Taking on the challenges

It is said that ‘Fall down seven times, stand up eight’. In order to succeed in the highly competitive world of business and entrepreneurship the world over, conquering the challenges and not being bogged down are necessary traits to achieve success. How does one build courage and beat the odds? Why the number of senior women leaders is fewer as compared to the number of senior men leaders? What sort of skill set is necessary to be on the top of the corporate leader? At a recently held CII-WomeNation Virtual Conference, industry experts shared their views on the subject. Panellists on the session included Robin Banerjee, Managing Director, Caprihans India Ltd (Session Moderator); Sujata Biswas and Taniya Biswas, Founder, Suta; Vasudha Madhavan, Founder, Ostara Advisors and Ipshita Sen, Founder, Engendered. Corporate Citizen brings you the excerpts

"In the initial days, I think the major challenge was to let go of the vertical and to trust people. When you are cheated once, you do not trust people easily. Hiring someone for handling the finances was something that came a little late. We started hiring full-time after one and a half years"

- Taniya Biswas

Taniya Biswas

Robin Banerjee: Give us a brief background about the work that you have done.

Taniya Biswas: We started the e-commerce firm, Suta in 2016. We were happily working in the corporate world. However, we did not find the satisfaction that we wanted because we wanted to see lives impacted and bring back sarees in daily lives, which we felt was slowly fading away. That is how we started with a three-member team and now we are a 130-member team. We began with two weavers and now we have 15,000 weavers.

Sujata Biswas: We are proud of the fact that we are a part of 12 states and these 15,000 weavers and artisans are the backbone of Suta. Honestly, that was the vision with which we had started. We are a bootstrap company. The vision of Suta-how we want to grow forward is to make the backbone that is the weavers’ base, it must be as strong as possible. Our supply chain must be stronger. We are on the journey of bringing forward the arts and crafts of different states.

Taniya: One more thing that I want to highlight is that when we started with the weavers’ clusters and solo weavers, we realised that their entire families are involved in weaving and the woman in the family does not have a bank account. Hence, we started working with them individually, and started working on their bank accounts. We have around 16 per cent women artisans, and that is something, which we are happy that has happened. We are eradicating the middlemen who were not giving the payments on time, and that’s what we were trying to achieve and we are reaching there slowly.

Robin: Ipshita, tell us about your journey.

Ipshita Sen: I will talk about how I came to be an entrepreneur because I spent 20 years doing what I love. During those 20 years, I worked in the advertising sector and moved to public relations (PR) and corporate communications. As I progressed in my career, it seemed somewhat strange that when you work in a community that has so many women at junior levels and as you climb the corporate ladder, they are very few at senior levels. This is not something, which was peculiar to India; it is something that happens all over the world. This propelled me because honestly, it was not something that I felt very much for myself, as I did not realise that when I was younger and working, there were some challenges and I was not facing them but many Indian women, women in PR and corporate communications were facing.

As you grow and as you work with larger teams, and when you have the exposure and experience, you realise that something is not right. If there are 70 per cent women at entry levels, why the management team has just 15% of women-what is happening? The usual reasons are family and children but that did not seem to be the only reason as to why this was happening. So, after spending a few years in that space, I decided to do something about it and that is how Engendered happened. I started working with women in the corporate world first because that was my area of understanding and I knew how that worked. Some of the aspects that I wanted to bring forward were how to manage and be proactive about your career. Not many women plan their careers proactively and there are cultural fits and things that they don’t think about. In the Indian context, these things are not available in the public domain, so when you are looking for a job, you don’t know what questions to ask. For this very reason, I started Engendered. While doing all of that, in the corporate space, Engendered works with about 8-10 thousand women and from that, I realised, being a woman entrepreneur myself and having worked for so many years, how difficult it is to navigate to the space where you are an entrepreneur. You have to have the right kind of network among all of the things that are necessary if you want to grow your company. That is how the other part of Engendered happened, that is when I worked with small and micro women entrepreneurs helping them scale their business. Engendered supports women in these two ways.

"Relationships are extremely critical for entrepreneurship and that is my learning, and that is something I really value. I also learnt the freedom of being able to pursue something where a lot of big boys exist and there were no big girls and it just gave me an opportunity to find some"

- Vasudha Madhavan

Vasudha Madhavan

Robin: Tell us Vasudha, how to make more money.

