As the CEO, founder and co-founder of not one, but two tech companies, Elizabeth Sarquis has accomplished a lot in her lifetime, but she credits a unique upbringing for shaping her view of the world and inspiring her path.

From a young age, Sarquis had the odds stacked against her. Originally from Colombia, her mom and two younger siblings relocated to Minnesota when Sarquis’ father was shot, falling into a coma for the next eight years. Throughout her childhood, Sarquis spent every summer back in Colombia, which she said heavily influenced the way she viewed the world.

“If you can imagine Minnesota in the Midwest and Colombia, South America, I mean you can’t get more different than that,” she said. “Everybody had blond hair and blue eyes, and then there was me.”

While Sarquis doesn’t feel like she was on the receiving end of any hostility because of her background growing up, she said she always felt different. Growing up without her dad also gave her a different perspective, and she expressed she always felt like, even though he wasn’t physically present, he was always with her, pushing her to surpass expectations.

“I became the champion of other people,” Sarquis said.

She also became a champion for herself — double majoring in political science and human physiology at the University of Minnesota and being accepted to medical school, deferring enrollment to medical school in order to spend time with her first child, then deciding to go to grad school and getting a master’s in child and adolescent development, and eventually taking a computer programming class — just for fun.

“I shouldn’t have been able to do all the things I was doing,” Sarquis said. “Especially most things other girls weren’t doing.”

Although her interests were clearly varied while in school, Sarquis always had a love of technology. She remembers being introduced to her first computer as a sales rep for a store called “Sound of Music” which later became better known as Best Buy.

“So that was my first exposure to how cool Macintosh computers were. And I was like, ‘oh my gosh, I have to have one of these’,” Sarquis said. Later, when her oldest son was just 2 years old, Sarquis signed up to take a computer programming class through Sound of Music.

As technology continued to develop, Sarquis found each new innovation to be fascinating. The development of the App Store was one innovation that would eventually lead her to founding her first company, Global Gaming Initiative.

Sarquis said she has always been captivated by games and gaming. In college, she said, she was the Ms. Pac Man expert, opting to play Ms. Pac Man rather than get drunk with her friends at parties. She said she learned in college about the community that games could build.

“So when I saw the App Store come out, I was like, this is something that’s going to be amazing,” Sarquis said. “This is something that has the opportunity to really revolutionize the way people think.”

Sarquis decided she wanted to teach young people and kids about giving. She said she ran a lot of focus groups before founding Global Gaming Initiative, where she met a lot of similarly-minded people who wanted to make a difference but didn’t know how, or didn’t have the money or time to invest.

“(We thought), what if we took away those barriers, and you could do something good every single day, and that was part of your life?”

So, Global Gaming Initiative, a mobile gaming platform that creates games that are fun and also inspire users to contribute to social initiatives, was born.

“We learned quickly that you can’t force a kid to eat a spinach pie. And the games had to be really fun,” Sarquis said.

She said she essentially went on an around-the-world adventure to figure out how to make her dream happen, which led her to meet some like-minded game developers in Finland and Germany who were willing to work with her. The first game Global Gaming Initiative released in 2013 is called “Sidekick Cycle,” which partners with World Bicycle Relief to donate bikes to kids around the world to help them get to school. Although the game is free to download, there are opportunities for in-app purchases, half of which go to the organization for bikes.

The tricky part, Sarquis soon learned, was the marketing. Per Apple regulations, Global Gaming Initiative can’t talk about charity in their app, so marketing had to be done separately. That’s what led Sarquis to co-found Jukko, a mobile ad tech platform that combines advertising with social good, just two years ago. The company recently relocated from Minnesota to Utah, Sarquis said, in part because Global Gaming Initiative worked with so many different tech companies local to the state.

“It was kind of a no-brainer decision,” she said.

Sarquis described Jukko as a “programmatic ad network,” or a software development kit publishers can use to decide where they want to have breakpoints in their app, game or newsfeed. Developers or publishers who integrate the software development kit have full control over when ads appear, and then Jukko’s ads will show up within the app.

Jukko partners with brands that care about people and the planet, Sarquis said. Brand partners include Ben and Jerry’s, Patagonia and more.

“So all of those kinds of brands are advertising on our platform,” Sarquis said. “Instead of being forced to watched a 30-second video, you get to see a beautiful, full page digital ad, and then you can look at it for … however long you want.”

At the end of the day, both companies are dedicated to making a difference in people’s lives. One of Sarquis’ most prized possessions is a letter she received from a young girl who wrote in to tell Sarquis how much she loved to play the game, because she loved helping other kids.

“So the connection was happening,” Sarquis said. “Our goal was for kids to have empathy, for them to understand, in a fun way.”

As a woman in business and technology in particular, Sarquis also works to make a difference on a more local level. As a woman, she said she’s had to work twice as hard, and has even been on the receiving end of business threats Sarquis said were based on her gender.

“It always surprises you and it’s always such a violation,” Sarquis said. “So now what I think is, you have to constantly build boundaries around yourself.”

Sarquis has a difficult time naming female role models for herself, so she wants to be a role model for others. New to the Utah tech scene, she hopes to be part of encouraging women to engage in technology and pursue technology careers.

“There’s a lot of culture that we can change,” Sarquis said. “I want to see more women in leadership positions.”