It’s Not Business as Usual for Her
Be it in the entrepreneurial heaven that is Silicon Valley or the rough and tough terrain of India, some notions die hard. Indian women entrepreneurs still battle prejudices and stereotypes that their male peers don’t have to endure
Silicon Valley
Home Advantage, Home Disadvantage
Home Advantage, Home Disadvantage
Being a woman from India shapes their success. It also
shapes the regressive response of their own community towards them,
In the 1990s, Pooja Sankar was a shy girl growing up in Patna. She was taught to stay away from boys, which made her years at the boys-infested IIT Kanpur a lonely battle. Sankar, who found programming just as hard as making friends, studied alone; she was too shy to ask her male classmates for help. Haunted by that experience, in January 2011, Sankar launched Piazza, an interactive website that allows students to ask, explore and answer all kinds of questions under the guidance of their instructors. Her startup already has 200,000 users, and the backing of Silicon Valley movers and shakers like Ron Conway and Mitch Kapor. “Who I am today is all because I was a shy girl in India,” she says. Sankar’s story highlights the unique situations Indian women entrepreneurs are in, even in the entrepreneurial heaven that is Silicon Valley. Her story isn’t much different from that of Aarti Parikh, a techie who co-founded mobile and Internet publishing house SachManya. Parikh is forced to use a genderneutral alias online to communicate more easily with engineers, both male and female. “When they are talking to a man, they assume the person knows more,” says Parikh. “Another thing is that just because you are Indian, people assume you will just do IT. They look upon us dismissively in creative matters.” Parikh’s iPad app for children, Being Global, beat Disney at the 2012 Appy Awards. “Indian women think out of the box because they have struggled so much, unlike most entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley who think like each other and develop similar stupid solutions like each other,” says Vivek Wadhwa, an entrepreneur-turnedacademic, and a vocal voice in the Valley on female entrepreneurship. He points to the annual TechCrunch Disrupt conference, a mecca for web and mobile entrepreneurs. “It is full of white males. You have 100 companies developing the same solution. You don’t see Indian women there because they don’t fit in there. And this is why they are building different companies in education, healthcare and really in every space possible.”
Gender Divide
One such woman is Parvati Dev who, after researching medical e-learning for over 18 years at Stanford University, founded CliniSpace. Her startup uses augmented reality to create immersive gaming-like virtual worlds in a medical learning environment. So, a CliniSpace interactive learning iPad app to train nurses treating wounded soldiers on a battlefield is set in a medical camp at a war zone with realistic depictions. In 1968, Dev was among a few girls at IIT Kharagpur. But her experience was the opposite of Sankar’s. “At IIT, I lost any worry between man and woman,” says Dev. She was almost never called by her first name; Dev became her college nickname. She is more irked by the reactions of some Indian community members. “Indians find it amusing to see a woman in a sari leading a Stanford lab. It’s as if it’s a question of credibility!” says Dev. Even in an apparently liberal Silicon Valley, stories of VCs asking women entrepreneurs uncomfortable questions—mostly related to their commitment after maternity—are not uncommon. A woman co-founder being mistaken for a secretary is not rare either. And if the woman is Indian, the situation gets more complex. “Indian women are taught not to ask for things,” says Kiran Malhotra, executive director of TiE Silicon Valley, a global network of entrepreneurs and professionals. “As entrepreneurs, you have to ask for things—like money from a VC—all the time. So, it is at least twice as hard for Indian women entrepreneurs.” Malhotra also leads the TiE Women’s Forum. Sakina Arsiwala, a Google and YouTube veteran who just sold her social startup Campfire Labs to Groupon, learnt this the hard way. A candidate was selected unanimously for a critical technical role in her startup. Although Arsiwala felt he did not have the relevant expertise, she did not speak up; three months later, the startup started losing mon ey and the project was turning out to be a turkey. When Arsiwala later told colleagues she had seen this coming, they wondered aloud why did she not speak up. Arsiwala’s reply: “As Indian girls, we are trained to please everybody and agree.” Now, she’s wiser. “Sometimes you just have to take a stand,” she says.
Indian Mindset
In many ways, Silicon Valley’s Indian women entrepreneurs find themselves in a situation similar to what their male counterparts encountered in the 1980s. They had then formed The Indus Entrepreneurs, now better known as TiE, which today is the world’s largest entrepreneurial body. A handful of fledgling organisations like TiE Women’s Forum and Women 2.0 are hoping to do the same—help women entrepreneurs help each other. “We were like immigrant entrepreneurs back then, with no powerful networks—like say the Stanford alum network—to help us out. So, we made our own,” says Angie Chang, co-founder of Women 2.0, which reaches out to over 30,000 women entrepreneurs. Sure, there are a few unique advan tages of being Indian. Unparalleled family support in a foreign land is one of them. For instance, Sankar started Piazza out of her brother’s garage. On another front, Reena Gupta, CEO of software-as-aservice (SaaS) company Avankiya, learned subtle, one-of-a-kind management lessons early on in life, whilst growing up in a joint family with 21 cousins in Bihar. “But the basics don’t change so quickly,” says Vinita Gupta, a rare Indian woman entrepreneur who broke barriers in the 1980s with her company Digital Link Corporation which she took public. “The Indian community itself remains judgemental, wherein conversations with women tend to be relegated to subjects like cooking, family and motherhood. The (Indian) community (in Silicon Valley) itself really needs to evolve,” says Gupta. Parikh of SachManya adds the Indian mindset in the Valley is obsessed with success, as defined by status and money. “This is why you will see many Indian women in senior corporate positions, but not in entrepreneurial positions be cause it is so much about risk with no guarantee of money.” Outside of the community, being different can be an advantage, says Gupta. When she was eight months pregnant, she had to travel to Minneapolis on urgent business. Two decades on, the client still remembers the “very pregnant woman with the strange accent”. Now, that’s a recall many entrepreneurs would be willing to give birth for.