Vasudha Madhavan: My journey is that of a professional turned into an entrepreneurial role. I have been working in the banking sector for quite some time. Having worked with ICICI and City Bank, gave me valuable experience and client exposure, deals working on transactions, working in teams etc. It also helped me in handling and managing interactions from different cultures. I realised that I had completed nineodd years with a large bracket badge. I really liked what I did. I somewhat started to form opinions about the sectors that liked the kind of work that I wanted to do. I also had multiple incentives for me to think about how could I do this on my own and rediscover investment banking the way I would like to do it. That rather led me to take a step out and see how that would work out for me. I transitioned from bulge bracket banking to boutique investment banking and after that, started up in 2015, so it is about six years or so. Initially, Dinesh’s and my firm probably had launched around the same time, probably within a month of each other- not knowing and choosing the same name and of course, I am into investment banking and they are into the tax advisory side. My work has involved advising a lot of companies on fundraising and mergers and acquisitions. I continue to do that when I started. For me, it was a huge difference to rediscover the networks that I had built. Now in a slightly different way, I rediscovered the true strength of relationships that I had built through my career, I built on those relationships, and created many more relationships.

Relationships are extremely critical for entrepreneurship and that is my learning, and that is something I really value. I also learnt the freedom of being able to pursue something where a lot of big boys exist and there were no big girls and it just gave me an opportunity to find some. I liked what Ipshita mentioned, I probably did not face some of those challenges or maybe, I was not aware of the discrimination where women do tend to fall back. It is true that the banking and finance sectors are very male-dominated industries. It is very rare to find a woman in investment banking or corporate finance and it is also quite rare that I worked with a woman entrepreneur who is raising funds for her business or who is leading a business. It is beginning to change, it is still a very rare thing, and every little bit counts. That was my journey all about.

How electric mobility came in was-it was part of my work that I was doing on focussing on manufacturing and related sectors in aerospace and automotive components. That brought me in touch with a very interesting company that wanted to look at strategies and clean mobility and had a startup that had already done it. My role was to bring these two companies together and create a merger and acquisition where it was a win-win for both and it led to scale for one and it led to an exit for the female founder. The company that was sold which was part of the M&A was a company called Ampere Vehicles who made electric two-wheelers, they are an inventive company and founded by Hemlata who is very wellknown pioneer in electric mobility. That is how my journey started and I realised that there is a need amongst founders in this ecosystem, which was starting to grow fast, and picking up speed over the last two three years.

To advice about fundraising from somebody who has understood the various concepts, the interdependencies in the ecosystem and from manufacturing to technology on the software side of it, and everything in between, I did take the pains to learn and read more about it and understand and learn with my clients as I work with them on fundraisers. There is also a need to create a larger investor segment; electric mobility still doesn’t get quite as many investors as some of the consumer tech or SaaS or some of these other sectors do get. There is a demand to create awareness among investors to create the confidence that there are great founders to be backed and there is money to be made.

"Losing the control is something that all of us are scared of. They come at the time when you let go of processes and systems that you have built, you have to give it to somebody, and I think all entrepreneurs face that issue"

- Sujata Biswas

Robin: Taniya and Sujata, you have done something very different. Tell us how you started, what were the difficulties that you faced, what advice would like to give to other entrepreneurs, and I want to know how you handled the supply chain issue?

Sujata Biswas

Sujata: The first challenge we faced was, we are from the fashion industry and we studied business, we understood how to do business. We took a lot of time to figure out what business means. We learnt it hands-on from weavers and vendors. A couple of times we also got cheated on, wherein, we lost a lot of money but then fighting and coming back on track is something that needs a lot of grit and it needs support from family, friends, and peers. I think entrepreneurship is all about that. You will keep facing roadblocks and you will keep facing challenges. Coming back on track is something that no one teaches you.

Taniya: Sometimes you think that this is the one chance you have taken in your career and in your new life to start something new and make it work and if you don’t put all your hard work into it and if it fails then there is no coming back. You can always go back to the corporate world where there is a stable life but taking that one chance and making it work was all for it. That is what pushed us a lot. In the initial days, I think the major challenge was to let go of the vertical and to trust people. When you are cheated once, you do not trust people easily. Hiring someone for handling the finances was something that came a little late. We started hiring full-time after one and a half years.

Sujata: Losing the control is something that all of us are scared of. They come at the time when you let go of processes and systems that you have built, you have to give it to somebody, and I think all entrepreneurs face that issue. Finance and Supply Chain is another aspect where the trust factor comes to play-to trust somebody to make sure that the orders go on time is crucial; to make sure that the weavers are not cheated, the right messages are communicated to them because they blindly trust what we say. Providing them 365-days of work, which we promise them, is something that we wanted to do and not fail at it because they have trusted us. They have left their routine job and they decided to work for us. Letting go, creating systems around this, took a lot of time for us.

"As I progressed in my career, it seemed somewhat strange that when you work in a community that has so many women at junior levels and as you climb the corporate ladder, they are very few at senior levels. This is not something which was peculiar to India; it is something that happens all over the world"

- Ipshita Sen

Robin: Ipshita, you are a communication specialist. You are a PR person. You have worked with big organisations. Tell us how the startup entrepreneurs can take advantage of your skills.

