Start up Divas
They’re young, ambitious and determined to unleash the power of the woman entrepreneur
As a fresher from the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad, Minnat Lalpuria Rao rejected 25 to 28 job offers when she graduated. Instead, the 28-year old decided to follow in her father’s footsteps and become an entrepreneur. While he spent his career in real estate, going from construction to re-development, she went in a completely different direction, setting up 7Vachan, a wedding-solutions provider in Mumbai some 15 months ago. With some 10 million weddings held in India annually, this was an opportunity waiting to be tapped — Rao organized 150 weddings in 2013, based almost solely on word-ofmouth and in 2014 she thinks she can piece together 1,000.
At a time when there is a sharp focus on diversity and women are being encouraged to break through unseen glass ceilings, turning entrepreneur is proving to be a good way to get more women into the workforce. With more women in management programmes (30-50%, according to various estimates) and societal pressures easing, more women are getting comfortable starting up. For example, ISB was the Indian partner for the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women Entrepreneurs Program, a five-year programme to aid the development of women entrepreneurs. Across seven cities, spread over 16 weeks, women went through this programme to sharpen their entrepreneurial skills. It saw over 1,300 attendees in total, says Kavil Ramachandran, who anchors ISB’s entrepreneurship initiatives. “Apart from stray management programmes, the potential of women entrepreneurs hasn’t been tapped,” he adds. “Attendance at our programmes shows that there has been a sharp interest in entrepreneurship among women.”
Doing Their Own Thing
Start-ups may provide a new way for more women to enter and stay in the workforce. At a time when established companies are turning cartwheels to meet their diversity targets (women being a key metric in this), the lure of the unknown and the thrill of entrepreneurship may be a bigger draw than the stability of a routine job. According to various estimates, women account for 25-35% of employees at start-ups and the number is increasing. According to venture capitalists and other risk capital investors, a growing number of women, emboldened by start-up success stories both in India and the globe, are taking the plunge.
The growing interest in entrepreneurship is visible in many places. For example, at start-up events and forums hosted by the likes of Indian Angel Network and Mumbai Angels, the number of women in attendance has increased sharply in the past couple of years. Individual angel investors say that more women are also walking up to them with clever business ideas. “There has been a noticeable increase in the quality and quantity of proposals we receive from women entrepreneurs…but it is nowhere close to where it should be ideally,” says Sasha Mirchandani, founder of Kae Capital, an early-stage investor.
While more women have been able to get (and stay in) a job, turning entrepreneur comes with its own set of challenges. For one, women have traditionally had lesser access to capital to fund their businesses, hampering their ability to get their start-ups off the ground. Some of the statistics make grim reading. According to the Gender-GEDI Female Entrepreneurship Index, a study by hardware giant Dell, India ranks poorly on all fronts. Overall, it came in 16 of 17 countries in this survey last year, with some statistics — 26% of women in India have bank accounts compared with 100% in developed markets — telling
their own tale.
Multiple factors restrain women from starting their own enterprises. Most prominent, Mirchandani of Kae points out, are social norms, which dictate that women put home, family and kids before their own aspirations — entrepre- neurial or otherwise. “There are signs that this is changing — husbands willing to play second fiddle, when the wife has a smart start-up in the works or a support system for children when both parents are at work,” he adds.
Creating a Network
In some parts of the country entrepreneurial women are making waves. For example, in the arid regions of Latur and Osmanabad in Maharashtra, women are leading the charge at organizations such as Swayam Shikshan Prayog, which is building networks of rural businesses. Here, women are handpicked to sell products such as gas stoves and the best ones given charge of a region to manage. “Women are seen to have stronger networks in the community and have more empathy with other women who control the household budget,” says Aparajita Agarwal, director, Sankalp Forum, a facilitator of social enterprises.
According to Agarwal, women may prefer entrepreneurship because it lets them be more flexible with their hours, even as they earn a steady income. This is especially true in rural India, where women continue to juggle multiple roles even as they chase their entrepreneurial dream. “Women entrepreneurs typically look at businesses that impact their lives,” she says. She points to examples such as Mann Deshi Mahila Sahakari Bank, set up in 1997, which is India’s first co-operative financial institution set up and run for women by women; or Silent Observer, a software tool developed by Pune-based Sukrut Systems, to prevent illegal sex determination tests.
