Tomorrow I am judging a start-up competition in Delhi that awards its winner up to Rs. 5 lakhs to start their business. Since the contest is only for women, I have received several messages thanking and congratulating me for promoting women’s entrepreneurship. Unfortunately, I am not a big believer in “women’s” entrepreneurship.
I believe that word entrepreneurship is asexual and to treat someone, mainly because they are a female founder (or entrepreneur), with a different mindset is simply not right. Why should we denigrate a founder, just because she is a woman? Does her X chromosome make her business any less valuable, profitable, or exciting?
Therefore, it irks me that there are events, panels, discussions, specially curated to promote women’s entrepreneurship or female founders, exclusively. Most female founders and executives that I have interacted with see it the same way. We all know that anyone discriminating against a business run by a woman leader or refusing to fund a female founder hurts the person holding the bias much more than it hurts the woman – not only in terms of mindset but also on return on investment.
When I look at my portfolio, I see amazing founders. It is just an afterthought that over 50% of them have women co-founders like Prerna at Daalchini, Kanika at Jadooz and Dhanya at KabaddiAdda. Even within my family office portfolio, several of our most successful investments are powered byf emale founders like Shivani at Tala, Avneet at CarveNiche, Mahima at Coutloot, Naiyya at BabyChakra and many more. They have made us several x’s on our investment (and no I do not keep nor intend to keep a separate portfolio performance based on sex), and some of them will turn into unicorns in the future – one of them very soon!
However, none, nada and zilch, of these founders or their start-ups are in our portfolio because they were women. They earned every bit of the success they have achieved, and I respect them for their blood, sweat, and sacrifice – as an individual. In my interactions with them, I see them as entrepreneurs NOT as women founders, and I hope that they know and feel that they are equals.
Therefore, I do not see any good reason to promote female founders or entrepreneurs, because I have experienced excellent returns on my investments by treating each founder as an individual and backing their businesses based on merit. The moment that I start treating a founder differently because they are women, it means that I do not see them as equals. I will skew my thoughts to cater to my bias, and it will hurt them as much as it will hurt my bank balance.
So I am going to continue to be supportive, critical, effusive, disappointed and elated by my founders without discriminating on them because of their race, age, color, sex, national origin, religion, and physicald isability. I believe this approach is the best way to promote any founder.
