WOMEN SPECIAL.......THE ENTREPRENEURIAL DREAM

THE ENTREPRENEURIAL DREAM

Women Shun Placements, Go Solo

    If female entrepreneurs are relatively rare in India, women-led startups spawned at college campuses are rarer still. But a steady trickle of women are now turning down lucrative campus placements in order to pursue new business ventures.

Ridhi Agarwal, a fellow programme student at IIM Calcutta, shunned job interviews as she is busy testing the beta site of her online grocery store. She set it up six months ago with a Rs 5-lakh investment. “Entrepreneurship is a double-edged sword. Letting go of a fixed salary at placements is tough,” she says. “But being a Marwari, I feel entrepreneurship is in my blood.”

This is Agarwal’s second start-up, though it’s her first on campus. After graduating from IIM Kozhikode in 2007, she worked at L&T Finance for a year, but got bored thereafter. While in Kolkata, she launched an online library portal, www.xelf.com, with about Rs 4 lakh of her savings. She broke even in a year and sold off her venture before moving to IIM Calcutta. “Taking the first plunge is the scariest part,” she says.

After her stint at the Wadhwani Centre for Entrepreneurship Development at ISB, Hyderabad, Sangeetha Narasimhan is gearing up to roll out Twimo, a consumer technology start-up, which will be launched next month. Narasimhan, a former systems engineer at Cisco Systems, opted out of 2011 placements to get her idea incubated at ISB. She spent the whole of last year bootstrapping her start-up, and the centre helped her evolve her original plan. “I could take the leap of faith as I became confident that not all would be lost,” she says. Ventures that do not take off are not perceived as failures, but as valuable life lessons, she adds.

“I was bold to let go of placement offers,” recalls Minnat Lalpuria, a 2012 ISB graduate who launched 7Vachan Services, which offers wedding-related services at a discount. “It is not easy to give up on offers to start something from scratch.” Of the 20 startups incubated at the centre in ISB, four are led by women. That’s a pretty high diversity score in the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

There are 200 graduate alumni entrepreneurs from ISB excluding those with family businesses. Women constitute 10% of them and the numbers have only gone up over the past four to five years. “At ISB, we are trying to figure out how we can encourage more women to think of entrepreneurship,” says Dr Krishna Tanuku, executive director of the Wadhwani Centre for Entrepreneurship Development. “We are looking at picking five high potential women graduates and mentoring them on an ongoing basis for entrepreneurship this year.”

Engineering colleges, though, lag behind B-schools when it comes to women ‘campuspreneurs’. Only one out of the 14 start-ups at IIT Kanpur’s incubation facility is led by a woman. Thinking Threads, promoted by Butool Abbas has four fledgling ventures under its fold, and will grow out of the incubation centre in the next few months. One of them, Oink – a Lifestyle store, has raised Rs 25 lakh in funding.

Abbas declined a job offer from an IT giant in 2009. “I realised that a corporate job would not give me the dimension and experience that I was looking at getting by running my own firm,” says Abbas, who has just been shortlisted for US Embassy’s International Leadership programme, which will be dedicated to women this year. “I am surprised there are not many women who opt for entrepreneurship as we are not considered to be the breadwinners and our liabilities are lesser,” says Abbas. None of the 25 student entrepreneurs at IIT Bombay’s incubation centre are women. “We engaged with half-a-dozen student-women entrepreneurs in the past three to four years but nothing materialised,” says an official at the Society for Innovation and Entreprenurship at IIT Bombay. “It is not because they are not interested, but their profiles change and other responsibilities crop up.”

They Dared To Fly

BUTOOL ABBAS

Of the 14 companies at IIT Kanpur’s incubation centre, one belongs to a woman: Abbas’ design and communication research company Thinking Threads. She has also been picked for US Embassy’s international leadership programme

SANGEETHA NARASIMHAN

Narasimhan’s idea is one of four from women, incubated at the Wadhwani Centre for Entrepreneurship Development at ISB. She will launch her consumer tech start-up Twimo, next month

MINNAT LALPURIA
Lalpuria launched 7Vachan Services after graduating from ISB last year. The company offers wedding-related services at a discount

RIDHI AGARWAL

This fellow programme student at IIM-C launched an online grocery portal in the beta stage six months ago with an investment of Rs 5 lakh. An MBA from IIM Kozhikode, her previous venture was online library portal, www.xelf.com

ANUMEHA CHATURVEDI & DEVINA SENGUPTA NEW DELHI | BANGALORE ET130312