Lara Berge is the type of person who goes after what she wants, someone who values growth over comfort, evolution over what’s familiar.

But all that go-getter energy?

She’ll be the first to tell you it’s not because she has any special superpowers or some Type A cheat code. Rather, she says a lot of it comes down to the fact that she’s gotten good at taking the next tiny step toward her dreams.

And that idea of the “next tiny step” is not only a thread running through her own story — one that’s taken her from Australia to Paris to Lisbon — it’s also become a central theme of The Creator Club, a Lisbon-born community and event series she founded alongside her friend Elisa Van Outrive in 2025.

The Creator Club is a place where founders and creators come together to hear honest stories, make meaningful connections, and feel supported and inspired to take action on their own ideas.

And in many ways, that’s how The Creator Club itself began — not with a grand plan, but with one event that Lara and Elisa decided to give a shot. Feeling fed up and uninspired by their fintech jobs, they created the kind of space they were craving themselves. What followed wasn’t a perfectly mapped-out business plan. It was a series of experiments, creative decisions, course corrections, and, yes, tiny next steps.

While Elisa has since gone on to pursue other business ventures, Lara is still building The Creator Club, and has recently begun expanding the series internationally.

I sat down with Lara to learn more about her journey. We talk about seeking discomfort, redefining ambition, balancing creativity with commercial reality, shaping The Creator Club’s voice, and what “finding your voice” actually means when you’re still figuring things out as you go.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

You grew up in Australia, moved to Paris, and then ended up in Lisbon. How did those different moves shape your identity, and what was the pull each time?

My mom is Australian, and my dad is from New Caledonia, a French island in the Pacific. Thanks to him, I have a French passport, but growing up in Australia, I always felt much more Australian than French. I didn’t speak French very well, and I wanted to reconnect with that side of my identity.

So, at 21, I moved to Paris. Thanks to COVID, I could finish my university degree online, and I thought, if I can study from Brisbane, why not Paris? Beyond learning the language and the cultural identity piece, I remember being really aware of how much of a bubble I had grown up in — a bubble of safety and comfort where everything was pretty easy. I was sent to a great university that opened up so many professional doors for me, and I wanted to experience the "real world," to be honest. I wanted to experience discomfort, because I knew that if I didn’t seek it out myself, it was going to come for me either way, so I’d rather it be on my terms.

The pull to Lisbon was much less intentional, but it reflected a bigger shift in my identity.

When I moved to Paris, I was very Type A, following a path that had largely been laid out for me. I even had a consulting job lined up in Australia as my backup plan. But living in Paris helped me reconnect with a creative side of myself that I’d probably dimmed throughout my education.

And with creativity, for me, comes spontaneity — being willing to make decisions because something feels right, even if it isn't necessarily logical.

I met my partner in Paris, and when he got a job opportunity in Lisbon, I was ready for another adventure. I also wanted to live somewhere that felt more me, with more nature and warmer weather. I just had a really good feeling about Lisbon, and it’s been amazing since moving here.

Do you think moving somewhere a bit more slower-paced like Lisbon has enhanced your ambition, or dulled it a little?

It’s a really interesting question, and it’s one I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. The way that I think about ambition right now is that ambition is this fuel that propels you toward, or gives you a desire to achieve, great things in your life. And that’s just a core part of who I am. At the same time, right now in my life, I feel like I’m taking a really long-term view.

We have so many years to achieve these big dreams, and I think our culture and society tend to make us feel like, Oh, if by this age you’ve achieved this, then you’re doing well — these signs of validation. But right now, when I think about ambition, I’m like, I know I want to achieve big things in my life. I want to write a book. I want to have a six-figure business that’s helping people to connect deeper with themselves and with others. And I know I’m going to do that. It doesn’t need to be all right now.

How lucky am I that I get to have a time in my life in Lisbon where I do get to slow down a bit?

For me, my most creative times, when the most ideas come to me, are when I give them space to come to me. So I would say that maybe, from one perspective, Lisbon forcing me to slow down has taken away some ambition — if you’re defining ambition as, “You’ve got to get it done right now and you’ve got to be fast-paced all the time.” But that isn’t what ambition is to me anymore.

