Poornima Shanoi is in the process of establishing FICCI, India's foremost business body in
the United States.
At the time this podcast was recorded a year ago, she was heading her own consultancy,
Hummingbird Advisors.
She has a unique ability to build engines of business growth through industry bodies.
The Semiconductor Association of India and NASSCOM are where she honed her skills.
Welcome to the My First Job Podcast, where we find out what drives people, how luck plays
a role and the lessons they've learnt.
This is episode 8 and like every career journey, it's full of twists, turns and insights.
My name is Venu Gopal Nair.
I'm the host of this podcast and CEO of Ideascape Communications, an advertising agency into
branding, creative and design.
So settle in, sit back and enjoy the conversation.
Hi Poornima and welcome to the show.
Thank you Venu.
Such an honour to be here speaking with you.
It's my pleasure, my honour as well Purnima.
It's a wonderful thing to see how your career has gone from strength to strength and right
from the beginning you were always very organised in what had to be done.
I noticed most people when they start off their companies, especially men, will talk
about conquests and conquering the world and you chose the Hummingbird, which is among
the smallest birds and though you work in such a highly technical sector, the semiconductor
space, what's the story behind Hummingbird?
So the credit for the name Hummingbird as well as its logo goes to my daughter, Nandita.
She's a millennial.
I think the Hummingbird stands for flexibility and adaptability, which is what one should
be in business.
I'm in the consulting space.
I need to understand my customers, serve their needs as long as we are on the right side
of the law.
So I think it's a very apt name.
Like I said, that's one of the places when you begin to see the difference between how
women see things and how men see things.
You know, even your start, that is you took French tuition.
Yeah, I love French as a language.
I feel it's very similar to Mathematics, especially the conjugation of words.
And sometimes I really wonder whether I should have studied, you know, my debate when I was
in college is whether I should study French or Pulal science.
And then I went and did something totally different.
But my love for the French language never goes.
And I feel very thrilled, you know, when I watch, let's say, French movies, Helcule Poirot,
for example, and can understand the French even after so many years.
So when I was in college at Mount Carmel, so I studied French for seven years.
If you want to make a little bit of pocket money, tuitions helped.
So French tuitions were it.
I didn't do it for too long, only in the final year.
But let's say I had a good time doing it.
I hope my students are as good at the time as I did learning from me.
But you say you learned French only in college.
You didn't have a link with the language earlier.
No, I did it from school.
So I grew up in Goa and there we had a choice of, you know, we had English, we had Hindi
and we had a choice of either Marathi or French.
And Marathi is something that one could learn in day to day life over there.
And I was so fascinated by the French words and the conjugations that I took French all
the way from standard eight to second year of degree.
So I studied it for seven years.
So and then I went to the Allianz Francaise out here at Bangalore.
I couldn't believe it, you know, formally in school, we learned theory, how to write
and read, but we never learned how to speak and to pronounce.
And the Allianz did that for us.
So yes, I mean, I have very happy memories of learning.
Okay.
So then from tutor into your first job, which was with an advertising agent.
Yes.
How did that come about?
So when I was doing my MBA, I really liked marketing.
I specialized in marketing and advertising is what fascinated me.
And more than that was advertising research.
You know, this was way before data science and analytics were even thought of as subjects.
And I always felt the market, if we knew the data and if we could analyze it better, we
would have more targeted messaging.
So I started off in advertising research and I had this wonderful boss called Arijit Ghosh.
I think it's from IT Kharagpur, but the most brilliant lateral thinker that I know to date,
I've never met anybody like him.
I think he was the first person who saw the potential for advertising research.
This was before the internet era.
So the show from print publications and that's where I started off.
Even today, you know, I always go back to data.
Data doesn't lie.
So gut feel is good.
And I like gut feel when I relating to people.
But if you want to take a decision, nothing like this.
There is a bit of luck involved there.
Like you said, coming across the one person or one of the few people in India who understood
the importance of data in advertising because as we've seen, advertising agencies have kind
of split between digital and the traditional agency because agencies, the traditional agency
has never really managed data or they understood the shift.
Whereas the digital agency is focused on, you know, the data, but they were not too
close to a customer.
At least that's the way I see it.
But now, of course, that whole line is blurred and things are changed quite a bit.
Do you remember or recall any specific things that you worked on in systems?
So at that time, HMD and microboss were the two largest accounts.
And let me say I was not too popular with the copywriters and the and the design folks
who could not understand why you needed data.
I mean, why was color so important?
I mean, I felt color a lot of things which we take for granted today with a lot of analysis.
And at that time, it was all on gut feel with gut is good.
But to put big budgets and marketing budgets on gut feel and, you know, you have a very
young rookie out of college trying to look at things differently.
