IT entrepreneurs' body starts women's chapter

The Bangalore chapter of TiE, a group of Indian IT entrepreneurs from the US and India, has started a women's forum, TiE Women. It will aim to secure more funding and other support for women entrepreneurs.

TiE Women will work within its parent organisation, and address those issues specific to women entrepreneurs, said Revathi Kasturi, founder and president of Tarang, a software firm here, and an office bearer of the new forum.

TiE or 'The Indus Entrepreneurs' is a group of mostly Indian IT professionals and entrepreneurs who did well for themselves in the US.

With the growth of the IT services industry in Bangalore, TiE saw the need and the opportunity to act as a network of engineers, businessman, venture funds and so on, who could all come together to build an "ecosystem" in which technology innovation could thrive. TiE Women, without duplicating what organisations such as AWAKE do, "will not limit itself to IT", Kasturi said. An invited talk at the inaugural meet of the forum on Saturday, however, showed how difficult that would be.

The audience, for Hema Hattangadi's talk on how her $400 million in sales power meter manufacturing and energy audit services business had become that way, largely comprised women in the corporate IT industry.

Hattangadi, managing director of Conzzerv, listed challenges that ranged from not being taken seriously by mainly male customers to the frustration of seeing an intelligent woman employee opting to play "second fiddle to her husband on the same team."

Among the issues specific to women entrepreneurs was that of support within a firm for pregnant women, new and not-so-new mothers. In the audience were women who worked for firms such as Accenture and Novartis, and whose husbands worked for firms such as Cisco and Nortel.

Suggestions too then were based on their experiences in the US or Europe. The solutions included creches at the work place, working from home and "tele-commuting".

As Hattangadi's scepticism showed, based on her own experiences here in Bangalore, finding local solutions, and for sectors such as manufacturing, is likely to be one of the first and biggest challenges for TiE Women.

Will not a woman with superior skills in quality checks of power meters find it difficult to work from home without the supporting logistics in place? Will such systems work without scale and be commercially viable?

In the long run, Kasturi said, the new forum seeks to bring more women wannabe entrepreneurs to "deal flow meetings", so they can tell investors about their ideas and get funding. TiE women will also help women who are interested, ready to start but don't know how, and already in the business but aiming to become better at it, she said.