Excerpted from She Storms The Norms by Anisha Motwani and Priyadarshini Narendra, published by Rupa Publications India.
Vineeta Singh is the co-founder and CEO of SUGAR Cosmetics, India’s fastest-growing beauty brand, available across more than 50,000 branded retail outlets in more than 550 cities. One of the sharks on the reality show Shark Tank India, she is committed to creating products that allow every Indian woman to find a favourite, and inspiring them to start their own entrepreneurship journey. An alumna of IIT Madras and IIM Ahmedabad, she is famously known for declining a ₹1 crore job offer from a leading investment bank to follow her heart and dive into entrepreneurship. Also, a triathlete and ultra-marathoner, her passion for running has helped her challenge her limits time and again.
She has been featured in Fortune’s and The Economic Times’ 40 Under 40, GQ India’s Most Influential Young Indians and Business Today India’s Most Powerful Women in Business lists, and on the covers of Business Today, Forbes and the Entrepreneur magazine.
While India now celebrates its many unicorns, too few of them have women at the helm. Is it a lack of confidence or a fear of failure that keeps women from entering the high-stakes field of entrepreneurship? Becoming an entrepreneur takes a different skill set than being a successful employee even at the highest levels. At times, it could mean being okay with being disliked or going against accepted wisdom. Women are typically brought up to be agreeable, to be liked and to colour within the lines.
Can women cope with the key task of being a founder, which is to constantly raise more money? Can they overcome imposter syndrome to lead hundreds of employees into a tabula rasa? Vineeta Singh is one of the few examples of female entrepreneurs who have done just that, creating an Indian cosmetics brand from scratch. Did she face these challenges or were there others she overcame to be where she is today?
In 2012, Vineeta Singh was raising funds for her second start-up. She found it extremely difficult. Some investors told her, ‘We don’t invest in solo women founders because they have families and stop focusing on business.’ Others said, ‘We would put in the money subject to your husband coming into the business full-time.’ With her husband on board, they then turned to her and explained that, ‘Husband wife teams are a big red flag for us.’ It didn’t look like she was going to be able to succeed in getting her company funded. She and her husband decided to break their last fixed deposit of 30 lakh to keep the company going.
Vineeta grew up in a household where it was not just accepted but expected that she would grow up to have a thriving career of her own. Work and career were important parts of her parents’ lives. Her father is a scientist with his own lab at AIIMS. He worked around the year to discover protein structures and added them to the global database so that they could be used for essential drugs. He had set himself a target of discovering 600 protein structures in his lifetime, to be the world’s greatest contributor to protein structures. That set a high benchmark for Vineeta to follow.
At the same time, she saw that his obsession with work meant that he sacrificed all his personal time for this pursuit. He didn’t have enough time for the family. She vowed that her life would have a better balance between work, her own interests and hobbies and family.
‘But I would always err on the side of being ‘overambitious’ because the concept of aiming to be “world class”, staying focussed on the long term and choosing delayed gratification over short-term wins was drilled into my head over and over.
Her mother too is a PhD holder. She continued working after marriage and had a kid and is one of Vineeta’s role models. Her father said appreciatively, ‘So many of the women at AIIMS lose interest in their work after they have kids. They slow down and are just not that ambitious anymore. It’s very sad. See your mother, on the other hand, who chose to never bow out.’ Vineeta grew up with the ambition to not slow down and was paranoid about not derailing the ‘career track’. It was only much later that she learnt to appreciate women for all the choices that they make, including being homemakers or those who work outside the home.
Vineeta was brought up to strive hard in school. Her parents actively discouraged her from doing domestic chores or anything that could distract her from study time. In her own words, she was ‘raised like a boy’. Her parents wanted her to excel at everything. They would have preferred that she went into medicine. But when she picked engineering instead, they were clear that she had to study from the best, i.e., an IIT. They showed her many examples of IITians who had gone on to achieve great things. It was another story that those all happened to be men, since there were very few women at IIT.
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