About me

Entrepreneur, passionate speaker, empathetic advisor, Buffy fan.

Explore some of the things I’ve built and achieved. Listen, read and watch some of my interviews and coverage. And get in touch if you’d like me to help you with your business or speak at your event.

I’m Alicia Navarro, pronounced “A-lee-the-a”, and known as Leithy. This oddity of pronunciation is due to the Castillian lisp of my Spanish mother. My Cuban father says my name without the lisp (“A-li-sia”) and in the English-speaking world I’ve grown up I’m called “A-lee-sha” by default. However, out of a penchant for the aural quality of words and a desire to be a little different, I always ask people to call me the way my mother calls me. So “A-lee-the-a” or Leithy, if you’d be so kind.

While I come from Spanish and Cuban roots, I was born and bred in Sydney, Australia, where my parents immigrated a few years before I was born. Despite it being probably the best place to grow up in the world, I moved to London in my mid-20s, and haven’t stopped moving since. I’ve travelled around the world many times, I’ve lived in San Francisco for many years, and I spend much of my time in New York. Where is home? Right now, in a sweet little canal-side apartment in Haggerston, London, where the sound of ducks quacking wakes me up in the morning.

My passions are varied and odd: reading maps (preferably while countryside rambling), drag queens, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, oysters (and food generally), dancing, Bill Bryson (and books generally), and tech entrepreneurship. And I’m known for being quite passionate about all these things and more. Must be that Latin blood.

Bio

Alicia is a serial tech entrepreneur, with a passion for product, brand, design and culture.
In 2007, Alicia founded Skimlinks, an innovative platform helping publishers such as Buzzfeed, Conde Nast, Hearst, and Aol monetize their commerce-related content. Alicia started the company in her living room in Sydney, Australia, and over 11 years as CEO of the business she grew it to a $50m/year business based in London with operations in San Francisco and New York. In 2018 she stepped down as CEO to focus on building her next venture, and Skimlinks was acquired by Connexity in 2020 (during COVID lockdown!).
After Skimlinks, Alicia worked as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at firstminute and Breega Capital, trained as an accredited Executive Coach, and became an advisor to many startup founders.
She is now the founder and CEO of a new startup, Flown, creating ‘deep work’ spaces for knowledge workers. Frustrated by how hard it was to find the physical and mental spaces conducive to productive and creative thinking, Alicia began Flown to offer a curated network of deep work-enabled home and hotels accompanied by a set of online tools and resources to enable accountability, focus and creativity.
She’s won the EveryWoman in Technology Entrepreneur of the Year, a Finalist in Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year, and the WCIT’s Female Entrepreneur of the Year, along with countless other awards for her leadership and startups’ innovation, growth, and culture. She served on the Board of Trustees of the charity Young Enterprise, helping young people build their confidence and enterprising skills while starting their own businesses at school. And she has donated much of her time to mentor and speak to young founders and students, encouraging them to take careers in technology and startups.
Prior to founding Skimlinks, Alicia worked in product management and business development for both corporates such as IBM, Vodafone and Fairfax Media, as well as startups. She has a computer science degree from University of Technology, Sydney, where she graduated at the top of her class, the first woman to do that at her university.

Headshots

Feel free to use these images if needed for press or comms material.

Photography by Talie Eigeland (highly recommended, she’s great!)