For me, my greatest goal in life, my guiding force, is that by the end of my life, whenever that is, I can look back and say that I was the truest expression of myself. These dreams of work I want to put out there in the world and impact I want to create are part of that, but they’re not the driving force. Other things are part of that too.

You come across as very self-assured. Have you always had this feeling that you’re going to do something big? Where does that confidence come from?

I’m definitely not confident every day. I was journaling this morning about how right now I’m actually doubting my abilities in work. It comes in waves. Sometimes there’s this perception that confident people don’t also have many moments of doubt, but I just know that those moments are part of being human. It’s sort of a feature, not a bug. And it allows me to connect with other people because everyone has doubts.

But I think this self-assuredness grew a lot since I started reading more from different people who talk about the link between spirituality and creativity.

I started to think about these things that I want to achieve in my life — let’s take writing a book as an example — as not actually being about me. It’s like this creative energy exists in the world, and it’s just those who are paying attention who will pick up on it. We think of it as, “Oh, I came up with an idea.” But what really helps me is this analogy — which I don’t actually think is an analogy, I think it’s true — that ideas don’t belong to us, and we’re not actually the ones who come up with them.

It comes from somewhere — God, whatever you want to call it. It helps take the ego and pressure off in terms of: you are or you aren’t amazing if you produce a piece of work or not.

Take me back to when you first started The Creator Club. It began as an idea for one event with a friend. Was there a strategy, or did it evolve organically?

Toward the beginning, my friend and I were still working our jobs full-time in fintech. And I would say that because we had jobs, we sort of had the financial part of our lives at that moment taken care of. It meant that we weren’t forced to be super strategic about what we were building with The Creator Club. We could just let it emerge.

But I don’t want that to be interpreted as passive in some way. It was more like: okay, we did this first event. We really enjoyed it. We loved it. We got so much energy from it, and lots more people than we thought bought a ticket and showed up. So it was also validation of, Okay, it’s not just us who needed this event, because that’s why we created it in the first place. Lots of other people do.

It was more responding to that energy of, Okay, let’s do one of these once a month. Because we wanted to, and others wanted us to as well. So in that way, it was quite strategy-free. And we did that for about six months, until we both quit our jobs, which meant, okay, maybe we want to earn some more money from this thing, since we enjoy it so much.

Earning more money from it would allow us to spend more time doing it and grow it. That’s when things got more strategic.

What was it like going from something fun and creative into something that also had to work as a business?

As a very early-stage founder, I found that change difficult, because it’s a completely different way of thinking. It’s like, how do you think strategically and make decisions that are going to earn more money in the business? Because now it’s a business, not just a fun side project that we do on the side of our jobs.

How do you balance that with these creative ideas of, Oh, let’s do this event. Maybe it’s not super commercially viable. Maybe it doesn’t even earn you any money, but you just have a desire to do it.

I found in the early days, and still now, that balancing those two things is really difficult, because often they go against each other. Often the decision that’s going to earn the business more money goes against the creative question of: What do we actually feel like doing? Because I think one is more short-term focused and one is more long-term focused. So that’s something I’ve been learning a lot about recently — how can I give more space to prioritize the long-term creative decisions?

Because I think they are the ones that also make more money in the end. It’s just a long-term view instead of: what is going to provide cash this month or next month?

When did you start intentionally shaping what The Creator Club looks, feels, and sounds like?

In terms of shaping the voice, it’s something that I’m thinking a lot about recently because I’m expanding The Creator Club community and events into different cities around the world through a licensing model. That process has forced me to get really concrete, in a way that’s scalable, about our vision.

I’ve realized that because of the type of business I’m building with The Creator Club, the vision and the voice are also an extension of me. The Creator Club started to solve a problem for me, which means it evolves as I evolve, and a lot of it is actually just knowing myself. But at the same time, it’s about thinking about the experience I want people to walk away with when they are interacting with our brand. And I think when you’re developing a brand voice, it’s a lot about: How do you want people to feel when they consume your brand, when they look at your visual identity, when they read your Instagram captions?

