[ad_1]
Startup founder and graduate UC Berkeley senior Amirita Bhasin reflects on building a venture-backed company as a college student. (Photo illustration by Neil Fries)
This I Am Berkeley is written as a first-person narrative from an interview with Sotira founder and UC Berkeley graduate Amrita Bhasin.
Like watching movies Social network Or like TV shows Silicon ValleyThere is a real reflection on how women are viewed and treated in the tech world.
According to the classic narrative, a young Mark Zuckerberg-like character creates a booming tech startup in Palo Alto. A corrupt, white male founder comes across as misunderstood. It burns bridges and presents industry gatekeepers as antithesis. But despite his self-destructive efforts, he eventually secured a round of venture capital that valued the company at billions of dollars. dead end.
It seems very easy for them.
Bhasin attending ETH Denver, the world’s largest Ethereum conference in Denver, Colorado. (Photo courtesy of Amrita Bhasin)
But as the founder of my own software company, Sotira, it was hard to see myself in that typical representation. These stories never feature female founders. And if they do, it’s usually non-verbal roles that are marked to show an aspect of diversity.
Sitting in classrooms and talking to investors and other founders, I’ve experienced firsthand how a lack of female representation affects the startup ecosystem and culture.
When I attend conferences or board meetings to talk about my company to other startup founders, I’m like, “That’s great. And you’re an intern, right? ” People like me don’t get taken seriously in these places because they “don’t belong”. It is unimaginable to many that women, especially young women or girls, can build successful companies. We may feel invisible.
All of these barriers and micro-aggressions as a woman of color and student at UC Berkeley make getting venture capital funding very difficult.
In the tech world, those gender gaps are real.
While nearly 30% of US startups have female founders, only 2% of venture capital funding goes to women-founded companies. It goes even less for founders who are women of color.
So I wanted to share my story because I believe representation is important in the tech industry. And despite the obstacles and challenges, other young women can and should break that mold.
Amrita Bhasin’s first business venture was a neighborhood lemonade stand with her brother in Menlo Park. (Photo courtesy of Amrita Bhasin)
Growing up as a kid in Menlo Park, I always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. The original Google garage, Facebook headquarters, and venture capital firms like Sequoia Capital worked out of offices not far from our homes.
I remember being in middle school and flipping through the pages of Entrepreneur magazine in search of the latest innovations from startup companies and founders around the world. It was inspiring to see how these companies can make a difference in people’s lives.
I have been obsessed ever since. To me, Silicon Valley was like Hollywood.
My parents are immigrants from India and London, but both trace their families back to Punjab, a former part of India. My father, a computer engineer, and my mother, a lawyer and chef, were supportive and, as a high school student, allowed me to skip school to attend tech conferences like TechCrunch Disrupt and Startup Grind. I got to visit tech headquarters like Uber, Google and Pinterest and intern for local startup companies over the summer.
Bhasin says the racism against her family is “often subtle and subtle.” (Photo courtesy of Amrita Bhasin)
While Menlo Park was a very safe area to live in, it was not a very different place for my brother and me. My neighborhood and schools were mostly white and rich families and also very Christian. Looking back at my old elementary school and soccer team photos, it is now clear that I was the only or one of very few kids of color.
We grew up in a practicing Sikh family after 9/11. And in an affluent neighborhood with a highly educated population, racism is often subtle and subtle.
They make fun of me and my family because I don’t go to Christian church with the students in my school and I don’t look like them. We have also often encountered racist micro-aggressions from other students and community members.
While these experiences were stressful, they gave me something to fight for as a child. I feel like I’ve developed some resilience, too, that I’ve used not only as a student but as a female founder and entrepreneur to break into the underdeveloped space for people like me.
I co-founded Sotira with my colleague and Berkeley alumnus Gary Kwong as a sophomore before the summer of 2021 to provide small business owners with a more customized software tool to streamline their profits and organize their finances.
Sotira billboard running over the Bay Bridge from Oakland to San Francisco. (Photo courtesy of Amrita Bhasin)
Our aim is to help digital business owners who cannot be supported by traditional financial systems.
With Sotira, we’ve created personalized financial tracking templates for every individual small business owner to sell their products. Whether you sell on Etsy, Shopify or eBay, we help users define their business goals by showing them what adjustments they need to make to increase their profit margins.
We are currently a free product, and many of our users are women-owned businesses. And we have business owners of all ages, from stay-at-home moms with multiple online businesses to part-time freelancers trying to take their side hustle full-time and new small business owners trying to follow their dreams.
