NEW YORK—Tania Yuki started her business alone in her living room. In three years’ time, she turned it into a high-growth company with 75 employees. Being a woman and “100 percent foreigner,” as she puts it, has not held her back from achieving her dreams.
“I quit my wonderful job and started working on ideas to help businesses in social media space” said Yuki. Her company Shareablee provides social media content analytics and insights for brands.
She was born in Sydney, Australia, and graduated from law school in 2005 with a focus on media law and communications. After graduation, she worked in media and digital media space. A production role on a documentary took Yuki to the United States for the first time in 2007.
“Scale of what was going on here was so exciting. When I got here, I knew I wanted to be part of it. But coming from overseas means that you need to work 10 times harder to make friends and connections,” she said.
Yuki began by pitching her preliminary ideas to marketers in 2012, and one of them offered to buy her solution. The biggest turning point was winning her first client, The Economist magazine, in 2013. Currently, Shareablee serves more than 200 clients in 10 countries.
In the struggle to hire and fit new staff, the company moved three times in the last three years. Yuki now feels settled in her new downtown Manhattan office.
