Skip to main content

Women entreprenuers and my thoughts

Techcrunch today published a post "Women Don’t Want To Run Startups Because They’d Rather Have Children" . Well, though I sympathize with the woman in the post,I do not agree with the tone of the article.

She takes her experience and generalizes it to all women, which is just taking it to the extreme.
I think ultimately what she wants to say is that,

"Its tough to be a woman, and its tough to run a startup". Big deal.

Its tough to run a startup. Period. Does not matter whether you are a man or a woman.

And she seems to assume that bringing up a child is just the woman's job. It's not. And thats why we humans have created a family structure.So that both parents take care of the kid. If I start to write about how difficult it has been for me to both be a young dad as well as drive a startup, it would become a novel :)

Actually, in the middle of the post she writes "It’s hard to not be the center, but I want to be the center of my family."(emphasis mine). She wanted to be the center of her family and nothing else. Thats the choice she made and its the choices we make that define us.She can now be defined as a great mother and not a good entrepreneur, and thats just fine.Its actually OK to be just a great mother and nothing else. But not everyone has to make that choice. Some could actually choose to be the center of their family and also the center of their startup. Just work harder for the first years of the kid.

But I do agree that men certainly have an advantage in the startup world. In our work culture we have the concept of maternity leave, where we hold the job for a woman until she finishes her pregnancy and then she can come back and join the workforce and continue from where she left off. In the startup world, the world just moves on :)

Just had to put my thoughts out. Don't worry, next week we will be back to cloud telephony.

Popular posts from this blog

Cloud Telephony-History and state of the art

Well, its been 11 years since Twilio launched their voice API in November 2008. I would say that was a major turning point in the cloud telephony industry. Before that, for people to build telephony applications, you either had to depend on proprietary platforms like Avaya dialog designer or build on arcane technologies like VXML which again was supported at varying degrees by the incumbents. Enter Twilio with their voice API and the industry changed for the better. Since it's been almost 11 years now I thought now might be a good time to do a comprehensive review of the cloud telephony industry as a whole in general and in India in particular. The Beginning Twilio was undoubtedly the startup which ushered in the era of cloud telephony. They started in November 2008. At that time in India, we at Ozonetel had launched a hosted VXML platform. There were no takers. After all who coded in VXML :) So when Twilio launched and we saw them take off, we immediately realized tha...

Google business messages and chat agents-A match made in heaven

Google has launched Google business messages without much fanfare. It's just a small button that pops up when someone searches for your business on Google. But from the conversation industry perspective this is HUGE .   Do you know that the small call button drives millions of calls i n a year for pizza joints and other retailers in the US. Businesses spend more than a trillion dollars supporting billions of customer service calls each year. Now imagine how many chat conversations the "Message" button can drive.  Think of how customers interact with business. 1. Search on Google. 2. Click on web site link. 3. Web site shows chat pop up and tries to force the user to chat.(Annoying. I know :)) 4. User clicks on chat and starts conversing with a bot or an agent. This flow can now be completely changed. The new flow can be: 1. Search on Google. 2. User clicks on Message and starts conversing with a bot or an agent. What if you could design a customer experience that helps...

Telugu ASR speech data collection

Image Source: IIIT-H Developing an indigenous ASR for Indian languages has been a goal for us since a long time. In that regard we have been experimenting a lot, trying out various neural network architectures.  While doing these experiments we found that there was no good dataset for Indian languages. While discussing with IIIT professors we got to know that the government of India was also exploring options to generate a good dataset. We immediately offered our help and our platform for this endeavor. So, as a starting step we have come up with a few campaigns to encourage users to donate speech data. We wanted to make it fun, so our first few campaigns are along the lines of JAMs(Just a Minute speech topics) etc. A topic will be provided and you need to speak for a minute on that topic. We have started this campaign for college students to start with. Of course anyone can participate and contribute their data. The more the merrier :) We will adding a lot more innovative ways ut...