Founder spotlight: Clare Leighton from bluesheets
In our ongoing commitment to celebrating International Women's Day, we're again shining a spotlight on some of our exceptional women founders as they make waves throughout the emerging tech industry.
Our second founder in this series is Clare Leighton, Co-Founder and COO of bluesheets. We spoke to her about how she came to start her company, the challenges facing women in the emerging technology sector, and advice she'd pass along to women considering a career in the industry.
Tell us a bit about yourself
Originally from Perth, I studied Finance and Environmental Sciences at the University of Western Australia. While finishing my degree I jumped into the world of startups, joining the recently launched Uber ANZ team. Working first in operations and then on the launch of Uber Eats, I enormously enjoyed the ‘messiness’ and impact of an early-stage venture. I moved into a regional role in Sydney, where I later joined a B2B food tech startup, DishDash, to launch and scale their Australian business, which is where I met my now co-founder. Currently, I’m the COO and Co-Founder of the data transformation platform, bluesheets.io, which we launched during the pandemic and are now scaling globally.
Can you tell us a bit about the company you founded, bluesheets, and what made you decide to launch it?
bluesheets is a data transformation platform that connects and digitises the full scope of financial data within an organisation to streamline and automate its financial processes. We make digitised, structured data available to businesses while providing efficiency gains of up to 90% by automating processes such as bookkeeping and reporting.
While working with the first of Uber Eats’s vendor partners in Western Australia, I saw how disjointed their systems were, and the burden of having to manually process financial data like invoices and various sales channels. What’s more, with the rise of cloud systems, more data was being generated online but without the ease of integration, ultimately someone had to manually transfer that data from one system to another. It all seemed incredibly counterintuitive.
Once at DishDash, a B2B SaaS venture, we were working with large enterprises and big tech firms like LinkedIn, Uber, and Slack. We saw that the problem persisted even in these big companies; whether it was SME systems or corporate legacy tech, there was a gaping hole in the way financial data was being collected, structured, and processed. To bridge the gap, data needed to be easily digested and integrated into a company’s systems. So we started building it, and bluesheets was born!
What three words would you use to describe working at a startup, and why?
Ambiguous - It’s a dynamic environment and no two days look the same. Startups grow and change at a fast pace so the scope of work is always evolving; you can’t always see around corners or predict what’s going to come next.
Impactful - You don’t have the organisational layers that can separate you from the end user; it’s a much shorter feedback loop. And if you’ve set out to solve a real-world problem for your customers, everything you choose to build (or not build) has a direct impact on their experience.
Fun - There can indeed be roller-coaster ups and downs, all of which make startup life incredibly fun and rewarding!
What does your typical day look like?
I’m an active person so I enjoy starting the day early with surf or swimming, and strong coffee before jumping into work! With the majority of our team in Singapore, I use the morning for admin and local meetings before typically being meeting-heavy in the afternoon. We structure regular internal meetings and blocks for external meetings throughout the week, so we are always starting with objectives, and reflecting come to the end of the week; a structure I find helps enormously with prioritisation.
I also play sports that require me to have a hard stop at regular COB hours some days. It’s great to break up my week with these ‘unplugged’ evenings and the rest of the week my workday typically wraps up around 8-9 pm so I can make the most of the overlap with South East Asia.
What have been the biggest challenges you’ve faced launching your company?
We launched our company at the beginning of the pandemic. It was a very unique experience to be founding, fundraising, and growing bluesheets fully remotely; with my co-founder in an entirely different country. The support of our investors, advisors, and users made the journey possible and we learned so much from that experience! We’re still learning with every challenge, and that’s part of the fun as a Founder; you’re always facing something different and learning something new.
What advice would you give to women considering a career in the emerging technology industry? What do you wish you had known?
Just start! Start where you are, and start having conversations and networking with founders and people in the industry. The startup community is incredibly supportive, especially here in Australia and in my experience, people are happy to share their learnings and help where they can. A concern I have heard often from would-be founders is feeling like they don’t know enough or aren’t ‘expert’ enough when the truth is everyone has to learn along the way.
Every venture is different and there will be learning curves you have to go through just by ‘doing’. For women considering a career in emerging technology, I would stress how much of an opportunity there is. Working largely in male-dominated industries, I have had the most support from men throughout my career and encourage any woman who has concerns about inclusivity to connect with, and seek mentorship from both men and women.