In a year and a half, Sotira has grown to include designers, developers and interns hired from the Berkeley SkyDeck program.
Sotira’s founders and employees received the second place award at SCET’s Silicon Alliance competition last year. (Photo courtesy of Amrita Bhasin)
But I’ve found that raising venture capital and partnering is often about networking and introductions to the right people.
When I’m in these rooms with venture capitalists my dad’s age, I get frustrated sometimes. As a founder trying to define how my company can disrupt the industry, I have questions like: Why not start a small business? Did you know that starting a startup is really hard?
I know this question is never asked by a man.
Female founders like Sophia Amoruso and Emily Weiss are often overlooked in the media and held to higher standards and levels of responsibility than male founders. If a female founder is publicly scandalized or does something unethical or illegal, she is more likely to raise venture capital funds again. If someone does this, they will be given $350 million, as seen with Adam Neumann, the founder of WeWork.
I think that misconception is more systematic than situational. The person before Facebook was not very hot or detailed, and Snapchat was created to send nude photos. Looking at the origins of many successful startups, coupled with the fact that founding teams and early employees were predominantly male, a culture of misogyny and sexism certainly pervades.
Female founders have been blacklisted by venture capital firms, hackers and tech parties, and cyberbullied and harassed for inappropriate comments on social media and men delaying their advances. Again, same with Hollywood.
UC Berkeley’s startup and entrepreneurship culture is the best of any university in the world, Bhasin said, “because of the focus on building, creating and innovating.” (Photo by Brittany Hosea-Little)
I chose to come to Berkeley not only because the innovation and startup culture is proven to be the best in the country, but also because of the diversity of perspectives and sense of belonging I feel here.
As a large public university, Berkeley’s startup culture can be very competitive. But there is an unconventional and multifaceted approach to entrepreneurship that has sustained me. At Berkeley, I majored in sociology, and that really shaped my worldview and made me more aware of the problems people face every day.
I am very excited to find the answers.
Berkeley’s network of alumni entrepreneurs and founder ecosystems is like no other. Wherever you go in the world, there are bound to be Berkeley students who can connect you with resources, support you, or just offer knowledge and advice.
In the startup world, when you say you’re from Berkeley, that hustle opens a lot of doors.
More than 250 people network on campus at the grand opening of Berkeley’s Baccarat Bioengineering Hub, a building that houses and supports innovative startups in STEM. (UC Berkeley photo by Keegan House)
The Berkeley Skydeck Incubator, classes at the Sutarja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology, and on-campus events provide unique networking opportunities with alumni and founders of companies such as Google, Lim, Oculus, and Tesla.
I have had the opportunity to actively participate in blockchain, especially social good initiatives. I was one of two American college students selected as a scholar by the Ethereum Foundation and traveled to conferences in Colombia, Portugal, Denver, and New York City. In those countries, I shared my thoughts on how blockchain is disrupting traditional financial institutions and venture capital firms that fail to provide equal opportunities for women—especially women of color—to start their own businesses.
Sotira won the Biance-Lift Initiative Award in last year’s Big Ideas competition. (Photo courtesy of Amrita Bhasin)
In whatever field of technology I’m in, I always want to champion the ways in which technology can promote social good.
I think, of all the universities in the world, Berkeley has the best entrepreneurial culture because it is focused on building, creating and innovating. Just as opposed to the entrepreneurial concept. I can read as many books as I want about starting a company, but that will never compare to the time I actively built it one day.
So I think there’s a Berkeley mentality that encourages persistence and courage that’s very important to me as a student and as a founder. Faculty, staff and students encourage disruption of the status quo.
When I graduate this May, I will continue to grow and evaluate Sotiran. We aim to partner with fintech giants and ecommerce platforms and grow through those partnerships. And to help more people.
“No matter what field of technology I’m in, I’m always looking to champion ways that technology can promote social good,” says Bhasin. (Photo courtesy of Amrita Bhasin)
My motivation as an entrepreneur is not just to make money, but to find meaning and purpose in building a company and product from the ground up. I’ve always wanted this, and it feels like a dream come true.
I hope my journey here at Berkeley inspires other young women and people with non-technical backgrounds to realize that you don’t have to be a young white male computer geek to be a startup founder. Regardless of your background, you can do this if you want to.
I think I am proof of that.
[ad_2]
Source link
