Founder & CD at White Bear 🐻‍❄️ | Top 22 Female Founder 2022 ⚡️| Small Agency of the year 2022 🥇| CP Top 5 Agencies in UK ✏️ | Speaker and Host 🎤 | 16x Award winner 2022 🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆

Kelly Mackenzie is a two-time founder, creative director, and unapologetic brand obsessive. She leads White Bear, the award-winning creative agency with studios in London, Dublin, and South America, recognised as Agency of the Year 2022 and winner of multiple DBA, Transform, Pent, Mobius, IDI, Creativepool, and Red Dot awards for work with brands like Red Bull, Netflix, Bold Bean, Tom Parker Creamery, and The Kerry Group.

She’s also the founder of People Like Me – a growing community for women in marketing to make real, meaningful connections in person, cutting through the algorithm and digital noise to create friendships, share challenges, and help each other shine.

Named one of Startup Magazine’s Top 22 Women of 2022 and a Creativepool Leader of 2023, Kelly is passionate about design thinking, education, and championing women in leadership. She has lectured at IADT and NUA, served on the board of The Big Idea, and mentored start-ups with Bethnal Green Ventures, Enterprise Nation, and SeedLegals.

Her philosophy? Build unforgettable brands, disrupt industries, and make people feel something – and have the craic while doing it.

Learn more at 
http://www.whitebearstudio.com
http://www.peoplelikeme.io


Subscribe to our newsletter at: https://mailchi.mp/whitebearstudio/newsletter
Or contact me directly at kelly@whitebearstudio.com

Kelly Mackenzie 🐻‍❄️

Isabella Ghassemi-Smith

Head of Marketing @ Wayra UK (Telefónica’s CVC) | Host of "The Day I..." podcast 💙

🚀 Backing the boldest female founders in emerging markets.

I run the Aurora Tech Award, where we don’t just recognise best builders in emerging markets, we back them. 

Capital, networks, exposure, everything to help them go further, faster. 

The women here? They’re bold and building the future (cheesy but true :).

Our motto: If the table isn’t built for you...build a new one. 

So that's we're doing (hence why you may see a lot of content with me and tables on this feed…)

Let’s talk:
💡 Female founder? Apply to Aurora.
🤝 Investor, partner, mentor? Let’s connect.
📩 DM me, always up for working with great people.

Head of Marketing, Communications & Brand  

Brought into the business to: recreate its brand identity and G2M strategy to position it as a leader in unlocking business opportunities between corporates and startups.
>> In two years, we have a new brand infrastructure, a new team and operations. This has led to a cohesive brand, with clear positioning in the corporate innovation space and a healthy funnel of B2B startups and corporate leads.

So… I maybe kind of won an award. 🫣

Out of 2,000+ nominations, I was one of 9 recognised as Teammate with Inner Drive. Considering I’ve only been with the business for just over a year, I’m pretty chuffed.

Aurora Tech Award is, in so many ways, my dream job: great people, a real purpose, and working on something I believe in deeply. I’m still pretty sure I manifested this job aha.

What inDrive calls Inner Drive isn’t a slogan. It’s a shared belief that the work we do can have a purpose bigger than the job itself. 

Here’s to another phenomenal year of building tables. 🤍

To my incredible team and colleagues, thank you for everything: the support, the belief, the trust, the openness, all of it.

Tamara Loseva Kseniia Matveeva Nadeen Hossam Serafima Piterskaia Alyona Khon Andries Smit Mark Loughran Arsen Tomsky Xeniya Verba Asya Vildt Liza Surganova Lee Chin Jian Helena Haykin, Esq. Paula Alejandra Parra Díaz Natalia Espejo Cortés Senya Andreev Anastassiya Dmitriyeva  Yerkezhan Shaldybayeva Nazya Temirkhanova Nurdaulet Turar Liza Surganova Irina Shubina Dana Gabbas and the entire InVision Marketing team

🚀 Building Aurora - the stage and fund for the boldest female founders in emerging markets.

Hi 👋🏼 I’m Bella. I invest in female founders and I’ll be at Web Summit Qatar. 🇶🇦 

I’m planning to do this conference a little differently, fewer rushed meetings, more real conversations, and ideally some “sport-networking” (so of anyone is keen for a run or some padel, let me know).

If you’re a founder, investor, or operator who prefers conferences to feel a little more intuitive(and maybe even fun), I’d love to meet. 🙏🏼

Web Summit Qatar

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New year, same table… 🫱🏼‍🫲🏻💙
(and yes, Bella continues to be a meme)

2026 prediction: Aurora Tech Award will still be doubling down on what we do best, backing the boldest female tech founders building in emerging markets.

Can’t tell if the bloopers are better than the original video…

It's that time of the week again.🎙️🙃 (Loving these little walk & talks).
Ladies, this week's episode dives into making that all-important first hire. 💁🏽‍♀️

We brought together two founders and one psychologist to share their anecdotes and approaches to building the right team.
 
Emma Murphy MIACP, Shreya Prakash (2025 Aurora winner) and Natalia Kiselnikova, PhD, you rock. 🙏

🔗 Listen to this week's episode of Women in the Building on all major platforms, and share it with someone who needs to hear this right now: [https://lnkd.in/d5fwx4PB]

Building your first team can feel harder than building the product.

You start by doing everything yourself. Then growth forces the question you cannot avoid anymore: how do you build a team when money is tight, trust is fragile, and every hire feels risky.

In a new episode of Women in the Building podcast, three women come together to unpack what team building actually looks like behind the scenes.

Founder Emma Murphy MIACP shares how she scaled her business through a long-term contractor model after a failed VC-backed startup.
Founder Shreya Prakash (and 2025 Aurora winner) talks about building lean teams through fractional roles and purpose-driven hiring at FlexiBees.
And psychologist Natalia Kiselnikova, PhD explains what really makes teams healthy, resilient, and high-performing, and where founders burn out without realizing it.

Hosted by Isabella Ghassemi-Smith, they talk about:
• when to hire employees and when not to
• fractional roles, contractors, and why there is no “one right model”
• how equity can help or quietly create long-term problems
• hiring for purpose
• boundaries founders need to protect their team and themselves
• why your main job as a founder is sometimes just to stay optimistic

If you are doing everything alone and wondering how to build your first real team without breaking yourself or the business, this episode will feel like a mirror.
Listen to our podcast on all major platforms, and share it with a founder who is right at this stage: [https://lnkd.in/d5fwx4PB]

At 3pm today I’ll be at Power Pitch Doha at the Pullman Hotel. 👀🎤

Honestly, one of my favourite things about Web Summit Qatar  this year has been the female energy. Founders, fund managers, operators absolutely killing it. 

📍 This pitch day by FoundHers Ventures powered by Carta embodies that with some epic female founders pitching. 

If you’re around, come say hi. 👋🏼 

Epic work by Amoye H.

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The Battle

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