Women entrepreneurs: Tales from the coalface

CHINA – SAMANTHA DU, ZAI LAB 

In 2011, Samantha Du was ready to retire. She had spent seven years with Pfizer in the US, moving through research and product development roles before becoming global leader for metabolic drug licensing, and then another 10 in China with a pharmaceutical company backed by Li Ka-Shing’s Hutchison Whampoa. The latter assignment had proved particularly grueling – establishing a business in a market segment that had yet to become start-up friendly.

“There were very few returnees from abroad, male or female. Most has pure science backgrounds, but my experience included working on the development and global launch of two new drugs for Pfizer as well as the time spent in licensing,” says Du. 

She co-founded Hutchison China MediTech and acted as CEO for its R&D subsidiary Hutchison MediPharma, building up a pipeline of oncology and auto-immune treatments. This also opened the door to numerous government and quasi-government healthcare advisory roles, helping promote Shanghai’s Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park to multinational investors and participating in similar initiatives in Suzhou and Pudong New Area. Meanwhile, MediTech went public in London in 2006.

“It was unusual to be a female founder, especially in biotech, and I had my son with me, who was then three-and-a-half years old,” Du recalls. “You can’t go to karaoke, drink or socialize much, but that’s my style.” Unsurprisingly, retirement didn’t last long. Du found herself inundated with invitations to start ventures, join ventures or become a venture capitalist. 

Du chose the latter path, spending two years leading healthcare investments at Sequoia Capital China before succumbing once against to her entrepreneurial instincts. “When I attended board meetings of portfolio companies, I would always think about how I might do things differently,” she says.

Zai Lab was established in 2013 with a strategy to license pre-clinical findings from Western countries and then develop drugs in China, leveraging the comparatively low operating costs. Getting traction with investors wasn’t hard, given Du’s track record, and the company raised $164.5 million across three rounds over the course of three years. Zai Lab raised $150 million through an IPO in 2017 and listed with a market capitalization of $1 billion. It is now worth $2.6 billion. Headcount has grown eightfold to 600.

While there are more female founders in the biotech space compared to when she started out, Du notes there are still fewer than might be expected. The reasons for this are not necessarily gender specific. “As an entrepreneur, you need to believe in yourself. You go through lots of ups and downs, especially for the first three years,” Du says. “I never saw the risk as that high. If you have the right business model and the right people, you can attract capital. But maybe I was lucky.”

TAIWAN – WINNIE LEE, APPIER

Having spent nine years in the US working towards a PhD, Winnie Lee expected to stay there and pursue her interest in immunology. “I still think it’s the best place for biomedical research and I still love immunology – I read science journals when I can,” she observes.

Her return to Taiwan in 2012 was driven by personal reasons – she was born there, and her family continues to live there – and it coincided with Chih-Han Yu and Joe Su conceiving the idea of a start-up that would leverage data to help companies make better decisions.

Yu was an artificial intelligence (AI) scientist whose projects while studying at Harvard and Stanford included a self-adapting robotics system to help polio patients walk correctly. Su was a systems engineer and Yu’s roommate at Harvard. “They were doing a lot of cutting-edge research but applying to real-life problems takes a long time and the idea came from that,” Lee says. “AI was not a hot topic then, but they did foresee how it could help people’s lives.”

The pair knew Lee from graduate school – she overlapped with Yu at Stanford – and they recruited her as a co-founder to provide non-engineering competencies that were not their forte. The combination has worked. Though now based in Singapore, Appier represents one of relatively few Taiwan start-up success stories, with approximately $80 million in venture capital funding.

The company has built several platforms that offer data analytics services to corporate clients, enabling them to optimize advertising campaigns for brands and analyze what users will do on different smart device screens at different times of the day. While these competencies could be developed in-house, many companies lack the resources or time to build effective algorithms.

“I think my PhD training has been helpful in my start-up journey,” says Lee, who serves as the company’s COO. “There are similarities between the two lifestyles. In scientific research, you are trying to figure out what the most important question that hasn’t been addressed yet.”

Appier has a significant number of female employees, some of whom are working mothers. Eighteen months ago, Lee joined their number, giving birth to a daughter. “There are many capable women who want to launch start-ups,” she says. “It’s all about finding the right balance. I wanted to be a mum and continue my career, and I work the same hours as I did before. But now I come home, spend time with my daughter until she goes to bed, and then do some work.”

KOREA – SOPHIE EOM, ADRIEL

Women account for only 10% of Korea’s start-up founders, but Sophie Eom, who has created two artificial intelligence (AI) companies in the past five years, has no time for gender politics. “I’m not a female founder – I’m just a founder,” she says. 

Still, Eom acknowledges there are intangibles related to gender, personality, and identity that are relevant to the art of entrepreneurship, especially in the realm of communication skills. “I’m not a programmer, but I know how machine learning works, so I can explain that to users, which is very important,” she says. “If you’re an expert, you tend not to be able to explain what you’re building and what it can do. I can put myself in people’s shoes.”

