As a young woman in her early thirties, managing home and work-life is a real balancing act – but somehow she seems to make it work. “Balance and start-up usually don’t live within the same sentence,” she cautions.
With a day that typically begins at 5:30am to maximise US time zones and facilitate discussions with Cloudscene users, she stays pretty much glued to her desk in back-to-back meetings, stressing that “no two days are ever the same.” However, no matter how busy her day gets she always finds time for family.
“I have a strict regime of getting home to put my little one to sleep. My husband and I have an 8-month-old baby so we’re very focused on spending as much time with him as we can when I have any time away from my laptop/phone.”
Recognising the gender disparity within the industry, Lajoie is passionate about encouraging women to strive for leadership and creating an equal environment for both men and women to have flexibility at work, particularly in leadership positions, after they have started a family.
Reflecting on her own experiences she says, “Externally there have been a few challenges in being a (young) woman in a male-dominated industry mostly around perception, but those walls break down pretty quick when they understand your experience and professionalism.”
Looking ahead Lajoie is leveraging her start-up experience, the most recent being a founding executive and chief commercial officer of Megaport, to “formulate a tight product roadmap and scalable revenue strategy based on value to the user” over at Cloudscene.
“We’re launching additional products and features later this calendar year, but for the meantime, we are focused on being the number one trading platform for cloud and connectivity services via our Cloud Pathfinder and Marketplace tools as well as maintaining the global data source for the industry.”
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