‘Women Don’t Need Charity, They Need Investments’ Says Encubay Founder, Deeksha Ahuja

Written by: Rajkanya Mahapatra

Deeksha Ahuja is the Founder of Encubay, a global diversity-focused startup network. Their flagship diversity-focused incubator has been set up in collaboration with Greenhouse Capital Africa. Deeksha has over eight years of experience in the Ed-Tech, Food-Tech, Beauty-Tech, Media-Tech and Healthcare-Tech space.

In conversation with, Pallavi Pareek, Founder of Ungender and Conduct, Deeksha talks about the gendered issues that plague the Indian startup ecosystem and how she thinks they can be solved.

Pallavi: Why this space? You’ve focused on women before through CollboratHer and MadeByHer. What are your reasons to focus on gender and entrepreneurship in the work that you do?

Deeksha: I might go back on a little memory lane for you to understand. I’ve always only known how to be an entrepreneur. Even when I was just graduating, we were setting up my venture along with two other co-founders in the EdTech space. When you’re an entrepreneur, you don’t have too many people to talk to or have them guide you because you’re out there doing things alone.

The only way you figure what you need to do next is by going for events, meeting other entrepreneurs, attending a lot of networking forums. I also did that, like any other entrepreneur, but the only difference was that, whenever I would go to such events, I would find that I am the rarity. Out of like 100 people, there would be like five women.

That really put me off for two reasons – firstly, I knew so many amazing female founders who were building their businesses. So, why would their businesses and what they were doing not at the level of their male counterparts? Why were they not scaling up or raising funds? Secondly, no one seemed to be bothered about this except me. That was the ticking point for me back in 2016. I’m a strong believer in the fact that women are, if not more, then as competent as men.

Women make excellent founders, we can multi-task, we’re highly intuitive, we understand consumer journeys. So if all these things were a tick mark, why were there such few women seen scaling up or raising funds and this is not only in India but globally too. I wanted to, somewhere, decode what was holding women back and come up with a solution. I wanted to do something about it.

Pallavi: What was the process that helped you zero in on this particular space where you have now developed an incubator for women?

Deeksha: For two reasons, the first being, I’ve always believed in creating a larger impact. For me, the top to bottom approach seems to work better. It’s simple economics, if you are able to portray a certain increase in number of successful women founders, at the top, scaling up and raising funds, and that number starts increasing, that itself will inspire so many more women to take to entrepreneurship or get many smaller ventures to start dreaming big. Once this cycle, goes in an auto mode, initiative like ours, will not be required, right? We exist today, so that in 50 years, we don’t need to exist. I hope you get the irony there.

The second reason is, unfortunately, most of the time – any initiative related to women have had this tag of ‘haan ye toh social venture hai or you know, let’s give some charity to women.’

I don’t necessarily agree with that. I don’t think women need charity. I’m also not doing this for charity. I think there’s a great business case in what we are building with Encubay. I think each and every woman comes with a very, very strong business case. Of course, we are focusing on diverse founders but that doesn’t mean that I’m saying, “you just need to be a woman and you don’t need to have a business.” When I say women founders, these are founders that have built brilliant businesses or are on the path of building really brilliant businesses. I want to shatter those stereotypes.

We’ve taken this path of creating an incubator, and it’s actually a little more than that. So, Encubay is a connected ecosystem of thoughts, of a lot of mentors, experts, investors, and corporate partners. We use this ecosystem to help the founders through the incubation programme or on the larger community to achieve their growth goals. So, that’s how we’ve been positioned, and that’s why we are in this space, solving in this particular manner.

Pallavi: How are you working on the gendered stereotypes that come in the way of women making progress in the startup ecosystem? They exist, right?

Deeksha: Yes, they definitely exist. There are multiple research studies on this. I recently read an article from the Harvard Business Review which very specifically states that male entrepreneurs get asked completely different questions compared to their female counterparts by VCs and investors.

One of the more important stats that I’d like to quote is that 67% of the questions that male colleagues are asked more about promotions and success, whereas 66% of the questions that are asked to female entrepreneurs by investors are more on the lines of failure or them not being able to deliver right. So, there is a very deep problem that exists here. This points to the fact that equal opportunity is not available in the space. This is a global problem.

Not everything is wrong and things are also changing. On the negative front, yes, there are a bunch of entities in the ecosystem who think there’s nothing wrong with status quo. We found that women are just 14% of the ecosystem which is terribly dismal in my eyes but maybe not in the eyes of a lot of other entities – could be investors, could be other ecosystems. So, this definitely exists because they don’t even realise that this is an issue. But that is slowly going to change. On the positive side, there are a lot of women who are entering this entire investor and VC industry, and, this has happened in the last five years.

Now, that has had an extremely high positive impact on investments going to women founders. When there’s a diverse team it is bound to reflect in the decisions that a lot of these entities take. A lot of these women, whether as partners at funds or as associates are gunning and are pushing for more diverse investments and portfolio companies, and that’s where we (Encubay) come into the picture.

In the space where bias exists, where the lack of equal opportunity exists, with time, I do strongly believe that they will have to change otherwise they will miss out on trends that are coming up.

As far as being a VC is concerned, one of your major goals is to be able to spot trends before the market does. That’s how you make money. But if you’re not able to do that you are going to miss out. So of course, I’m not saying biases don’t exist, but things are changing. We work with a lot with investors to help them understand the gender lens and/or help them see value.

Brings me back to what I said earlier, I’m not telling them to compromise their quality standards because I think women meet all of them. It’s only about giving them the equal opportunity and asking them the same questions that they would ask their male counterparts.

Pallavi: What are the roadblocks you’ve had to face so far in your journey on building Encubay? How have you addressed these roadblocks?

Deeksha: Definitely, there are roadblocks and I’m not going to deny that there aren’t any. This is where persistence comes in. I have been very actively promoting the fact that Encubay is a network. If I were to do this alone, my chances of succeeding or bringing about that change would have been very, very low. Fortunately, we have a stellar amount of people, who, like you said, are the converted – there are mentors and investors who absolutely understand the value of gender lens.

What I think has worked for us is – if I were to do this just by myself, maybe it wouldn’t have been as effective but when you go as a collective, when you show that there is real value, and there’s real validation of what you want to do – maybe people won’t listen to you for the first time but the second, and the third time they are going to have that bend towards you.

The second thing is, there’s always an angle of feeling angry about a problem and acting from an emotional, reactive space than a practical, logical space. There are only 14% women representing the startup ecosystem, that’s a problem. Let’s try and problem solve that in the most effective way.

So my approach towards this whole situation has been the latter. I have chosen to work through this in a very logical manner, because it’s tough to change how people think, but when you show them something that has borne better results – (there is enough data to prove that investments in women founders have higher ROIs) a change in the thought process occurs.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Watch the complete video, here.

Ungender Insights is the product of our learning from advisory work at Ungender. Our team specializes in advising workplaces on workplace diversity and inclusion. Write to us at contact@ungender.in to understand how we can partner with your organization to build a more inclusive workplace.