I'm sure they must have and not as a person, but for what I was trying to say.
Okay.
So then from advertising, you made another pivot.
What is it that went through your mind when you decided that you needed to move to the
next step?
I wanted more money and I wanted a better salary.
I love my boss.
I love my colleagues.
I love the environment, but the money was not good.
Okay.
And I got my dream job in India's leading market research and which are both qualitative
and quantitative research and which for me was absolutely what we needed if we had to
build strong marketing campaigns.
But I had a bad boss.
I have to be eternally grateful to her because that made me an entrepreneur.
I said, I cannot work under bad.
You join a company ultimately and you leave a manager.
So my, I'm very grateful to her for making my life so miserable that I decided to become
an entrepreneur.
So between your first job and your second job, you went from a boss who was possibly
one of the best you worked with to a boss who was possibly one of the worst you worked
with.
I think if you have a great first boss, right, it spoils you for the rest of your life because
you keep measuring.
They might measure maybe 50%, 70%, but I was just so spoiled with my first job.
Okay.
So then you decided that you couldn't stick around though the job was fine, the boss wasn't.
So then you decided to turn on.
Did you really think of it as being a risk at that point in time?
I, when there's a very odd question and I find people saying, you know, risk, reverse
risk averse.
I've never been scared of taking, whether investing in the market or doing a job or
doing anything in the, okay.
Or maybe, you know, I should not boast, but I don't know what is fear.
I mean, only if you ask me to jump into eight feet of cold water in the pool, then that
scares, but the rest of it is about taking a risk.
So no, it doesn't scare me at all.
Never scared me.
And maybe I'm foolish, but taking risk is part of my DNA.
Sometimes I wonder if that is the way people are made risk averse.
Some people will take risks in areas that they might take physical risk, but not this
one.
Like you said, your average physical, but this kind of risk, you didn't see it as being
a risk at all.
But what are the factors that you consider?
So the, the business that I started with a co-founder, I got, you know, I spoke to her
and she liked what I was thinking about is that I was looking for a job and I realized
there was no place in Bangalore.
You know, I was based in Bangalore.
I was already married at a very young age.
I didn't see myself moving out of it.
And I said, if I'm looking for a job, what are the options?
How do I get another job?
Then I realized that there were no options in the market.
All the options were in Bombay.
And so I suddenly felt like someone in her twenties that here is a big opening in the
market, which one can take advantage.
And this was just as Infosys and Wipo were getting off the, and Bangalore.
And then I realized that advertising or market research and FMCG companies were not growing
in Bangalore, but technology.
So I was very lucky to have Wipro as my first customer and Infosys as my second.
Wow.
Okay.
Yeah.
Okay.
Obviously they were not as big as they were as they are today, but it was still a major
leap, right?
It was, it was a great start.
And I think they set such high standards for integrity and works and working that, you
know, when you work with the best, you know, you don't compromise on the at all or on your
principle.
So I think there were great learning grounds to have such fabulous customers as number
one.
And so I think, you know, we started off with the right time by sheer accident, but in the
first year, the Kuwait, I mean, I think around that time there was some Kuwait war and it
affected us.
Many entrepreneur resilience, women, especially resilience is also part of our DNA.
You don't give up.
I think also people should know when to give up, but at that time we didn't know about
giving up.
You just perceive it.
And we did that business for 10 years, finally exited when a venture fund bought my partner
and me out.
What kind of recruitments did you make?
So we focused increasingly, we did a lot of what you would call in parlance as headhunting
assignments and some keep and it feels very good when you see some of those people, you
know, who are hired as VPs or as part of senior management went on to become CEOs of those
companies.
It was never about the bulk recruitment or this numbers.
It was always quality over quantity.
And we always made sure we had a premium pricing.
So I never competed on.
Did you have any previous experience in Rikha?
Nothing, zero.
Wow.
You figured that you would be able to identify the right talent and deliver.
Yeah.
I figured out how to do it while you were doing everything is about selling.
We know whatever you're doing, like whether you're running a company, everything is about
selling two things we need to have in school and at college level sales and how to read
business reports.
I mean, how to do business planning balance sheets, profit and loss.
If people are equipped with these three things right from the school level, there's so much
more we can do.
And so I think women can, you know, sales is a great word.
People think, Oh, I don't want to be a sales for, but I think sales is at the core of it.
And if you can sell, you can do anything and sell with content.
I don't mean lose selling.
I mean, see this, understand what you're selling and have faith in what you and you will work
at it.
So how do you go about recruiting?
The requirements were fairly large.
You would have to find.
I'm not giving any secret sauce.
Yeah, I know.
