Anu Shah
There are hundreds of women entrepreneurs out there, who broke gender stereotype and fought all the odds with great pains to build successful companies and secure a place in what is arguably a male-dominated industry.
Anu Shah — a 32-year-old serial entrepreneur with two successful business exits, who also served as CEO of Rocket Internet (Southeast Asia) — is a good example for this high fighting spirit.
Leaving home
Shah, a teenager, left her home in 2005 with US$40 for a call centre job in Mumbai, India, for a meagre monthly salary of US$100. She later switched the job and joined a consumer products firm as its sales representative. Her hard work was recognised and the company promoted as a Brand Manager.
A few years later, she went to the University of Leeds (UK) for an MBA on a full scholarship. Shah has since worked in M&A, strategy consulting, private equity and as a tech entrepreneur across Singapore, Dubai, London, and New York.
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Later she went to Harvard for post-graduate studies. In 2016, she dropped out to pursue entrepreneurship.
In Rwanda
In 2016, she went on a business trip to Rwanda as the Associate Vice President of Acorn Capital, where she met the CEO of an all-women-run local craft brewery, which was looking to raise funds. The business sourced ingredients locally, providing livelihood to many, thus empowering women in her community. However, due to her lack of experience in building business, Acorn didn’t invest in the firm.
Shah, anyway, decided to help her on a pro bono basis and connected her to the owner of a Toronto-based craft brewery and investee of Acorn. This firm decided to send on-ground support to train the CEO. However, lack of funds turned out to be the biggest bottleneck for the Rwandan company.
“So we all joined hands to launch a crowd-sourcing campaign. As a result, the Rwandan brewery firm raised about US$110,000 through crowdfunding. This incident remained with me,” Shah recalls.
“When I came to my Harvard in 2016-17, I was awestruck by the network effect of Silicon Valley (SV) and the support system that existed for the entrepreneurs and business owners. I was tickled by the idea of replicating the SV-like infrastructure for entrepreneurs in emerging and frontier markets. Harvard gave me the much-needed support and mentors from my classmates and professors to create my vision and launch it on a larger scale through EFI Hub,” Shah tells e27 as she recounts her startup journey.
EFI Hub is a startup incubator whose objective is to empower startups in emerging and frontier markets of Asia and Africa. Acorn Capital later acquired the firm.
Shah also built another company which she later sold to a Middle Eastern firm. Shah also served as the CEO of Rocket Internet (Southeast Asia) in between.
Now, with two successful exits of over US$10 million and an experience working with a global startup builder, Shah has decided to take a break and dedicated her focus to work in the social impact space.
Working for a noble cause
A champion of refugee causes and a strong proponent of gender equality in the startup space, Shah donated US$7 million to support UNHCR’s refugee rehabilitation programmes focused on the advancement of Congolese and Burundi Women and Children residing in the refugee camps in Rwanda.
As part of this initiative, she spent four months with UN Assistant Secretary General’s office, working with the core team of UN Women to design a programme to establish gender parity and equality through entrepreneurship and innovation.
In her view, the first step to gender parity is by achieving financial independence. “In war nations of Africa and Central Asia, 49 per cent of the girls drop out of school at the age of 13-14. This is mainly because of the lack of educational infrastructure.”
Civil and political unrest leave young girls more vulnerable to sexual crimes. These teenagers are then married off and become a young mother at the age of 16-17.
There is no hope for them to come back to get higher education or become fully financially independent because of the lack of development of proper skill sets to be in the workforce. These women continue to be economically dependent on the men in the family and are never able to command equal rights at home or in society.
“This UN programme is designed to explore the possibility of establishing gender parity through entrepreneurship. The idea is to create independent business models — such as co-operative bakeries, milk federations or businesses in the cottage industry — supported and funded by the UN and local governments. These will make more opportunities and room for women with no formal education in the low skill space to become financially independent,” she explains.
This programme has been shortlisted for funding, and Shah will be presenting this it the team in Geneva to finalise the deliverables and do the pilot launch in Mali. The implementation of this programme is expected to affect three million women in Africa and Asia.
Gender discrimination in Southeast Asia
According to Shah, women entrepreneurs in Asia are facing several challenges. Human and social capital constraints include lack of access to formal education, entrepreneurial skills training and business networks, as well as lack of confidence.
“In Southeast Asia, women entrepreneurs have 7 per cent less access than men to business networks — a crucial source of know-how and contacts for entrepreneurs looking to develop their business. Discrimination in day-to-day business activity is also a problem,” she gets candid. “In Malaysia, for instance, male suppliers and customers prefer to deal with male business owners, thus pushing women owners to let male family members take over.”
She also reveals that women tend to be at a disadvantage in accessing financial resources for their business, notably in accessing the full range of debt and equity alternatives. They may be disproportionately confronted with corruption.
“Research shows that women business owners and managers are more likely to receive requests to pay bribes when obtaining an operating license in economies that have a greater number of laws discriminating against women,” she argues. “Societal and cultural expectations that women will manage work and family responsibilities also limit their ability to expand their business.”
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Institutional and regulatory challenges are the other major roadblocks that limit women’s capacity to scale up. In various countries, cumbersome business licensing requirements are likely to be associated with a lower proportion of firms run by female entrepreneurs. Small and medium enterprises owned by women tend to be disproportionately affected by these regulations, given their smaller size and lower access to resources, she maintains.
“In some countries, women have limited or no access to property rights, hindering access to capital markets because of lack of collateral against which to obtain credit. These challenges hinder their capacity to grow,” she adds.
She also argues that startup founders give little attention to self-care in their quest to building a successful entrepreneurial career. Everyone participating in the startup ecosystem contributes to the problem of poor founder health.
“The all-encompassing nature of a startup often causes founders to spend less time with family and friends, and many are required to relocate away from these support networks for funding or strategic reasons,” she says.
As stress at a company builds, founders are more inclined to double down at work. This tendency only further burdens the founder by muting their supportive relationships and reduces their ability to cope with company pressures.
“I have yet to meet a founder who has a budgeted line item for self-care or who takes guilt-free vacations. Investors, founders and poorly-trained middle managers all perpetuate a myth in the startup ecosystem that the only way to be successful is to grind yourself inexorably to the bone,” Shah speaks out.
The post With 2 successful business exits, this ex-CEO of Rocket Internet (SEA) is now championing gender parity in startup world appeared first on e27.
