This Queen Counts the Money Too...

"As that journey begun, we took a step back and discussed about our personal and professional roles. So, our personal and professional lives have always taught us a valuable lesson on both fronts. With fashionandyou and dealsandyou, we were pretty much working in a collaborative manner. He (her husband) was part of the fund raising team, and CFO of fashionandyou in the beginning and then he went on to do dealsandyou. Whereas, I was collaborating on dealsandyou on the distribution side. With this kind of set up, we learned about each others strengths and weaknesses, and it was a perfect game as a team, complimenting each other."

From scaling the peaks by being the CEO of fashionandyou.com to becoming a woman entrepreneur, Pearl Uppal has done it all, with support from none other than her co-founder, partner, and husband, Gaurav Kachru, former CEO, dealsandyou.com. She not just eats the honey, but also counts the money. But it's not easy being a woman entrepreneur, Uppal reminisces with Dataquest...

THE START...

Prior to 2009, Pearl Uppal had been in advertising, web, and mobile. She worked with Rediff and Yahoo! for seven years and led Yahoo! India's monetization for the last five years. Uppal, along with her husband, experimented with the ‘biggest jobs' that were available.
"We weren't really kicked about taking up another CEO job at a big firm, and then we said-let's try and build a company. So our experiments with entrepreneurship started in 2009-10 where we went in not as promoters but as professional CEOs who were willing to take up entrepreneurial risk." From here on, both went on to be part of e-commerce businesses-fashionandyou.com and dealsandyou.com.

THE JOURNEY...

For three years Uppal and her husband scaled the businesses significantly. "We escalated those businesses around venture capital, raising money for these ventures and deploying that money, and followed by multiple series of fund raising. Through this we got an exposure to the venture capital industry," Uppal reveals. Kachru having an exposure in M&A with GE, which enhanced our understanding at that point about venture capital industry in the startup environment-what it takes to charge, build, and scale.

As the contentment set in, their urge to do more did not go away. Uppal and Kachru looked forward to build more businesses, work on a project that won't be probably ‘seven years to one business idea', and then they began to restrategize their goals. While Kachru moved into the technology sector in 2010 with a view to migrate towards a capital/VC side, hoping to get an exposure to build a business and get hold of the VC business; Uppal wanted to work around ‘startups-0 to 100'. Soon enough, the common multi-sector exposure and interest towards the funds and the VC side, brought them together for an interesting entrepreneurial mix.

"I have always worked in the internet sector, and whatever I would have done would have been in this sector. So for me it was a clear thing that either now I create something that would marry my passion and experience together because there is no job which is going to give me this experience. It was not the love of entrepreneurship because I was 33-34 when I stepped into entrepreneurship, so I felt that it's the same old thing unless I stepped into something new and figured it out. I am personally very attracted to transaction led businesses," recounts Uppal.

AND NOW...

Thus working around startups specially in tech field, about 5Ideas came about as a platform. Uppal thought, ‘Let's do five big initiatives in the tech startups ecosystem in India' the first of which is the ‘startups Superfuel'. There are a couple of other initiatives on the horizon, but ‘Start-up Superfuel' is where, both are settled and a concept which both believed in-where they could help startups with capital at early seed stage. Providing financial and human capital - for the two of them, working around these startups without seeking control, really helped in incubation spurt in that phase, was prime.

Lately, the Start-up Superfuel formulated $10 mn fund. The first investment was made in April 2013, in a company called Dataweave and soon in couple of weeks the second company will be announced. "We will invest in 8-10 companies in a year. The $10 mn fund will raise about 30 to 40 startups and we continue to do the rest of the fund raising and we also met over a 300 startups in the last six months, we continue to meet 3-4 startups a day and our fund is tech focused fund within the tech sector," says Uppal.

ON THE GENDER CHALLENGES...

"It was only in the entrepreneurial journey that I've found gaps which I did not find in my corporate journey. I was part of a sector where women were common. Digital and non-digital media has many women, be it editorial, content, marketing or sales. At that stage I didn't see a gender divide at all. I saw the first challenges of gender divide when I had my first baby in the corporate sector. I realized I lost a promotion, it's something that was openly discussed with me when I was pregnant. It was the first point in my journey that whether I was committed to my profession was in question."

At this point Uppal realized that she had to do it all over again with a one or a two-year loss. Uppal pays the deepest gratitude to her family and her immediate environment, as it was their strength and background, she says which helped her climb back the corporate ladder.

"I think the challenges women face is that we don't have the network where we feel one of the men. We just feel extremely alienated when we face one of these problems at home, social environment, corporate environment, and then the entrepreneurial environment. If you go to a start-up event where the best mentors are coming and there are 100 entrepreneurs sitting and you'd probably see one woman who is in the marketing or the accountant role. So there's a huge amount of hurdles for women. There are hardly any women VCs in India. So it's very difficult to explain," shares Uppal.