Eom’s first start-up was Solidware, an AI-enabled insurance industry tool that helped clients improve efficiency in credit-scoring and underwriting processes. The company was acquired only seven months after being established, but this proved enough time to germinate a follow-up idea based on the tribulations of marketing the company to the insurance industry. 

Adriel, an AI-based advertising software-as-a-service business, was subsequently launched in late 2017. The company is now servicing clients in 21 countries and is said to have grown 30% a month since inception. The core offering allows small to medium-sized enterprises with limited budgets to post advertising content across a number of different online channels, including Google, Facebook and Instagram.

Eom’s husband, Oliver Duchenne, has been the technical knowhow behind Solidware and Adriel, while Eom has juggled the multitasking legwork that goes with getting a company off the ground. This has required transforming herself not only into an AI industry translator for non-technical counterparties, but also a branding expert, fundraiser, and team builder. Adriel now employs 18 people across offices in Seoul and London, half of whom are engineers. 

This bench will come in handy as the company plans its next phase of growth. Adriel raised a $5 million Series A in June with support from Korea Investment Partners, BA Partners and food delivery unicorn Woowa Brothers. It brings total funding to $6.5 million to date and sets up a deeper exploration of the cross-platform edge that is becoming increasingly indispensable in the advertising space. 

“Google and Facebook have so much data, start-ups like us can never beat the performance they can provide, but we can optimize ad campaigns by being multi-platform,” Eom explains, noting that some heavyweights such as Amazon are starting to tinker with ways to leverage this increased optionality. “There will be more things that we can do around optimization between platforms – it’s becoming very big in this industry.”

INDIA – SUCHI MUKHERJEE, LIMEROAD

In 2012, Suchi Mukherjee had just arrived back in India and needed a project. She was fresh off the birth of her second child and her departure from UK-based classifieds site Gumtree, a division of eBay, where Mukherjee had worked since 2006. The 39-year-old wanted to launch an online retail platform in her home country that could become an essential tool for an undeserved market.

Mukherjee drew inspiration from the shortcomings of existing online retailers, all of which overlooked the reality that the majority of buying decisions for Indian households are made by women. The founders’ ignorance of this simple fact meant that their own services drove away a potentially huge market.

“All the other horizontal e-commerce players that existed at the time were run by men, and at a very basic level everything was oriented around searching, not browsing or discovery,” says Mukherjee. “But if you think about how women shop, they want to browse, they don’t know what they want to buy when they go in the store. That kind of volume business doesn’t work.”

Mukherjee’s insight led her to create Limeroad alongside Prashant Malik and Ankush Mehra, former executives at Facebook and Reliance Hypermarkets, respectively. The site emphasizes exploration, encouraging customers to browse lists of garments, accessories, beauty products, and home decor curated by other users. Most of these curators are women, as are 70% of the site’s customers. Users can also share links to items through social networks.

Limeroad launched less than a month after receiving its first institutional round, a $5 million Series A investment from Lightspeed Venture partners and Matrix Partners India in 2012. Tiger Global joined the investors for the company’s $15 million Series B round in 2014, and all three GPs returned in 2015 for the $30 million Series C round.

With competition heating up in India’s online fashion space from rivals such as Amazon and Flipkart-backed Myntra, Mukherjee expects a tough fight ahead for Limeroad. She sees the tenacity required to continue pushing against such strong currents as an example for other potential female entrepreneurs in India.

“You can’t ever forget to dream big, and it’s very easy to do that when you’re saddled with tiny kids and aging parents – which is the demographic I found myself in when we started out,” Mukherjee says. “And you need to ensure that whatever that dream is, it fits into a larger market. It’s very hard to build against a headwind, but if it’s a large market and there’s a clear unfulfilled need, then you’ll find your customers.”

BANGLADESH – MALIHA QUADIR, SHOHOZ

Bangladeshi travel and ticket platform Shohoz entered the ride-hailing space last year, and within months had raised a $15 million funding round led by Golden Gate Ventures. It was a powerful boost for the four-year-old start-up and for its founder Maliha Quadir, who launched the site in 2013 after returning from the US. 

Quadir started Shohoz with a focus on the bus industry but has always had bigger plans for the platform. Through gradually adding products such as ride-hailing, food delivery, and movie and event tickets – with financial services to follow in the next few years – she has put the company on course to serve as a Bangladeshi counterpart to regional super-apps such as Grab, Go-Jek, and Wechat.

“Localization is a very important thing – in every country, we’ve seen that the local player wins against global competitors like Uber,” says Quadir. “So we think there is a chance for us to create a differentiated local operation even in the face of these foreign competitors.”

With a CV that includes stints at Nokia and Morgan Stanley, as well as an MBA from Harvard Business School, Quadir had plenty of options in 2013. But returning home to Bangladesh had been her dream since she left for college in 1996, and in Shohoz she found a way to tap the country’s booming internet penetration rate and increasingly tech-savvy population. The company claims to have served more than 150 million people across its verticals, handling more than 650 million transactions.

