them unleash their ideas, products, services, and ideologies to the world through the power of influence, social technology, and storytelling.

Today, I am alert to what I need to learn to create even more impact. So, after Linqia, I’ll be studying transpersonal psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies to understand how we can learn and adopt the training and skills to best contribute to the mass healing of populations. I find the cross pollination of human psychology with entrepreneurship and impact creation extraordinarily riveting. After all, it’s not just about my companies, but what continues to drive me — my desire to learn and build my skillsets to serve people.

Undoubtedly — a positive mindset.

Your thoughts impact your emotions, your emotions impact your actions, and your actions impact your future. What does it mean to have a positive mindset? One thing is certain: that there’s no magical switch that you flick on like a light. A positive mindset is so deeply ingrained in all the facets of who we are. As I reflected on my own journey and pondering this question, I engaged a coach for three months to unravel the tenets of a positive mindset and discovered the secret key, which I have synthesized into an acronym I call the GIVE code.

So what does it stand for? G represents Generosity. I learned about generosity in my late teens spending hours with my boyfriend’s grandmother — who was in her 80s. She said to me, “You know what, Maria? There are two types of people in the world — and you’ll know as soon as you meet them which type they are — they either come from Giving-ton or Taking-ton.” Giving-ton is: when you first meet somebody, do they have a giving spirit? Are they curious about who you are and what your common connections are; how to collaborate and add value to one another? Or are they from Taking-ton: sizing you up to sense what they can take from you? Did you go to an Ivy league school, who do you know, where do you work? And then putting forward their ask. That conversation left such an impression on me, and I consciously took that mindset onboard and decided that I always want to walk away from a conversation or interaction with the sense that I’ve given something and filled somebody’s cup with something of value.

I represents Infinity — in the context of having an abundant mindset. Asking yourself what are the possibilities? Let’s look at all the reasons why this is going to work out or, seeing all the positive qualities an individual embodies. Seeing who they are and what they are capability of achieving. This mindset takes you out of the judgment zone that can weaken a connection. If you enter every interaction with an infinite mindset, there’s infinite potential to co-create and catalyze each other’s future.

V represents Vulnerability. You never want to be seen or perceived as having it all together because there is no such thing as perfection. Perfection is in the imperfection, and so vulnerability ties to being self-aware about who you are, where your strengths and weaknesses exist — and accepting that our super powers are not going to apply to every area of our being. Today it’s far more common for people to be able to share their feelings — whether they are nervous, sad or angry, because that’s part of the human experience.

And last, E represents Energy. Your ability to manifest energy says a lot about who you are and how you flow through life. Within a few seconds of entering a room, what do others feel when they see or hear you? I believe the combination of generosity, infinite mindset, vulnerability, and energy — the GIVE code — is really what transcends into a positive mindset.

A tool that I use daily is Insight Timer — a global network and community of mindfulness practitioners, guides, and teachers. Shortly after waking up my partner and I listen to a 15 to 30 minute guided meditation — holding hands, laying down with our eyes closed focusing on our breath. So much of how our day and future unfolds is determined by the first 30 minutes of every morning. Meditating has helped me maintain my positive mindset to ensure I can get through any moment of uncertainty throughout my day.

To dive even deeper into Maria’s founder journey, check out our podcast episode with her (and host Stacey Lawson), available on all major podcast platforms!

Find us on: Spotify, Apple Music, Google Podcast, Red Circle & Stitcher