Ipshita Sen

Ipshita: One of the big things that we see in the space of entrepreneurship and generally with leaders and experts is positioning themselves and I am just going to talk about women. This is my learning from PR and communication days. Never there was an opportunity to put forth an expert. In nine out of ten cases, the expert that we put forward was a male expert. It was not with large clients that we handled. It wasn’t that there aren’t any women experts. However, it is just that they are so hesitant in stepping forward and it is something that they do not enjoy. Therefore, they rather not do it without understanding how it affects the whole space. It affects their careers. This is where corporate communications comes in, understanding your personal brand, understanding who you are and how do you want to position yourself.

You cannot run the business by yourself. When you want to attract talent, why would somebody who has the kind of expertise and knowledge that you seek, will work for you. You have to inspire them. It is most likely that you are in a much smaller company than as a person whom you are trying to attract, where they are working now. For example, everybody wants to hire from Google and Facebook but why should somebody step out of Google and work for you. If you don’t spend time from get go in building networks, building expertise, building your story, your vision, then what you are going to sell. Particularly with women, there isn’t a great deal of understanding of this part because they are so focused in trying to make it work, trying to cobble together-resources, finances, whatever it may be. These things don’t strike at the time it should. My learning and my advice to everybody is that you do not start as you start your business because these things take time. You cannot build a personal brand overnight.

Robin: Many a time entrepreneurs feel that my business will speak for itself. But it doesn’t. Business always has a name and it is the goodwill that works with it. It could be personal branding or business branding. Vasudha, how do we access, let us say, a private equity fund or venture capitalist or banking system. If you go to PE and venture capitalist, we are looking for equity; if you are going to banks and NBFC, you are looking at debt. For an entrepreneur, in the beginning, I do not think it matters to them-they want money whichever way it comes. Throw some light as to how to look for money when someone is starting all by himself/herself and hardly there is any branding or goodwill around him/her.

Vasudha: What Ipshita mentioned is very important. Personal branding and creating content or talking about what your vision is and so on. It does help even in the fundraising process. Public Relations plays an important role while dealing with roadshows with the investors. Even if the PR is to do with business or thought leadership or areas in which the company is known for. It really does contribute. From a fundraising perspective specifically, I have not worked too much with the very early stage of funding. My work has been associated with the growth stage but I can start to throw some light on how the founding journey looks like for business. If I take some idea, and with the help of technology, even ideas stage funding is possible, which is to say that if you have a great idea on which you want to create a software product then you can get funded at an idea stage.

Equity starts with angel networks and even with accelerators, I think, those are the early stage sources of capital, where you could access funding at the early-stage of business, you could also if you have an idea you could go to the early-stage VC as well. There are funds, which would support you then you have a high threshold to cross to make that cut. A lot depends on how well you understand the core underpinnings of what the investor is looking for. One common mistake that entrepreneurs tend to make and I think this is true for men and women is that when they are pitching their business to an investor, they tell how passionate are about what they have created and how important it is that it grows and gets capital and such. It is all-important and it should be done. But it is also important which is absolutely true but it is also crucial to understand the requirements of the investor whichever category that the investment may belong to and tailor your pitch according to that. For example, one of the requirements could be a certain time frame within which the investor would want to invest, make the returns and exit. So, that is important for you to factor in.

The other could be in an angel situation or an high net worth individual (HNI) kind of investor support situation that could be something else that is important for an investor and which is why they would support a company. For instance, in my area, which is sustainable mobility and clean energy-I see there are passionate funds, passionate family offices, passionate HNIs who want to support those areas. Therefore, it is important to understand what they are looking for and to see if that is something that their business can help them with.

As you grow up the value chain, and suppose that you have a business and you have started to get some traction with clients, angel networks-early-stage VCs tend to be relevant for a fairly long stage of growth which is the most critical phases.

The core milestone for a business is to achieve a product that is fit for a market whether it is software that is commonly used, but I think the concept is true for any business-it is to say that you have a recognised and standardised product and you have customers that will buy from you on a predictable basis. And you have been able to set up the backend to be able to serve the market. Once you have early proof of this, you can go to institutional investors and then again, it depends on the kind of equity investors because the typical requirement, apart from other things, is the scale that you can achieve in a short period and that could be a driving factor.

The scalability and size of the market are some of the initial stages that business owners would look for. It is important for you to assess even before you are starting the business, it is important for you to assess what kind of a market are you catering to-is it large, is it niche. Even if it is a niche market, what sort of specific value that you bring to that niche and how are you going to be unbeatable in that niche, is neccessary to understand.

Then, of course, growth capital phases are a different story, you have larger investment deals of $15-20 million. In terms of where you are scaling and how much you are going to scale depends on the business. But at the early stage when you are probably raising your first few hundred thousand dollars of funding or first few million, I think it is very important to understand the core market, core product that you bring to the table.