Rituparna Chatterjee ET24MAY12
In the 1990s, Pooja Sankar was a shy girl growing up in Patna. She was taught to stay away from boys, which made her years at the boys-infested IIT Kanpur a lonely battle. Sankar, who found programming just as hard as making friends, studied alone; she was too shy to ask her male classmates for help. Haunted by that experience, in January 2011, Sankar launched Piazza, an interactive website that allows students to ask, explore and answer all kinds of questions under the guidance of their instructors. Her startup already has 200,000 users, and the backing of Silicon Valley movers and shakers like Ron Conway and Mitch Kapor. “Who I am today is all because I was a shy girl in India,” she says. Sankar’s story highlights the unique situations Indian women entrepreneurs are in, even in the entrepreneurial heaven that is Silicon Valley. Her story isn’t much different from that of Aarti Parikh, a techie who co-founded mobile and Internet publishing house SachManya. Parikh is forced to use a genderneutral alias online to communicate more easily with engineers, both male and female. “When they are talking to a man, they assume the person knows more,” says Parikh. “Another thing is that just because you are Indian, people assume you will just do IT. They look upon us dismissively in creative matters.” Parikh’s iPad app for children, Being Global, beat Disney at the 2012 Appy Awards. “Indian women think out of the box because they have struggled so much, unlike most entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley who think like each other and develop similar stupid solutions like each other,” says Vivek Wadhwa, an entrepreneur-turnedacademic, and a vocal voice in the Valley on female entrepreneurship. He points to the annual TechCrunch Disrupt conference, a mecca for web and mobile entrepreneurs. “It is full of white males. You have 100 companies developing the same solution. You don’t see Indian women there because they don’t fit in there. And this is why they are building different companies in education, healthcare and really in every space possible.”
Gender Divide
One such woman is Parvati Dev who, after researching medical e-learning for over 18 years at Stanford University, founded CliniSpace. Her startup uses augmented reality to create immersive gaming-like virtual worlds in a medical learning environment. So, a CliniSpace interactive learning iPad app to train nurses treating wounded soldiers on a battlefield is set in a medical camp at a war zone with realistic depictions. In 1968, Dev was among a few girls at IIT Kharagpur. But her experience was the opposite of Sankar’s. “At IIT, I lost any worry between man and woman,” says Dev. She was almost never called by her first name; Dev became her college nickname. She is more irked by the reactions of some Indian community members. “Indians find it amusing to see a woman in a sari leading a Stanford lab. It’s as if it’s a question of credibility!” says Dev. Even in an apparently liberal Silicon Valley, stories of VCs asking women entrepreneurs uncomfortable questions—mostly related to their commitment after maternity—are not uncommon. A woman co-founder being mistaken for a secretary is not rare either. And if the woman is Indian, the situation gets more complex. “Indian women are taught not to ask for things,” says Kiran Malhotra, executive director of TiE Silicon Valley, a global network of entrepreneurs and professionals. “As entrepreneurs, you have to ask for things—like money from a VC—all the time. So, it is at least twice as hard for Indian women entrepreneurs.” Malhotra also leads the TiE Women’s Forum. Sakina Arsiwala, a Google and YouTube veteran who just sold her social startup Campfire Labs to Groupon, learnt this the hard way. A candidate was selected unanimously for a critical technical role in her startup. Although Arsiwala felt he did not have the relevant expertise, she did not speak up; three months later, the startup started losing mon ey and the project was turning out to be a turkey. When Arsiwala later told colleagues she had seen this coming, they wondered aloud why did she not speak up. Arsiwala’s reply: “As Indian girls, we are trained to please everybody and agree.” Now, she’s wiser. “Sometimes you just have to take a stand,” she says.
Indian Mindset
In many ways, Silicon Valley’s Indian women entrepreneurs find themselves in a situation similar to what their male counterparts encountered in the 1980s. They had then formed The Indus Entrepreneurs, now better known as TiE, which today is the world’s largest entrepreneurial body. A handful of fledgling organisations like TiE Women’s Forum and Women 2.0 are hoping to do the same—help women entrepreneurs help each other. “We were like immigrant entrepreneurs back then, with no powerful networks—like say the Stanford alum network—to help us out. So, we made our own,” says Angie Chang, co-founder of Women 2.0, which reaches out to over 30,000 women entrepreneurs. Sure, there are a few unique advan tages of being Indian. Unparalleled family support in a foreign land is one of them. For instance, Sankar started Piazza out of her brother’s garage. On another front, Reena Gupta, CEO of software-as-aservice (SaaS) company Avankiya, learned subtle, one-of-a-kind management lessons early on in life, whilst growing up in a joint family with 21 cousins in Bihar. “But the basics don’t change so quickly,” says Vinita Gupta, a rare Indian woman entrepreneur who broke barriers in the 1980s with her company Digital Link Corporation which she took public. “The Indian community itself remains judgemental, wherein conversations with women tend to be relegated to subjects like cooking, family and motherhood. The (Indian) community (in Silicon Valley) itself really needs to evolve,” says Gupta. Parikh of SachManya adds the Indian mindset in the Valley is obsessed with success, as defined by status and money. “This is why you will see many Indian women in senior corporate positions, but not in entrepreneurial positions be cause it is so much about risk with no guarantee of money.” Outside of the community, being different can be an advantage, says Gupta. When she was eight months pregnant, she had to travel to Minneapolis on urgent business. Two decades on, the client still remembers the “very pregnant woman with the strange accent”. Now, that’s a recall many entrepreneurs would be willing to give birth for.
Rituparna Chatterjee ET24MAY12
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