Despite working with the heavily male-dominated busing industry for more than six years, Quadir has never felt that her gender limited her or affected how business partners see her. Though she acknowledges this is not the case for all women, her biggest challenge has been attracting talented employees, both male and female, who can help take the company forward. The most important criterion is that they share her passion and that of their fellow employees, and that they are willing to contribute their fair share of the labor.

“A woman does need to be better than a man in everything she does to really show her commitment to her career,” Quadir says. “At the same time, I have faced issues with women in my office. They want it all – they want to go home at five, take care of their kids, and then they want the same responsibility as the men who are working until midnight in the office. That’s not fair to your colleagues, but if you’re going to be working late, we can help you with balancing that.”

SINGAPORE – BIDUSHI BHATTACHARYA, ASTROPRENEURS HUB

The team at the first space tech incubator in Southeast Asia has an unheard-of gender ratio in its segment: three women and two men. Singapore’s Astropreneurs Hub has always prioritized this diversity and sees it as a philosophy that might, seemingly against the odds, catch on. 

“It’s like computer science in the 1970s and 1980s, when they took people regardless of gender,” says Bidushi Bhattacharya, CEO and founder at the organization. “I ‘m hoping that space tech, as it grows, brings people in like that, because you need to have that diversity to really excel. It’s not just a matter of being fair. Part of the reason our company works as well as it does is that everyone has different ideas.”

Bhattacharya got her start in the industry by working on the Hubble Space Telescope for NASA when it was getting ready for launch. She spent some 20 years with the space agency, and by the time the mid-2000s rolled around, she was working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and hearing rumors about how a private company called SpaceX was luring space talent from the public sector.

This was the initial spark that got her thinking about entrepreneurship, but it found a slightly different calling after a chance career change led to a relocation to Singapore. Bhattacharya noticed there was a significant supply-demand gap in space tech education in Asia and went to work establishing a program that helps students get their experiments on the International Space Station. This was eventually rolled into Astropreneurs Hub. 

Ecosystem building is the name of the game, but the incubation and education business is looking to diversify into more concrete commercial offerings. This includes software for calibrating micro-satellites, which in the current era of private space operations can have a failure rate of 65% due to lack of adequate testing. An expansion of the team, pending additional funding, will be necessary to realize these plans, and diversity will doubtless continue to be among the top selection criteria.  

“The thing I find is that if a man is told no, he’ll just keep going but a woman tends to become a lot more tentative,” Bhattacharya says. “I was pitching to some VCs a while ago and afterward this guy came up to me and said, ‘I think the name of your company is too cutesy.’ Would you say that to a man? If you don’t know the word astropreneur, you might express that some other way. I know it’s his problem and not mine, but I’ve been doing this for a couple decades, so I have the credibility. I just know if you say that to a young lady, it will be a lot more difficult for her.”

VIETNAM – VU VAN, ELSA

In many ways, when Vu Van moved to the US 10 years ago she had a head start on many of her peers. As a young woman growing up in Vietnam she saw plenty of other women in positions of influence, and as a result she has always considered it obvious that she could rise to any position that a man could.

“I never felt like I didn’t have opportunities for advancement and promotion when I worked in Asia; in fact, most of my managers were female,” says Van. “It was only when I moved to the US that I started hearing conversations about why women and men are paid differently, and I started having to wonder if I’m losing out on opportunities because I’m female.”

But the lack of a glass ceiling doesn’t mean there are no barriers for women in Vietnam. From outside of her home country, Van could see more clearly the subtle ways that young women like herself were discouraged from pursuing science and engineering degrees in university. Due to a common belief that only people with engineering degrees can work in technology, most women entrepreneurs in Vietnam launch restaurants, beauty parlors, and other lifestyle-oriented businesses. 

Van is pushing against these assumptions with Elsa, the English-language tutoring app that she founded in 2015. While Vu herself has little technological training, having earned an MA and MBA from Stanford, she had the vision for an artificial intelligence-enabled app that could detect users’ mistakes in spoken English and provide recommendations for how to improve their pronunciation. 

By gathering the right team, she has brought the app to market in Vietnam, and the company plans to launch the service in Indonesia, Japan, and India this year, one of only a few Vietnam-based start-ups to pursue a wider regional market. Gradient Ventures, a VC arm of Google, has provided financial backing for the expansion.

Van credits both her role models in Vietnam and her mentors in the US for showing her, in different ways, that her choices don’t have to be limited by her gender or background. She hopes that other young women will be able to overcome their self-doubts and find ways to bring value to their communities.

“Ultimately tech is just an enabler to get where you want to go,” Van says. “The important thing is, do you have a problem that you really care about deeply and want to solve, will it benefit a lot of people rather than just the few people around you, and are you the best person to solve this problem. If you have all three qualities, whether you are male or female, you should be starting a company.  

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