You want them to feel inspired, capable, like they are part of something bigger than themselves. I think the best brands always make us feel something.

You developed three core pillars for The Creator Club: inspiration, action, and inner work. Did those come out of the process of needing to codify the brand?

They actually came just before that, when we started to reach out to sponsors. It was during that process of creating a sponsor deck, that those three pillars stood out to me. I’ve found it really interesting that when we actually sit down to create a deliverable, instead of just thinking about something in our head, all of these things can come out that surprise you.

For example, right now, just after our call, I’m going to be writing The Creator Club’s very first manifesto. I know that when I write this manifesto — which is basically going to be a page of: What is The Creator Club about? Why do we exist? What’s the impact that we’re trying to make? — even though it’s something I’ve spoken about almost every day for the past year, new things are going to come to me.

How much of your decision-making now is intuitive, and how much is analytical?

I find this question really interesting, and it’s something I think about a lot — this head-to-heart sliding scale. That’s how I like to think about it. It is a sliding scale. Maybe the most successful founders aren’t the ones who make decisions with all the head or all the heart. It’s like: can you be flexible between the two in any given moment? Right now, and I think because of the type of business The Creator Club is, I would say more of it is heart. But of course there still have to be some logical, analytical decisions made there as well.

There are so many directions you could take The Creator Club. How did you decide international expansion was the one you wanted to pursue first?

Ultimately, it was going to be me executing whatever I did next. And I know that I need to enjoy it, I need to feel good about it, and I need to feel passionate about it for it to be amazing. When I thought about expanding into different cities, it just resonated, since this international aspect is a pretty core part of who I am.

I was like, Hell yeah, that sounds so exciting.

I also love helping and experiencing other people growing. My life has changed so much thanks to The Creator Club over the past year, and the idea of helping other city leaders experience that same growth was really exciting. When you surround yourself with founders who are creating incredible things, all of a sudden doing incredible things isn’t considered crazy — it’s considered normal. So it was those two things — the international aspect and helping other people grow — that made it feel like a definite yes. But I constantly have other ideas bubbling in the back of my mind. I know there are other things I’m going to try, and I don’t need to do it all at once.

‍

Do you feel like you’ve found your footing with The Creator Club?

I think that is an ongoing process. I don’t think I’m ever going to get to a point where I can say, Yes, 100%, to that question, because this business is like a living thing. It changes. It fluctuates. Some days it feels this way, some days it feels that way. And so I think removing the expectation that I will ever get there and that I’ll ever feel like, Yeah, I’m confident about this. I found my footing, is important. I’m not there yet, but I really actually enjoy the process of figuring that problem out.

What does finding your voice mean to you?

I’ve always known my voice, but I’ve been too afraid to share it with others out of fear that other people won’t like it or that they’ll disagree in some way with what I’m doing. And for me, therefore, finding my voice is accepting that not everyone’s going to like it.

And when we say that out loud, whenever someone hears that in an interview, it’s like, Oh yeah, we can intellectually understand that. But truly, in your heart and your body, that inner-child part of you — the inner-child part of me that sometimes needs everyone to like me — that’s different. For me, finding my voice was really about being like, It’s okay, girl. People aren’t going to like everything that you put out there. And that’s normal.

One next tiny step at a time

There’s a tension running through Lara’s story that I think is especially relevant to anyone trying to create something of their own.

The idea of:

Having a vision, but giving it space to grow and evolve.

Being strategic, without squeezing out the creative instinct that got you started.

Dreaming big, without demanding that every dream happen right now.

And perhaps most importantly, taking action without feeling completely certain or ready.

Because as Lara puts it, finding your footing is an ongoing process. The business changes. You change. The ideas change. And maybe finding your voice works much the same way. It doesn’t necessarily mean creating something from nothing, but perhaps, uncovering something that was always there by having the courage to let it be seen.

A big thanks to Lara for sharing her voice and story with us.

Know a female founder who would be a great fit for this series? We’d love to meet them. Email us at elizabeth@escontentcreative.com.