That's where a lot of things are hidden.
You've given part of it by saying, yes, you had to know how to sell well.
I think that is really the point.
A lot of people assume that second stage is where you have to think it through.
How do you get these people?
How do you locate them?
How do you figure out which I think are the points where you excel, which is why I think
you built it over 10 years into what it became.
So then that I think was another gateway.
So after Nexus, which was my company's name, was acquired by the venture fund.
I worked there for some amount of time and then I took a break of about six months to
understand what I wanted to do in life and what were my priorities.
At that time, I was very intrigued by what industry bodies were doing.
I thought they had a very pivotal role to play in shaping the economy, you know, presenting
the sector, you're representing industry out there.
So I worked with NASCOM for a while.
Then I worked with the Manipal Group heading their marketing and strategy, where I worked
with two great guys.
You know, I've been so fortunate in the one was Dr. Ranjan Pai, who now heads the group
and the other one was D.F.
Prasanna, the person ex-G and ex-Vipro head.
I turned from a person who was focusing on inputs to being totally outcome driven.
So I'm very grateful to them because they saw obviously some potential in me, which
I did not see in myself.
The hours were long, there was a lot of travel, but the learning was tremendous.
So when you say industry body, you of course are the founding resident of the semiconductor
system.
So was it something that you saw because of the interactions you were having or you felt
that given that India was a growing power in IT services, this would be one of the areas
that needed to be focused?
So actually the IAC at that time, it was the India Semiconductor Association.
It went on to become the India Electronics Semiconductor.
About 33, I understand about 33 companies met together at the Leela in Bangalore and
said we need to have a trade body of our own.
You know, semiconductors are not IT services.
So they decided to set up this trade body called IAC.
And I think they spoke to 11 people globally, they wanted to hire a president to head it.
And finally, they found this woman in the backyard.
And I said, no, I don't like this title of president.
It's too fancy.
You know, give me a little more down to earth title.
Okay.
And anyway, they found me suitable.
I wasn't even interviewing for the job.
You know, when you have some great CEOs sitting across the table and say, Pudimha, we want
to do this.
And you know, you are an entrepreneur at heart and see it as an entrepreneurial venture.
So I started by like employee number one registering the company, opening a bank account, working
with some really nice, you know, semiconductor industry always say has a nicest human being.
Okay, wonderful human beings.
And at that time, a lot of people try to say, you are going against NASCAR.
And I said, no, this is David and Goliath battle.
We're not doing a battle.
Everything is about people.
Like I said, semiconductor industry people cannot be hired by IT service.
IT services people cannot be hired by semiconductor companies.
So there lies a differentiation.
It's not a competition.
It's different spaces.
You know, it's like saying civil engineers and architects are the same.
I mean, semiconductor is the civil engineer and IT services are the architects.
It's only in India that the architects came before the civil engineers.
I think I get an idea of how you're convincing people in high places as to how to simplify
things and were you often the only one of the few women in that when you started off?
Yeah, actually, I'm still used to being maybe one of two women unless it's like Thai women,
you know, which is a women's forum or a spy for her whom I believe in and which I want
to see growth where I see a lot of women.
A lot of the places and a lot of meetings still today are very rarely where I see a
second woman.
And if I see her there, she's usually a chartered account.
And I'm very thrilled that so many young girls are turning to the CA exam and passing it.
So in one of the groups that I work in, one of the team members, she's a 23 year old CA.
I'm so impressed because she's going to have such a tremendous growth path.
Right.
So I think these are two completely different challenges, right?
The first thing is that you have to set up the foundation when you're saying that you're
setting up something for the India Semiconductor Association.
Like you said, you start off from the point where you open a bank account, then figure
out because in a lot of these cases, you have a policy, you have an objective, but each
and every point has to be navigated.
And like you said, you won't be given a quarter by anyone else who thinks your competition.
So at times it is having to overcome the misconceptions that people have.
And semiconductors are an expensive business, right, setting up a facility can be very,
very.
See, I think we should differentiate between design and manufacturing.
So India's intrinsic strength lies in design.
Manufacture, you know, you don't need a dramatic policy change for the design industry.
What could help is more up to date curriculum in the colleges, but design by itself will
grow.
So I will say, you know, India has its pockets in Bangalore, Noida, Hyderabad and up to an
extent in Pune.
These are our hubs.
And you know, when we speak of the numbers of chip designers in India, the world gets
very excited.
If I were to speak with these numbers to, let's say, folks who compare it with IT services,
they don't get excited.
OK, OK, because the numbers are so different.
And I used to always say one chip designer creates jobs for 10 embedded software engineers
who in turn create jobs for 100 software engineers.
