When Indigital founder Mikaela Jade first pitched the idea for her augmented reality tech business, she heard a lot of the same responses from venture capitalists. “A lot of the comments were, ‘Oh, that's great Mikaela, but indigenous people don't use technology.’ Or, ‘That's great, but it's a super high risk because you're female, you're indigenous, you're operating in frontier technologies, and you're literally living in the frontier. We just can't see a market for it.’”

But the Dharug Cabrogal woman had history on her side. 80,000 years of history, in the form of her ancestors, and the deep drive she felt to preserve their language, knowledge, and lore. Working as a park ranger in Kakadu, she knew there had to be a better way to respect cultural sites – and to engage with them fully – than banging a metal, English-language sign into place. “There was a lot of narrative from archaeologists and anthropologists”, she says, “but not really First Peoples.”

A chance encounter with some early augmented reality technology in 2012 gave her the idea for Indigital, a solution to this problem. She set about creating the technology to allow Aboriginal Elders to tell the stories of their cultural sites, via what she originally imagined as holograms.

In 2018, Mikaela was named as the Australian winner of the Veuve Clicquot New Generation Award, now called the Veuve Clicquot Bold Future Award. And she feels a particular affinity with the champagne house’s grande dame, Madame Clicquot. That’s because she comes from a long line of women who – like Madame Clicquot – don’t let a few rules stand in the way of changing history. And Mikaela clearly follows in their footsteps, having recently been named one of the top 100 innovators by the Australian Business Review. So how did she go from one-woman show, saddled with debt, to employing a workforce (86% female, thank you very much), and kicking goals in tech? It all starts with hiding in the toilets to play Space Invaders…yes, really.

We spoke to Mikaela about her remarkable personal story, the moment she almost gave up, and the advice she wants every female entrepreneur to hear.

What does being innovative mean to you?

I have a different take on innovation to most people. To me, innovation is taking different knowledge systems and mashing them together to create something that wasn't there before. I think there's this myth of innovation always having to start from scratch, and build something entirely new. But I think some of the best innovations come from taking different ideas and concepts, and bringing them together, and bringing the people involved in those different skills together, and creating something new together.

Did you have a background in tech before launching Indigital?

Not really. I was a geek when I was a kid. I used to go and hide in the toilets, so I could play Space Invaders because my parents didn't like us playing games all the time. I really got interested in coding, so I started doing a computers and technology class when I was in year nine. And I quit, because I was the only girl in the class. There was no one that looked like me in that class. And that was the narrative at the time in the nineties, it was a career for guys. 

I did have some technical capability in my past career, but not anything to do with artificial intelligence or mixed augmented reality production. I had to learn that all myself.

Tell me about the problem that inspired you to create Indigital?

I was working as a park ranger, and I was employed to make signs. You go and put the sign out on the national park, and it tells you all the things you're supposed to know about the site. But it was really frustrating because we were putting metal signs in places that are tens of thousands of years old, which are very significant places. And the sign manual, and the process to get those signs approved, is very colonial. So, often First Nations perspectives were not really shared on those signs, and you weren't really told about why the site was culturally significant, more the age of it. There was a lot of narrative from archaeologists and anthropologists, but not really First Peoples. 

And how did you come up with the idea to use augmented reality to tell indigenous stories?

In 2012, I went to the University of Canberra and I saw a really early version of augmented reality, and it was terrible. It was great for the time, but looking back at it now, you'd be like, ‘oh my gosh. Five year olds could make that’. Your phone had a picture of a doctor and the little video hovered one centimeter above the page. I thought, imagine if we could take the technology in a phone and go to a cultural place, and hold a phone up, and our elders could appear. I always imagined it as holograms, not as videos. So, I set about working on this concept of ‘how do we incorporate indigenous knowledge systems and language and lore through holographic technologies, where there's also a business model wrapped around that?’

Did you have any roadblocks in building the business model?

One thing that I saw as a threat of the technology was replacing opportunities for First Peoples to have employment, sharing their cultural places through tourism, and I didn't want that to happen. So, I looked at what would the business model around that look like, to support First Peoples in augmenting their cultural tourism products with augmented reality? 

We set about building that in Kakadu, and I worked with five phenomenal men from Kakadu who are traditional artists, and we worked on a project that brought bark ochre paintings to life. It went really, really well. We ended up at the United Nations talking about the work that we'd done in augmented reality. And then I became completely overwhelmed with the demand side of what I had created. 