With women educated overseas heading to the hinterland to drive social entrepreneurship ventures, the possibilities are just opening up for millions of women in rural India.
After spending five years in some of India’s villages across Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand and Odisha in the microfinance sector, Ajaita Shah decided to start a solar energyfocused venture in rural Rajasthan. Shah used some of her microfinance learnings to redraw the rules of solar energy in these villages. The 29-yearold who is of Rajasthani heritage, but grew up in New York (she graduated from Tufts), felt the acute lack of electricity first-hand while living in these villages. “Solar as a concept isn’t new; it has been around for as long as 20 years in India,” she explains. “The problem was two-fold — the equipment sold was substandard and after-sales service was practically non-existent.”
As a woman in a Rajasthani Jain family, Shah had to work her way past many naysayers who questioned her position as an entrepreneur and not in the traditional roles of daughter, wife, daughter-in-law and mother. “I’ve had to fight numerous battles along the way to prove that I belong,” she says. In the past few years, she has let her business do the talking. Since 2011, her enterprise, Frontier Markets, has sold some 17,000 solar solutions in 15 districts of Rajasthan, covering some 1,200 villages. “We want to eventually sell five million units and reach some 10 million households,” Shah says.
Already, Shah is looking to empower more women in rural India. Frontier Markets, for instance, has launched “solar sahelis” (solar friends), an initiative to train village women to become entrepreneurs who will vend solar products. There are already 150 of them selling solar lanterns and Shah hopes this number will increase to 5,000 in Rajasthan alone, before Frontier Markets along with its solar sahelis expands nationally.
Game of Poker
Until the middle of 2011, Richa Kar was a business process consultant with German enterprise software giant SAP in Bangalore. However, a latent start-up bug was only growing in the six years she held a regular job — ideas around starting her own café, running a venture to source local products for NRIs and many were proposed and disposed in quick order. Instead, she quit her job and started Zivame, an online lingerie retailer, which today houses some 40 brands, with some 93 sizes of bras alone. She says that the biggest step is to make the first move. “When you finally take the plunge, everything falls into place,” she says. Entrepreneurship can be strange for Indian women, since there’s no sense of balance at play. “It is like a game of poker…you are all in.”
More women are turning entrepreneurs because their roles at home and at work are being redefined. For example, 7Vachan’s Rao says that she has her family’s backing to focus completely on her venture. “I work around 15-16 hours a day and often work on Sunday afternoons, when the rest of the family wants to relax or catch a movie,” she says. Instead of the air-conditioned confines of a multiplex, Rao is often out, meeting her vendors and supervising another wedding. She’s got seed funding for her venture and in the next month expects to raise her first round of venture capital backing to grow her enterprise.
Thirty-six-year-old Priya Maheswari ventured right into the male-dominated world of real estate when she decided to establish her start-up Properji. com. When she relocated from the US to Bangalore, she discovered that buying a house was an onerous task — the industry was opaque and brokers were often in cahoots with builders, leaving buyers at a distinct disadvantage. “There was no independent advice available,” she says. “As a woman, it was even harder to get authentic data and deal with the entire industry.”
Waiting for the Wave
Progress since then has been steady rather than superfast. Today, the former consultant has got around 350 customers on her site and plans to earn revenues from subscriptions to a data package she provides customers. “We are not a generic listings site full of agents and brokers,” she says. Being in Bangalore didn’t spare her the blushes of often being the only woman in the room. “It was intimidating in the beginning and even today when I am the only one in the room,” she says. Rather than get cowed down by this skewed gender ratio, she focuses on the job at hand. “Having worked in multinational companies, I feel I can understand the needs of my clients, who are mainly serious middle and upper-middle class buyers…I want to empower my customer by providing them with factbased independent research so that they can make an informed decision.”
Like Maheshwari, there are many more women lining up to take the entrepreneurial plunge. A few more poster girls in the start-up universe will ensure that these ripples of enterprise develop into a wave.
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Rahul Sachitanand ETM 140309
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