So it is actually the chip designer is the seed from which the tree grows.
So we're very strong in design.
And I think Bangalore from the white, if I were to use a Bangalore example, the white
fields, the Jhapur road, HSR layout is at the heart of the world's chip designing.
And why do you think this happened?
Is it because TI set up, was it TI?
Texas Instruments started long ago.
Was that one of the early influences?
Why do you think India got good at chip?
See, one of the things that I'll go back, I'll come back to Bangalore's history.
We have to see that the defense also, long ago, apparently there was a study, I don't
know, this is your seat, where they said if the missiles were to come from Pakistan, they
would not reach Bangalore.
This is some geographical study.
So they set up the defense labs and the air like HAL, DRDO.
All of these labs were set up in Bangalore.
So you had a very strong engineering community out here.
And people who went to work and came back and were engineers are very true to their
performance.
Today, a lot of engineers also do other things.
But at that time, they were doing hardcore engineering.
So there was this culture in Bangalore.
And then TI set up its center in 1987.
And I think it's a fabulous company.
And so many people have come from their entrepreneurs in this space.
So from there, one, let's say, if the Queen Bee comes, the others will follow.
But a lot of the following happened, I think, after 2006.
And I remember in 2005, 2006, my continuously pitching to so many US design companies who
wanted to know why they should come to India and where they should come.
So I remember nonstop selling why India should be a destination for them.
So I think ISA as a trade body has done extremely well in attracting investments and design
companies to India.
I'm wondering if personally, whether your experience in recruitment and understanding
what were the skill sets required for the companies that were growing shaped your understanding
of where the market itself is going or what exactly is happening?
Or was this all that you had to literally ferret out from multiple interactions and
research all of these?
See, a lot of it is also swimming with the tide and swimming to save.
I just take an example from ISA.
So when I looked at it first, it was a deep tech sector which used to get buried on the
tech pages of the Times and where nobody read it.
OK, I mean, today, Times has made the tech page very interesting by featuring other technology
leaders.
But it wasn't so some years.
So my first goal was I want to move semiconductors to the business pages of the economic times.
I gave myself 18 months to do it and we did it in 11.
When we released research reports on the sector, it used to come on the front page of the Hindu
business.
So it suddenly became cold.
That's what the difference is.
It's not about being submerged and surviving, but getting your head and shoulders out of
the water and resist is very important.
And what I've seen here is that you just waded into the deepest of waters.
Typically, I think a lot of women would be very conscious of their professional borders.
I want a job that does this.
But you never put any of those limits on yourself.
I never saw a career as a job, Venu.
OK, so you have to see my mother was a mathematician.
God bless her soul.
And she worked in Southern Railway before I was born.
My sister is a PhD in electronics and I come from a family where there are so many teachers.
They're never limited by gender.
So gender and we were never brought up that, you know, girls can't do something.
So it doesn't even enter any part of my brain that women should have and can have.
Like you said, you saw what was required.
You should get on to the business building that you come into the first thing because
you understood that those are the things which will actually make a difference as far as
you went.
So how did things move forward from there?
So I think the first things we did was in a public policy because six policy level out
of the center and at the state level also got a lot of research report and data and
got something like nearly 200 companies to participate.
OK, when I saw it was on such a good scale, you know, finally I'm an entrepreneur at heart.
I wanted to get into the ed-techs.
I thought there was tremendous capability for great content and possibly that is the
only I wouldn't say it was misjudgment.
Maybe I was too early.
So after I left ISA to be an entrepreneur, I raised money too.
But I made one mistake.
I say I look at it for numbers, not for revenues and not for profitability.
OK, so even when I did my first business Nexus, I know we were we earned very well in dollars
too and that keeps you afloat.
The conversion is so good.
But here I was working on the India market with Indian customers who do not pay their
vendors in time.
And the whole thing was getting messier and messier in working capital.
And I used to have so many.
So I've been there as an entrepreneur to a very good business and through a business
where I could not sleep in the night because I was worried whether the bills are going
to get paid.
How am I?
How many FDs am I going to break to pay salaries?
Because as the leader of an organization, your first responsibility is to pay your employees
on time.
These are the people who have left what they're doing to have faith in you.
And you know that you've been there and you go through it.
If you can't pay people, how will they have faith in you and how will you have faith in
yourself?
I would say that was a really traumatic period of my time when customers who have raised
money, who had money in the bank, tortured their vendors.
So I was very happy when we became a part, Latitude became a part of Money Park Technologies.
My team continues to work.
This was in 2017, 2018.
And I'm very happy that, you know, the business they acquired, the people they acquired are
still working.
Okay.
But I moved on because I cannot see myself hitting into a very large organization where
I have to clock in at nine o'clock and clock out.