I had created a monster in a way, because people could see the potential in the technology for preserving language, knowledge, and lore, but no one had the skills to make it themselves. They were all coming to me, asking for me to make it for them. And I became overwhelmed with the weight of holding all those stories, and then realised how dangerous it was to channel all the stories into one piece of technology. So, I almost gave up. And then in 2017 I met some people from Microsoft, who could see the potential in what I was trying to do. They offered to work with me to reimagine and re-platform what I was doing, but also look at how could we extend the skills and capability to mobs all around Australia and the world, to create this content for themselves. And I really wanted to do this because I knew that the technology was great but we also needed to allow people to have self-determination over creating this content for themselves.

You connected with your heritage as an Aboriginal woman at 29 years old. Tell me about your journey to discovering your heritage and how it's changed your life.

When I was 29 I was able to reconnect with my community. We're a speaking nation of sovereign peoples, and that's when I was able to finally reconnect with the rest of my family. But it was really difficult, because I was working as a park ranger in Queensland, and then in Western Australia, and both communities of peoples that I was working with there identified me as a First Nations woman, and that was really confronting because we weren't really told anything about that when we were growing up. So, when you grow up with one identity, and then as an adult find out that that identity was fabricated - for good reasons, and in order to protect our family - it's a really difficult thing to grapple with. And there's so many people in Australia that are grappling with the same thing, because the colonization was cataclysmic for First Peoples across Australia in all the 300 nations that exist, and we're people that are still trying to put the pieces together. So, it's been a journey to try and connect all the dots and find out, okay - I'm a Dharug Cabrogal woman from the Dharug speaking nations. What is my role in my community? I'm learning my language with my community. I'm trying to teach my children our language as well, so they don't have to grow up not knowing our tongue and our lore associated with that tongue. The sense of responsibility that comes with that, as a 42 year old woman, is quite high because I'm in this privileged position in my life now where I'm connected to the younger generation and to the older generation. And that's a huge responsibility as well, to make sure that I can speak to my elders and learn from them, and also pass the knowledge down to my children, so they will have that when I'm old, and pass away. And then they can do the same for their kids. Otherwise we lose our culture.

The story of Madame Clicquot is pretty amazing, and she was a visionary in her time. Why is she such an inspiring woman to you?

I still think, as much as we've been able to run businesses and open bank accounts and do all the things that she couldn't do, I think she still is a visionary, even in today's terms. Her ability to see market opportunities and go for those market opportunities is outstanding. I'd love to see what she would have done with her business today, if she'd have been alive today. She's still inspirational.

You're from a strong line of Aboriginal women, so can you tell me about the women in your life who inspire you the most?

Yes. I have my own Madame Clicquot in my own family. I descend from a Cabrogal woman called Lucy Lane, and she was a phenomenal agitator in the 1800's. And she, in fact, petitioned the Aboriginal Protection Board for rights. She was requesting a boat to be able to take the produce she was growing on her country down into Sydney Cove. She was denied that by the government, but she saw opportunities. She persevered, she harnessed her community to get behind her, because as an Aboriginal woman, she was completely unable to put the petition forward for herself. So, she had to harness other members of the community that had status, that were non-indigenous, to support her petition. So, to be able to do that in the 1800's as an indigenous woman is quite phenomenal.

And also in our family, we have Australia's only known indigenous nurse in the First World War, Marion Leane Smith. She actually served for Canada, and she was on the hospital trains. She then started The Red Cross in Trinidad after that. So, she had quite a phenomenal life. 

There's so many aunties, and my own mum and my sister, that inspire me every day, so I do have lots of strong women around me, and I tend to surround myself now with other strong women. It's just a really nice camaraderie amongst women, particularly women in business in Australia at the moment, and indigenous women in business. We all support each other and really want the best for each other's companies, and I think that's a really nice part about being in the business community in Australia.

When you had the idea for Indigital, you were based in Kakadu at the time. Tell me about the response you received initially.

