Come
Women’s Day on March 8 and we get bogged down in a flood of seminars and events, all proclaiming to know what’s best for
women’s self-development. But this year, we have decided to move away from the experts and talk with
women, whose real-life stories of
struggle and success are bound to inspire all. In the first part of our
Power Women series,
Business Insider India chats with
Sramana Mitra, an
entrepreneur and a strategy consultant in
Silicon Valley since 1994. Her fields of experience span from
technology disciplines like
semiconductors to sophisticated
consumer marketing industries including
fashion and
education.
As a
serial entrepreneur-CEO, Sramana had earlier founded three companies – Dais (off-shore software services), Intarka (sales lead generation and qualification Software; VC: NEA) and Uuma (online personalised store for selling clothes using Expert Systems software; VC: Redwood). Two of these were acquired while the third received an acquisition offer from
Ralph Lauren which the company did not accept. Back in 2010, she also set up a virtual incubator called
One Million by One Million, to help a million entrepreneurs from all over the world to reach a million dollars in annual revenue, build $1 trillion in global
GDP and create 10 million jobs. What has life in Silicon Valley has taught Sramana? Here are the edited excerpts from our chat.
Entrepreneurship is not easy People often ask what inspired me to be an
entrepreneur. Well, I am an entrepreneur’s daughter. I grew up watching my father run companies and I am sure that was a fundamental influence. But I also believe entrepreneurship is both
genetic and environmental. My maternal great grandfather was also an entrepreneur; so I had genes from both sides.
But let’s come back to the hard facts and let me tell you, entrepreneurship is not easy. Of course, there are many instances of overnight speculative success where you build something for a little bit, and someone comes and scoops it up for a lot of money. However, building long-term, sustainable value is extremely difficult. I have enjoyed my
journey, but I have also made sacrifices to become an entrepreneur. What I am doing today with
1M/1M is extremely difficult, extremely complex.
Get over the fear of failure In January 2009, in the midst of raging
financial crisis and a deep
global recession, I hosted an
online entrepreneurship forum for
laid-off engineers who were considering a
switch to entrepreneurship. There were 220 people registered for the event and 130 attended. About 145 questions were submitted, from which we synthesised some of the most commonly asked. Among those was one I want to close this volume with: How do you overcome the fear of failure?
When I was younger, I had an enormous fear of failure. I was quite used to winning and I was very bad at losing. Since then, while I have been successful in many ways, I have also failed at various attempts. My attempt at building a product company out of India in 1997 succeeded somewhat, but the company did not become a revolutionary brand of the order that I aspired for, nor did it achieve any significant scale. Somewhere along the way, though, I developed the
wisdom to take things in stride, embrace failure, learn from it and rise above it.
Develop a personal philosophy: Faith & conviction will get you going When I look back on my journey to trace the development of that wisdom, I see one overriding theme. Very early in life, I developed a personal philosophy. An unlikely juxtaposition of ideas culled from various systems of thought – from the
Upanishads and
Vedanta, from
Hindu scriptures,
Ayn Rand’s
Atlas Shrugged and
The Fountainhead, and certain
Buddhist concepts of Futility &
Nothingness.
The Hindu system of thought has a very powerful core concept:
Tat Tvam Asi or I Am He. Instead of worshipping an external God, the Hindus believe that God is inside. Indeed, a powerful way of thinking. If the ultimate perfection lies inside you, and all you need to do is realise your own potential, much of your fundamental self-doubt vanishes. At least at an existential level, the individual is complete within.
Ayn Rand offers a similarly individualistic perspective, although from a radically different point of view. Rand’s
heroes and heroines move mountains. Although reared in a communist and collectivist Russian background, he celebrates individual achievements and believes in one man’s ability to make a difference. Many entrepreneurs I know have been influenced by Rand’s writings and have drawn inspiration, especially from the character of
Hank Rearden in
Atlas Shrugged, who fights against all odds with tremendous
resilience. Similar
self-confidence echoes in
The Fountainhead’s architect hero,
Howard Roark, whose resilience and
personal integrity propel him towards a vision of architecture condemned by his contemporaries for its bold originality and threatening innovation.
Yes, conviction and faith are incredibly important components of a sustainable personal philosophy, but where does it come from? How do you develop it?
This is a question you must ask yourself. I can offer pointers on what to study, but how your own psyche will respond to the stimulus – I cannot tell. This is a spiritual, experiential journey, and you have to go it alone.
I will, however, share three more components from my own bag of wisdom:
Laughter,
Compassion and Nothingness.
When the individualistic ideology overwhelms, when your head swells with self-aggrandisement, think of the Himalayas. Or the Pacific Ocean. Or the Universe. One can soon comprehend that we are nothing; we are insignificant; we are a single speck of dust in the continuum of time. So why be afraid of failure?
Believe in the turnaround I was once fired from one of my own companies. I raised the
venture capital and we brought on a middle-aged, supposedly experienced guy as
CEO. I was in my twenties. The guy was incompetent and political. He didn’t understand the product, had no vision. We couldn’t figure any of these out until he joined, because he was on a charm offensive until then and I had limited experience of making a hire like this. We thought he could complement my product skills and vision with superior sales skills.
Once he was on board, it started going downhill very quickly and he set out to fire me. I had massive immigration challenges, and had very little negotiating power because I didn’t have a Green Card then.
To cut a long story short, I was in
Buenos Aires when he called a Board Meeting on the phone and fired me. And the Board let him. I walked around on the streets of Buenos Aires trying to absorb the blow.
Six months later, they had to fire the CEO. The angel investors offered to fund me again and start another company. I did.
Life went on… Life always goes on.
Finally, if you are a woman and a wannapreneur, here’s one sound piece of advice. Be a damn compelling entrepreneur, not just a damn compelling
woman entrepreneur.
Watch this space tomorrow – Power Women will be back with their intriguing success stories.