I think, you know, Gautam Pai out there has a lot of vision and he's a great guy.
And I'm very happy that, you know, my company come a part of the company.
But I was very relieved because the tension of paying monthly salaries, that was my biggest
problem.
And even today when I work with entrepreneurs, I say, I know what you're going, I know what
is going to kill you.
And we start dealing with it from day one, not, you know, on the 29th day of the month.
Right.
No, these are massive lessons.
You know, getting into a business, you know, customers will come.
They don't come.
No, it's not about customers.
It's about customers paying you on time.
It's not about getting business.
It's about getting paid in time.
Yeah, that's, that's I think another one of the attendant issues of all.
But why do you think that happens?
Is that peculiar to India because you have worked in, you have looked at other markets.
Do you have any, the thing on why is it that we seem to, employers seem to be built that
way or is that just a aberration?
I have not found it to be an exception for me or any other entrepreneurs.
I think Indian businesses need to be kinder to the SMEs and pay them on time.
You know, if you push an SME and don't pay them their money on time, salaries of a lot
of people suffer.
Okay.
And there's a limitation to how much the banks may talk.
Today, I think Mr. Modi has done a tremendous difference by pushing for SMEs, but it was
not so some years ago.
You went to the banks and they behaved horrendously.
You have to give collateral.
You have to give your FDs to get any kind of OD facility from them.
So I think, you know, I have never found any overseas customer delaying on payment even
once in my entire life.
And this is nothing unique to me.
You speak to anybody and they will not tell you anything different.
And people were in the B2B space.
I have done hardly anything in the B2B space.
No, it's a, like you said, it's one of the things where you're holding so many threads
together and try to move things forward that even if one thread slips or it gets cut somewhere
in between, there are consequences that ripple right across the system.
So it's a, yeah.
So I mean, first of all, getting into an area that is, like you said, not too many women
in the field in the first place, then understanding what needs to be done and then going to the
source of the problem and then saying, okay, it needs to be tackled at that point.
Okay.
So set up the semiconductor association and then decided that you didn't want to be part
of something.
So you like the largeness of the idea, but not the management of very large companies
because they come with their own set of dynamics.
I don't have any problem with large companies at all.
I just decided to go back and start my own company and be an entrepreneur again.
Absolutely no issue with large companies.
They are the oxygen on which a lot of companies survive.
I just think I started an edtech company a little too early.
There's a matter of timing.
When I started Nexus, the timing was right.
When I started latitude, the timing was wrong.
So I exited in 2017, 2018.
But in 2020 when COVID struck, the amount of people who called me up said, Purnima,
are you still running latitude?
You know, we want to buy it or we want to work with you.
I said, guys, you're three years too late.
Okay.
But I was glad I exited at an honorable exit.
I did not, I mean, I could, I did not let anybody who had worked with me suffer.
Nobody got their money.
It was a very amicable move.
So my conscience is clear.
I feel happy.
I could have, I would have been happier if I had made money from it, but at least I did
not have losses from it.
Sometimes those are the best points of whatever that you have done.
When you said latitude was a little early, was it in terms of the market or your setting
up, was it a question of timing?
I think it was a matter of timing.
If I had started off two years later, it should have been great.
And what happens is when you start a little too early and like I say, you're planting
seeds in a dry field.
If you know, you are, there's no water for it.
And you know, by two years go by and then you start getting impatient and start getting
a little weary rather than starting two years later when the timing is right.
And then everything works out well.
So I think the timing is a great part of luck.
So I've seen it earlier.
Luck works.
Of course luck works, but bad luck also works.
It pushes you in the wrong direction.
What is latitude's main focus?
So we were creating content, educational content.
Like, you know, for example, we did one of the alliances that we had was with it.
Okay.
So we create content for online learning.
Online learning is like so easily accepted today, but in 2011 people were still struggling
with this concept of online learning.
Yes.
So it's a matter of timing.
So 2011 was too early, but by 20 it had matured into something which was red hot.
Absolutely.
What made you think at that point that this is the way it's going to go?
I did not have too much of data, but I felt that people would be wanting, you know, there
were so many, especially in urban areas, there were so many people who are going to work
and who wanted to improve themselves.
Bangalore teaches you many things.
If I'm staying at one end of Bangalore and there's a great class going on the other end,
you cannot travel.
The traffic is so horrendous that, you know, your life is limited to a particular geography.
And I felt at that point of time that people are going to start learning online.
And why will I go and learn online only if I'm going to get some great teaching and content
material.
Okay.
So like I said, I'm not a B2C player.
So I do not know how to go and sell to consumers, but I know how to get customers who can deliver
to these consumers.
