She's Next Talks

Growing up in a traditional, patriarchal family in Azerbaijan, Turana Alieva faced a pre-written future: her parents dreamt of her becoming a doctor. “I’m afraid of blood,” she recalls, admitting she faints at the sight of it. Refusing to follow their roadmap, she pursued politics and economics instead, eventually securing a scholarship for a master’s degree at the University of Glasgow despite her family’s initial reluctance to let her study abroad. After graduating in the UK, multiple unsuccessful job attempts led Alieva to pivot into entrepreneurship, launching her start-up, FeMight. Building a business from scratch proved draining and misunderstood by her family, who initially assumed she was unemployed. Her mother regularly sent her office job vacancies until FeMight won the UK Start-up Award regional finals. “Until recently my mom thought I was jobless,” she explains, noting how hard it can be for traditional families to grasp the building phase of a start-up. Through coaching female founders, Alieva identified the "confidence gap" as the primary barrier preventing women from taking risks, asking for promotions, or pitching investors. She views confidence not as an innate trait, but as a muscle that requires continuous daily exercise. “Once you stop training it, it goes weak again,” she observes, emphasizing that women often focus on current metrics while men pitch ambitious future projections. Entrepreneurship also taught Alieva hard lessons about pacing. Early on, she attempted to do everything at once, leaving her devastated when no one showed up to her first two events in Glasgow. Realizing she was on the path to burnout, she shifted to setting one focused goal at a time. Today, inspired by the rapid shifts in women's independence across Azerbaijan, Alieva is expanding FeMight’s global community by raising funds through B2B crowdfunding to build a dedicated digital platform for female founders.

At two years old, Bardha Ajvazi moved from Kosovo to the United Kingdom, returning home as a teenager with an open-minded worldview and an international perspective that would define her career. "I think if that didn't happen in my life, I would be a much different person today," she reflects, noting how her early cross-cultural exposure shaped her approach to business. Armed with degrees in business management and IT, Ajvazi co-founded marketing and digital agency Brand Fluence in 2019—just three months before the global pandemic hit. Rather than folding, her team capitalized on the sudden regional surge in demand for digital transformation, e-commerce, and online branding. Driven to address a gap in her local market, she later co-founded Andra, the first Albanian-language platform dedicated to women’s health, menstrual tracking, and family planning, which has already surpassed nearly 30,000 downloads. Across both ventures, Ajvazi has built a leadership style rooted in open communication and strong teamwork. Rejecting the myth of the solitary founder, she actively encourages her team to propose new ideas without fear. "I've learned that I cannot do something on my own," she notes, emphasizing that long-term success requires gathering diverse perspectives around the table. Her guidance for aspiring female entrepreneurs is grounded in practical reality rather than social media illusions. She cautions founders against measuring early-stage startups against mature companies, while advising them not to wait for perfect timing. “Do not wait until you feel completely ready because that will never happen,” she urges, stressing that while passion is vital, “a business also needs demand”. As a mother of two balancing executive roles with board leadership, Ajvazi defines success through meaningful impact rather than single milestones. Looking ahead to her next chapter in digital transformation, AI, and mentoring young women across the Balkans, her commitment remains steadfast. “Success for me is... having created work that is meaningful while remaining present in other important parts of my life,” she says.

At twenty years old, Katarina Tasevski did not have her life figured out. Before settling on a career, she changed university faculties four times, exploring everything from archaeology to biochemistry. Today, as the Operating Director at DEKRA Arbeit Macedonia, she views that winding path not as a delay, but as an essential exercise in curiosity. Tasevski strongly advises young professionals to avoid rushing into master's degrees just to tick an educational box, recommending instead that they wait until they have truly discovered their calling in the workforce. This philosophy of continuous, intentional learning underpins her entire career in North Macedonia's rapidly growing labour market. "I strongly believe that if you are the smartest person in a room, that you're probably in the wrong room," she observes, noting that genuine growth only comes from being challenged. At the helm of a full-service HR company, Tasevski navigates a workforce in flux, balancing the influx of international companies and the shifting priorities of younger, self-focused generations. Yet, amidst the global rush to adopt artificial intelligence and remote work, she remains a staunch defender of in-person collaboration and human intuition. While AI might efficiently draft an email or filter a CV, she argues it cannot replicate empathy, assess a candidate's behavioural nuances, or measure true motivation. "Human interaction is... something that actually puts the human in human resources," she asserts, stating that she would never trust software to do a recruiter's job. For female entrepreneurs building their teams, she advises looking past rigid skill checklists and hiring for motivation, as technical skills can always be taught to a willing learner. As a female executive in a society where the title of "director" still traditionally conjures the image of a man, Tasevski is redefining the role. She believes that modern leadership is not about wielding sheer authority, but about cultivating an environment where employees feel valued, heard, and motivated to grow. For her, a woman's true leadership strength lies in combining "resilience with empathy". Despite the pressures of running a broad HR operation that she fondly compares to being in a "popcorn machine", Tasevski’s enthusiasm is boundless. When asked what she wishes for the most, her answer is wonderfully unconventional: an eighth day of the week—specifically, an extra working day—just so she can dive into even more projects.

