About me

I’ve been asked, more than once, to summarize myself for an introduction at an event. I never know what to say. The honest answer is that I’m a person who keeps choosing the same thing and discovering, each time, that it’s a little bigger than I thought.

What I’ve chosen, repeatedly, is to bet on people: mine, ours, the ones in the room I’m walking into. Everything else I’ve built has come from that.

Where I’m from

I was born in Canada and grew up in Melbourne, the eldest of four children. My parents had two children naturally and then, having lived in places that showed them how many children needed love, adopted my brother Simon and, later, my brother Peter.

My mum was a teacher who couldn’t stop teaching. She wrote books for East Timor. She went into prisons at night to do arts and crafts with women whose children were waiting for them on the outside. “If no one’s thinking about these women, Lizzie, no one’s going to show them how to be kind and caring.” That was my childhood, more or less. A working mother, four kids of various origins, and an adamantly global view of what a family was supposed to look like.

It set the tone for everything that came after.

How I got into this

I left Melbourne for Sydney at eighteen because I knew if I stayed, I’d never find out who I was without my school friends in the room. I went to Macquarie University. I lived on campus, which was — at the time — something only people from farms did.

I lasted a year. Then I took a gap year in London and accidentally got a job at Saatchi & Saatchi. They had typing pools then, and I didn’t type fast enough to make it into one, which turned out to be a career-saving piece of bad luck. Instead, I ended up rotating through the creative team, the retouching studio, and account management. I came back to Sydney, sent out a few résumés to see what would happen, and got offered a job before I could re-enroll.

To my parents’ enormous heartbreak, I never went back. They were the kind of family where you finish your degree, and then you finish another one. But I had already met the thing I wanted to do.

The first business

I had chosen to join Mattingly/Young & Rubicam in Sydney as a media planner, but I was then poached to move to Euro RSCG. In 1997, I joined Yahoo! as one of the earliest hires on the Asia-Pacific team at a moment when most of the people I met still wanted me to explain what the internet was, slowly, in the boardroom.

In 2001, I left to bet on myself. That bet became The White Agency, the digital agency I co-founded in Sydney with Craig Galvin — the same Craig who I’d met working at Yahoo! and who would, a decade later, come and work at Rokt with us.

We grew The White Agency into one of the country’s most respected digital agencies. Telstra. Commonwealth Bank. Coca-Cola South Pacific. STW (which became WPP) bought it in 2011, and it became whiteGREY. It still exists. It merged into AKQA in 2024.

The second one

In 2012, we started Rokt. The bet was a strange one at the time: that the most undervalued moment in ecommerce was the moment of transaction itself — The Transaction Moment™. We have worked tirelessly to turn that moment into a relevance engine.

Fourteen years later, Rokt is a $3.5 billion ecommerce technology company powering more than ten billion transactions a year for Uber, Macy’s, PayPal, Live Nation / Ticketmaster, Best Buy, and dozens more. I’m the Chief Commercial Officer. I’ve been here since I wrote the first press release announcing our formation.

It’s the longest sustained creative project of my life. I’m not done with it.

Boards and the work outside the work

I sit on the board of Vital Voices Global Partnership, the international NGO that invests in extraordinary women leaders around the world. I joined because the work sits at the heart of what I believe: The most powerful thing any of us can do, with whatever access we've been given, is help someone else go further than they thought they could.

I recently stepped down from the board of S4Capital, where I served alongside Sir Martin Sorrell, helping build Monks into another global digital business.

Outside Rokt, most of my time goes to philanthropy. Three things, mainly: children's health, education, and opportunity for girls and women.

The personal bit

I’m married to Bruce Buchanan — the Rokt co-founder, my husband, and the person who started coming to Sophie’s cleft-lip clinic appointments at the children’s hospital with me when we had just started dating. Between us, we have five children. Three are now grown and out in the world. Two are still at home, although the home itself has moved a few times. We split our time between several locations, including Sydney and Brooklyn. I’m a Canadian-born Australian, New York-adopted, and, for whatever it’s worth, I'm still a complete introvert who recharges with family by the water.