Right.
The government had so many flip flops.
First they say the universities can do online.
They can't do, they can do.
It went back and forth so much.
And then you are someone who is supplying that content.
You're also feeling the flip flop.
Right.
But it's like actually universities can deliver content online.
I just thought, you know, that they are going to do it.
And I thought they would do it much faster than the pace at which they worked.
But generating content was never a problem.
This is a wonderful city.
Bangalore is a fantastic city with great people.
Okay.
There is nothing in terms of knowledge that you cannot get from the people.
There is every kind of skill.
So if I want to do in a particular area, you have great content.
But when some of these things start out, there are only a few people who really understand
where it's going.
In terms of online learning, do you think that it will ever prove to be any kind of
competition to colleges and schools?
The two are kind of parallel tracks or it's more of filling some of the gaps rather than
understanding.
See, I think students need to be in college to learn social skills.
You need peers, you need friends, you need that warmth, you need society that cannot
be replaced at all.
And we have all seen that how burnt out we got out with Zoom in 2021 and students also
are very, very weary with it.
But I think a lot of labs, for example, cannot be replaced.
Something physical which has to be done.
Okay.
It's some things like design.
People do work projects in groups that cannot be replaced.
But so much of learning.
For example, I did, there's an exam to be an independent director on the board.
I did that exam 100%.
I studied for that exam 100% online content.
You know, it was all there.
I had the time because I was not commuting and I was not traveling.
So those things can be done.
I don't need company to do that kind of learning.
But if I had a project, I would have been happier sitting with three people across the
table.
Yeah, everything has its pluses and minuses, but nothing can replace human interaction.
Yeah.
But how do you manage all that?
You run your company and then you're on the boards of several companies now.
How did that come to be?
So serendipity, I have no words for this.
So I was first on the board of a public-diminished semiconductor.
Alongside that, I'm right now on the board of two companies whose managements are very
solid.
One is Dixon Electronic and the other one is NSE IT, which is a subsidiary of the National
Stock Exchange.
So there's a lot of management, a lot of transparency, a lot of corporate governance and the other
independent other directors on the board are people whom I also learn from.
And there's a lot of mutual respect.
So every year I get about four requests to be on the boards of companies.
I am lucky I have friends whom I can sound off and say, should I go ahead or not go ahead?
So it's not about being on a board and being on committees.
I sit on a nomination and remuneration committee.
I sit on the audit committee.
This requires a lot of reading and knowledge and you'd be so neutral but have an impact.
It takes a lot of time.
So I admire people who sit on five, six, seven boards.
And I said, wow, you guys, I don't know how you do it.
But you know, two boards, it's a lot of work that goes on.
So the exam that you did, which you qualified, you said the online, what exactly do you,
is it a process of how do you manage governance or how is it that you provide inputs?
What does that course cover?
This is from the Ministry of Corporate Affairs under the Ministry of Finance, Government
of India.
The Government of India has mandated that independent directors should have qualified,
should have passed this exam.
I was already sitting on boards and somebody just told me, you know, you have time now
due to COVID because you're not traveling, you're not going anywhere.
And Sunday you are three hours easily at your disposal all day.
So the content is great.
I'm not saying it's delivered superbly, but it's online content.
It teaches you so much.
You know, these are laws, corporate laws, finance, all of it that you need to understand
what are related party transactions, what is right, what is wrong.
I think the card is really good learning.
You know, I could apply so much of it after I did this exam in the May.
I think it is great at anyone, even if you don't, if you want to run your own company
sometime, if you know this, it really helps you keep good governance.
And from this to continue, so Hummingbird Advisors is looking at semiconductor design
opportunities.
What exactly is the role that Hummingbird does?
So we are a consulting firm.
There are a couple of things that we work on.
I work on basically three projects at a time and I put up teams by project.
So for example, I can speak about some of the things that I can speak about.
For example, C dot has just got decided to support innovation and startups in the telecoms.
The whole policy document for that was put together by us.
Okay.
And C dot is a great organization with stellar people within.
So we got good inputs and good sounding boards and it took us three months, but we have a
very comprehensive policy, all documents.
So they can just go ahead and implement that.
I'm just sharing some of the work right now.
We are helping a company in Southern India, which wants to get into this industry.
So I have a great team with one of the best leaders in the electronics manufacturing space,
a great finance guy, a great strategy person and myself, and we're putting the whole recommendation
together for them.
Just handle the acquisition of an Indian design company by US public limited semiconductor.
So these are some of the assignments and they're all in a deep tech related space.
You know, you can see they're all first cousins to each other, but it is fascinating.
And since I'm not about quantity and it's always about quality, I spend a lot of time
thinking about relating to my customers.