I had this vision since 2012, and I couldn't set about building it until 2014 because I didn't have any resources to do it. It's really difficult for indigenous people to set up tech companies. We don't have intergenerational wealth to draw from. So, I was going around looking for people to invest in my idea, and met a number of venture capitalists at the time in Sydney and Brisbane. And they were mostly male, mostly white. They couldn't see what I could see in the potential. A lot of the comments were, "Oh, that's great Mikaela, but indigenous people don't use technology." Or, "That's great, but it's a super high risk because you're female, you're indigenous, you're operating in frontier technologies, and you're literally living in the frontier. We just can't see a market for it." It was really disappointing, but I used my ranger salary to invest in it, and took out a massive business loan. There was a small amount of grant funding, and I bootstrapped it.

How did you raise capital?

I probably did all the wrong things to start with. I basically just kept applying for grants, I kept applying for loans. I put a lot of my salary into developing the minimum viable product, which was incredibly expensive. We managed to make it work. And then, I had to spend the next three years of my salary paying down that investment, and managed to pay it off, which I'm really proud of. Our company is debt free, which is a really exciting place to be, because I know how hard it is when you're carrying a debt. Just the psychological difficulties around having that debt associated with the company, and wondering how you're going to pay it off. I don't really want to go there again.

Do you have any advice for indigenous female entrepreneurs?

Have conviction in your idea and don't give up, is my first piece of advice. There were points along the journey where I was adamant I was going to shut the company. And one of the saving graces that I had in my life was my daughter. I was in the car and I was bawling my eyes out from all the stress. And I said, "That's it. I'm shutting the company." And my daughter turned and said, "No, mum. You can't, because I want to work in that company when I finish school." She really got to me in that moment. 

And I think being able to get back up from the no's and really turn the no's around into, ‘what can I learn from that no? This person has said no to me, but they have a reason for saying no, and I need to unpack what I can do differently to turn that no into a yes next time’.

All the failures and all the no's taught me different things about how to create something exceptional. And it's hard in the moment to see that potential and possibility when you're feeling terrible about being rejected, but in the end they're giving you a gift. And being able to see the gift in the no's and the hard times is something I really encourage people to do.

How did you know you were onto something that you just needed to see through?

Every time that I went to stop doing it, there was something that came in and rescued me from that thought process. I felt like my ancestors were helping me in those times when I couldn't see a way through. And it still happens in the company today. I feel propelled by forces that are bigger than what we can see and feel, in a lot of ways. And I think our cultures and that our ancestors from many nations of people that work in our company now, are all behind us. And we do have this shared responsibility to make sure that in seven generations time, that our descendants aren't wondering what their tongue is and what their lore is and what their language is. So, we're all driven by a higher purpose in the company.

Tell me about the bias indigenous women in STEM often feel.

I have two schools of thought on this, and I think we can hold dichotomies at once. One of them is, I think it's terrible that we don't have a high representation of indigenous women in science, technology, engineering, and maths. We have good representation in arts, which is great, but we really need to extend that across the rest of STEM. And there are so many barriers to being able to get a STEM degree. Especially if you're on country, having to leave country, for example, to come and sit in a physical place to do study is a massive barrier for people. So, I think there are logical reasons why we're underrepresented in STEM, and it's because the system doesn't suit us and our experience. 

The other thing is though, I think we have actually thousands of indigenous women in STEM, because we have 80,000 years of science. And just because we don't have a piece of paper from a university, doesn't make it any less worthy, and doesn't make our contribution any less worthy. Or our ability to participate in science, technology, engineering - that's worthy. I think there's many people doing that without having the formal qualification from a Western system to validate that.

You've gone from being a one woman show to now having nine staff who are really dedicated to the same values. What have you learnt about hiring people?

Just do it. I was so scared for so many years about bringing someone else on the journey, and that first hire was incredibly difficult because I was willing to eat lentils and not drive my car, and do all the things that you need to do when you don't have any money, but I didn't want to put that on someone else, or I didn't want to carry the responsibility of someone else's financial future. 

But in the last 18 months, we've grown our team from just me to nine indigenous and non-indigenous staff. We are 86% indigenous staff, we're 86% female staff, and we all work from country, where we are, so we have a distributed team. It works really, really, well, and we've had really inspiring stories come out of the program as we followed it over the last 18 months. 

I just have incredible people around me, and also incredible networks to be able to propel us forward and talk about us. That’s something I'm really grateful for. We have people in the SheEO community and people in Microsoft, and people in Telstra, and people at Veuve Clicquot, talking about what we do all the time. So, we get a lot of warm introductions to people just through the networks that believe in us.