00:00 Well, it's now time to call upon our women of worth who did not only dream, but in fact she also dared.
00:06 Ladies and gentlemen, she's here to tell us her wow story of how she gave up her corporate career to pursue her love for cooking
00:16 and really channeled her passion into building one of India's most successful food tech companies.
00:23 Ladies, put your hands together for founder of FreshMenu, Rashmi Daga.
00:28 [Applause]
00:39 Hi everyone. It's my pleasure to be here and trust me, a decade back, ten years back, I think it was just like a dream that you would be able to do something that breaks from the regular mold
00:53 and probably come and speak at a forum and create something which makes impact in life, in my own life and for a lot of people.
01:05 So I think it's a huge privilege to be in this place. I would like to start from where it all started.
01:12 As a kid, come from a very conservative family, I think first generation of kids who actually studied or who were pushed to perform well academically
01:24 and happened to use that push to get into Delhi College of Engineering in IIM Ahmedabad.
01:31 And I remember back then a lot of people used to tell my parents that you've got your girl too educated and you're in trouble.
01:38 Coming from that point of view in life to building a career, starting with IBM sales, and again it was a choice that was not a very common choice.
01:50 I know a lot of friends and people around would check with me, do you really want to build a career in sales and why are you doing sales?
01:58 Today I can tell you that sales is the biggest reason I'm able to do what I'm doing.
02:04 Sales as a career teaches you a lot of things, right, from building relationships, understanding business, product, actually getting someone to pay for your product.
02:14 And I think that learning in life is probably never to be compromised.
02:19 So I did about five years of sales between IBM and J&J Medical.
02:24 And I think from there, there was a bug that you have to do something own in your life and not keep doing a job.
02:32 And I think job is something that most of us are trained to believe that we work for others.
02:40 I think once you do your own startup, once you shift to the entrepreneur side, you realize that a job itself is very important.
02:46 And I think for women in India, that itself is a huge hurdle to cross over, that instead of being at home, you actually work and you build out a career.
02:54 So honestly, whether you work in a corporate job, whether you work at a startup or you're an entrepreneur,
03:00 I think we're doing a great service in moving our society forward, that we actually go ahead and work.
03:07 I think from there on, my bug was that, you know, let me build something of my own and let me try and build a business.
03:14 So first step was actually work at a startup so that you learn and probably learn at someone else's expense.
03:21 So I did learn at somebody's expense. I joined a startup called Tudor Vista.
03:25 Tudor Vista was an ed tech startup back in 2008, considered a hot startup in the space.
03:30 We were teaching students in the US. For three and a half years, I did everything that was possible at that startup.
03:38 Sales, operations, customer service, recruitment.
03:42 We actually went ahead and built one of the largest virtual workforces in India, sitting with a very small team.
03:49 So resource was a constraint. And with about eight people in Bangalore in a small office,
03:55 we were actually recruiting hundreds of tutors every month.
03:59 And these were mostly women who wanted to work a few hours, work as a consultant, in their spare time and earn an extra income.
04:08 I'm talking about 2008. We did that for three and a half years.
04:13 I did tutor recruitment and then moved on to doing some sales there.
04:19 Bootstrapped a startup. There's a lot of confidence that I've learned what to do at a startup.
04:23 I bootstrapped a startup for a year. Again, I think early timing probably was not the best of time to do a startup.
04:32 A call taken in life to shut down what is not working. So I did shut it down after a year of hard work.
04:39 A lot of learning, which are even useful today. But if things are not working, you cannot drag them on and on.
04:46 And you have to let them go. One big lesson that I learned at that time is being perfectionist does not help.
04:54 As women, I think we have been trained consciously, subconsciously that you have to always excel.
05:00 You have to be perfect. You have to be very, very good. But trust me,
05:04 especially if you're trying to be an entrepreneur, trying to start up, perfection is something that if you keep chasing perfection,
05:11 you will be really slow and you may be left behind. And perfection is not something that takes you fast.
05:17 So my lesson in life was that iteration is good. You can start with something.
05:21 You can keep improving it if it works. But perfecting a product before even releasing it is not something that goes down very well.
05:29 So I closed that startup, moved on, worked a few roles, and then started with Fresh Menu again.
05:37 Honestly, as an individual, for all my life, I kept thinking that I have to work because I don't want to be at home
05:45 and especially taking care of food and stuff at home.
05:48 So starting a company in food was not a very easy decision because it looked like you're actually going back to where you all was running away from.
05:58 But I think Fresh Menu has been amazing because we've been able to change and help a lot of people do what they want to do better,
06:09 save that one hour of cooking every day. So it's actually an option created where good quality food cooked in a local kitchen can come to people.
06:17 And that was first principles at Fresh Menu, that we are not cooking something that we are not eating ourselves.
06:24 We are not proud to eat at our own homes. And therefore, it was very different from all that people were trying to do.
06:30 This was actually thought from day one as a fresh food company. We source material every day.
06:35 We actually cook in a local kitchen with trained people all the time.
06:40 So food that comes to customers' house from a Fresh Menu kitchen is cooked either 10 minutes, 15 minutes before they ordered or 15 minutes after they've ordered.
06:48 And that was a huge change compared to what the market was doing. Market runs a very central kitchen, factory-made, frozen food model because that's what is very, very scalable.
06:59 So again, I think scale is very important to think from a startup point of view.
07:03 But if your product does not work, you don't want to scale something that does not work as a core product.
07:09 And therefore, scale from day one is not what you need to obsess over.
07:12 First, you need to obsess over what is my service, what's my product, why should a consumer like it?
07:17 And once that happens, then solutions for scale are easier to think about, which is what we did at Fresh Menu.
07:25 So as an individual, I think as an entrepreneur, the journey has been huge in the last almost five years.
07:31 Every day has been a learning. Every day you learn a new lesson in solving problems, in building patience.
07:39 Being a mother and taking a decision to do a startup, when I was starting Fresh Menu, my daughter was three years old.
07:45 And the big question in my head was my kid is very small and I need a lot of time.
07:50 And I think it's hard to keep the guilt away every day because as an entrepreneur, I spend way too much time at work.
07:58 But I realize that my kid's going to be small for me all my life.
08:01 So she's not going to grow up and she's not going to become big and independent very easily.
08:07 So be it three or be it six, it's not going to change. But I should pursue my dream and I should not let that go.
08:13 It was a tough one for first year. First year is a big struggle at a startup. You're surviving day on day.
08:19 I used to work seven days a week. I used to carry her to the kitchen. She spent time in the kitchen.
08:24 She's been in my car while I'm delivering the food. I think she's very proud of Fresh Menu today.
08:29 And I think she's growing up to be a very independent girl. And I think she'll be way, way better than what our generation is.
08:37 These kids are much smarter. So I think I end up feeling that bit of responsibility that if we do not break away from the old mold,
08:45 our kids are not going to have a different life, a different society.
08:48 So here it is. I think I'm so glad to see so many women and so much of, you know, push for entrepreneurship.
08:57 I think women entrepreneurship is at times being considered as something which is a very small niche.
09:03 But there are a lot of us who have a lot of aspiration, a lot of strength and a lot of things that we could all achieve.
09:09 So here it is. I think India is going to change very, very quickly for women. Thank you.
09:19 Ladies, let's have a louder cheer for our women of the world. Rashmi Daga. Rashmi.
09:29 Thank you so much for telling your story straight from the heart. That's exactly how we needed to hear it.
09:35 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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