Besides that, I support three startups.
One of them, which is very dear to my heart is Aspire for Hope set up by my friend Madhura
Dasgupta Sinha.
She and I were chieftain scholars to the UK many years ago.
How did that come about?
How did we become a chieftain scholar?
So a British chieftain scholarship is a mid career.
There are lots of kinds of scholarship.
This was for women in leadership and management.
This was a mid career thing for me.
It really, you know, 12 of us were selected from here, which is about 12 out of 500 applications.
Okay.
We had some four or five rounds of selection.
Spent three months in the UK.
Really good learning.
We had a project.
We did it here.
It was a lot of bonding and six of us are very close even today, so many years later,
but it actually gave me a great direction.
I should give a lot of credit to the Chignin scholarship because it set me, you know, at
some time your one's mind is a little bit clouded on how do I proceed.
And then you see women who are your peers, who are in different spaces.
How are they proceeding with their lives?
And then suddenly you see no obstacles at all.
So I'll give a lot of credit because it just removed, if I had any reservations or barriers,
in my mind.
Okay.
So Madhura set up a spy for her.
I've been there from day one supporting her because I think what she's doing is going
to be so much economic importance.
It is not social cause.
It is an economic cause.
I also work with Uniqrin, which is set up by this amazing young entrepreneur called
Roshni Mohandas.
She's worked with Infi App in IKEA and this is an enterprise SaaS company for product
pricing in e-commerce.
Again, the B2B space and third one is a processor company out of Indian Institute of Science
or Morphin Machine.
So I'm deeply involved with these three companies, Hummingbird and the board position.
I do nothing else.
I cannot take on any more assignments and I'm very long-term with these.
And yet you managed to write a book and bring up a fine young lady.
So I also get the great marriage going.
You remember this.
I've been very happily married for many years.
Yes.
How did the book come about?
Okay.
So I wanted to write a book since I was 14 years old.
Credit for the book should actually go to COVID.
Okay.
Because like I said, the two things that happened during COVID are the passes exam and the other
thing is I wrote a book.
Okay.
I mean, you get so much of time suddenly, right?
You're traveling nowhere.
You are not commuting.
You're doing everything from one physical location.
My co-author Supriya Panchangam is an amazing young person and I think she'll go far.
I like her thinking.
I like the way she puts things together.
We wrote this book in three months, but it took us another three, get it published, editing,
all of it.
It was released at Tea Hub last year on Women's Day as part of the Women's Day celebrations
and Tea Hub CEO M S R M Srinivas Rao was very supportive and he released it.
It went to number six on Amazon's business books and I think that gave me great thrill.
How would you describe the book?
Is it covering things that women would have specific things as entrepreneurs or is it
a kind of reference guide?
How exactly would you classify it?
So the book is called Accelerating Her Business and it's more like a guidebook on how to
help you accelerate women's businesses.
So you could be an accelerator.
You could be a corporate.
You could be a university.
How can you help women who are entrepreneurs?
Because the needs of women and the way market treats women as who are entrepreneurs is very
different.
So how do you help these businesses to grow and make this program successful?
So I would say it's a guidebook.
It's a good guide.
I would say a very good guide.
How do you see that difference?
Are there a couple of things that you can say about how businesses or accelerators see
women entrepreneurs?
What are the differences?
I think women need to have more confidence in themselves.
I keep saying this.
Most women and I find even if entrepreneurs they always begin with an apology.
Okay.
Women are most apologetic about what they do.
A lot of women.
And I say that is not necessary.
Everybody has the same flaws.
They're just different degrees.
But how to raise money?
A lot of women I find them saying I don't know how to raise money.
I don't know how to manage money.
And they will give it to a husband or brother whose knowledge is same or less.
So this is not I mean I'm so surprised by this.
But small businesses.
So you know if women were to learn you know selling and how to manage their money and
how to have more confidence in themselves they're already doing well.
They can go so much more further.
I really believe in them.
And I think it's very clearly by focusing it accelerating her business rather than saying
accelerating a business.
You made it very clearly about saying that women need a different kind of approach and
given the current social situation.
So how has it been bringing up a young lady as a parent?
What has been your opinion?
I think today's kids are so smart.
My daughter is a millennial and I'm learning from her.
Her maturity in her 20s I wish I had.
Okay amazing.
Today's generation is so smart.
Okay and I'm like you know blown by the way they analyze situations.
They understand you know where how hard to work.
They work incredibly hard.
They use social for example you know so many so but knowing what is a full stop.
What is a comma?
How do you balance your personal life and work life?
You know at one time I think in my 20s and even in my 30s everything was a comma.
There were no full stops.