At 21, Sitara Aghayeva made a life-altering decision: she secretly taught herself the programming language Python in her bedroom. Despite holding a degree in accounting and facing intense pressure from her family to pursue a safe, traditional financial career, she deliberately chose the harder path. Today, the Baku native is a leading AI risk specialist at a major bank and the CEO of her own tech start-up, Comask. Aghayeva’s pivot into the tech world was fuelled by a military philosophy she read in a book: you must choose your hardship. She now applies that same pragmatic mindset to entrepreneurship. Her start-up, Comask, was born from a frustrating corporate pain point: losing valuable ideas during late-night WhatsApp brainstorming sessions. Her solution integrates task management directly into a messaging platform, converting chat keywords into actionable workflow tickets so no tasks are lost before the team reaches the office. Crucially, Comask features an AI "agile coach" that learns a team's work style, monitors workflows, and proactively messages delayed team members in multiple languages to offer help. Yet, Aghayeva remains highly critical of the tech industry’s current blind obsession with artificial intelligence. “First thing a start-up... should identify is the problem,” she advises, warning founders not to integrate AI simply to appease investors or follow the hype. If a problem can be solved with a simple two lines of Python code, she argues, that is the superior solution. As a professional who manages AI ethics and data privacy, Aghayeva's rule for daily AI use is strict: “If you think that if someone screams out about your information to the public and you will feel ashamed, don't share it with ChatGPT, Claude, or any other tool because it can leak”. In Azerbaijan, where success is often rigidly defined as a 9-to-five job with a monthly pay slip, Aghayeva is challenging the status quo. She actively pushes back against regional stereotypes that claim coding isn't suitable for women. Her advice to the next generation of female founders is to abandon the pursuit of perfection and simply take action. “Just release, push, write someone on LinkedIn... speak about your startup. It won't be perfect,” she urges. "If you go public, you take good comments and bad comments, and you should take both".

For over two decades, Nadera Alsukkar managed complex operations in some of the world's most volatile conflict zones. Born during the outbreak of the Bosnian war to a Bosnian and Jordanian family, she experienced displacement firsthand, igniting a lifelong passion for human rights. Armed with a degree in actuarial science and early experience volunteering with the Red Cross, she carved a unique path leading crisis responses in Syria and Iraq.Her crucible in leadership came while managing the White Helmets operations for Mayday Rescue, culminating in a highly complex, internationally celebrated evacuation of her team under severe military and diplomatic threat. Through these high-stakes environments, Alsukkar discovered that true leadership isn't about rigid planning, but understanding how to keep a team focused when forced to pivot under immense pressure. She also realised that calculating risk in a crisis requires looking beyond immediate relief to consider long-term sustainability and values. Despite her formidable resume, Alsukkar has intimately navigated the hurdles women face when seeking professional support. She recalls a male colleague dismissing her operational vision by telling her, “you plan like a Barbie”. This ingrained bias, combined with the internalised pressure women feel to have all the answers, makes asking for help incredibly daunting. “We're either we think we're not allowed to ask because we should know the answer, or we're not taken seriously,” she notes. Determined to change this, Alsukkar recently founded We Lead Next, a platform designed to democratise access to expertise and mentorship for young founders in the Balkans and the Middle East. She argues that the corporate world is still clinging to post-industrial management theories built for predictable manufacturing, which are entirely ill-equipped for an era dominated by rapid AI advancements and global uncertainty. Her start-up aims to gather experts in fields like fintech, deep AI, and biotech to build entirely new, community-driven ways of doing business.Reflecting on her demanding career and the reality of burnout, her advice to female entrepreneurs is surprisingly gentle. "Take it lightly," she urges, emphasising the importance of prioritising yourself and leaning into supportive communities. "Change happen one small effect after another, not dramatically. So slow down that's the most important thing".