Okay one merged into the other.
But today I think very very smart.
They work so hard.
But they know also how to have you know balanced life.
So I think you know I'm very lucky to have a daughter.
She's my great sounding board.
I mean like I said that's what I said.
She works as a children interaction designer.
She works at Maintree.
So I'm very happy about where she is.
And that is so fulfilling because I think you're saying yes I'm not taking anything
away from kids today who are very smart.
But looking back at what you have done when you started to wear women are seen today.
Like you said you were probably the only woman in the room and it was having to go up against
men who traditionally believed that they should be you know managing things whether it was
at home or at the office.
So yes your background prepared you.
Your family background prepared you for never seeing those limits.
But I think it's a different kind of strength to be able to take on an established norm
and then say that no but I will see I will make the changes because getting people to
accept these changes is I think 60 percent of the problem.
I don't know.
I mean all my mentors have been amazing men.
You know all of them said men who have had faith and never treated me with any concession
because I was a woman.
Neither did they be software targets.
Neither did I need to have shoulders to cry on.
I think amazing mentors that 100 percent men great women as friends because you need friends
and family.
So great you know even men being friends and mentors have played an important part.
My husband has been amazing.
So I mean I should not take away from that at home when you get support then you realize
that I'm a block.
So yes I wish that credit should be there.
Also you know I think in places like Bombay where banking and FMCG has a lot of women
there'd be far more women in the room.
But being here in the say a hard deep tech space the number of women earlier were lesser
but I'm happy hopefully there will be more and not the lesser women.
The pressure is really at the middle management.
Mentoring is one part.
The second part is how do you balance your family and your work life which is a problem.
There's nothing called balancing.
It's how do you manage.
There's no balance.
Men also women also.
There is no balance.
Just how do you manage it is great.
Are you seeing a difference from the time that you got in versus today.
Are you seeing based on since you're working on Aspire for Her what kind of changes are
you seeing in the women you interact with today.
I think today's girls are fabulous.
Like I said they do not see any limits for themselves.
It is you know because I'm a girl I can't do it or will I be able to do it is never
a question for them.
I think India's future is in great hands when I see the girls.
It's not that the boys are not great but since you're asking me about girls I'm so impressed.
Yeah because I'm saying that's the other part.
You have a special interest in them and your work is also does involve.
So the three startups which you are involved with are they all helmed by women.
It's very surprising.
Okay this is by sheer coincidence that the co-founders or founders of all these startups
is a woman.
Okay.
That's a great place to be in also because I think as you see a company slowly grow having
to contain like you said difficult aspects of growing a business either it's the environment
or the policy is not right or something else is not okay.
The biggest thing about a woman is the resilience that she has got both within the family and
outside.
So what is it that you would like to tell young women who lack the confidence or who
are unsure of themselves.
Just hang it there.
This too shall pass.
As simple as that.
I think it's been a wonderful experience talking to you from the time you started.
One of the things you said was that you were always very clear about what you wanted to
achieve.
Where do you think that came from?
Because a lot of people are not. Is it that you simply have an ability to analyze things
and then act in a way that ensures that you know exactly what needs to happen.
No it also comes from knowing what you don't want to do.
So it eliminates let's say a lot of things off the table.
There are things that I will not compromise and which I don't want to do.
So it makes life easy.
It just removes you know the chaff from the wheat.
So then it becomes easier as you go along.
So instead of saying what do I want to do be very clear about what you don't want to
do and the options will present themselves.
You know exactly what you want to do.
In a way that becomes the same.
So it's been wonderful talking to you Purnima.
Thank you for sparing the time and I think you've taken us on a journey which is quite
rare because let's face it at the point when you got in and then you worked your way up
into being the president of the Semiconductor Association.
Like you said it required a lot of anticipation, analysis and action.
All of which you displayed in equal measure.
So whether it was seeing how the future of content would play out and how online.
I think you gave a very clear example of where online works and where online doesn't.
To everything that you're doing for women today and how you see the focus and writing
the book.
Usually I'm always amazed at what women are able to achieve because men have everything
spread out on a plate in front of them and they'll still say that you know I don't have
enough but women stepping back are able to do so much more.
Thank you Venu.
You have been such a fascinating interviewer.
I don't know whether I spoke too much but you certainly got me to speak.
I'm glad you did that because the thing in all of these conversations is I want to understand
the mind of the person, what were the decisions and why you made some of this.
It's very easy to get a listing and a point by point but if you stop to examine what happened
then I think the conversation goes in fascinating directions.
Thank you.
It's been a pleasure interviewing you and thank you for coming.
Thanks a million.
Thank you Venu.
Bye bye.
Thank you.
Bye.
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