Brown Queen Diaries
Welcome to the Brown Queen Diaries, a podcast that celebrates the diverse experiences of women of color. Join us as we explore personal stories, cultural heritage, and the challenges and triumphs of navigating life as a brown queen. Each episode features insightful conversations with inspiring guests, touching on topics like identity, empowerment, wellness, and creativity. Whether you're seeking inspiration or connection, our community is here to uplift and empower you. Tune in and embrace your inner queen!
Brown Queen Diaries
From Corporate to Startup Success
What does it really take to leave a successful corporate career and build your own business as a woman? Sangeeta, founder of Jumpstart Studios, doesn't sugar-coat the answer. Coming from three generations of entrepreneurs, she first climbed to senior leadership at ANZ Bank before realising something fundamental was missing in her career.
The entrepreneurial path wasn't straight for Sangeeta. After starting businesses in travel and food experiences (both interrupted by COVID), she discovered her true calling: helping other women make the leap from employment to entrepreneurship. Her clarity about why women struggle in both corporate and startup worlds is refreshing. "The current business world was not built by women, was not built for women," she explains, highlighting how existing structures fail to accommodate the multiple identities women carry simultaneously.
This understanding led her to create Press Play Ventures, a program that's already helped over 120 women founders. Unlike traditional approaches, Press Play recognises women's realities and provides flexible pathways into entrepreneurship without forcing them to choose between their various roles. The statistics speak to the need: women receive less than 5% of startup funding globally, and in Victoria, only about 1,000 women founders existed before her program began.
What makes Sangeeta's methodology particularly valuable is her practical approach to testing business ideas. Rather than starting with heavy investment, she teaches "pretotyping" – a concept from Google's former head of engineering that involves testing market interest before building anything. "Don't build first. Market first, sell it first, get some money and then deliver the product," she advises, saving founders countless resources on unvalidated ideas.
The success stories emerging from her program show the impact of this approach - her most important insight is that success looks different for everyone, and recognising when an idea isn't viable can be just as valuable as pushing forward.
Want to learn more? Sangeeta's award-winning book "Start Right" distills these lessons into practical exercises, or join her next Press Play cohort opening applications in April with up to 85% scholarships available.
Brown Queen Diaries by Priyanka Nomula
Directed by Sandeep Raj
Presented by Aussie Talkies
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Hello everyone, welcome to Brown Queen Diaries, season 2. This is the platform where we celebrate fearless South Asian women who are breaking barriers, redefining success and carving their own paths. Today we are going to dive into entrepreneurship and we have a powerhouse guest who has done it all from corporate to starting her own startups, to empowering a lot of women, build their businesses and having her own book published about the startups. So let's welcome Sangeeta, who is the founder of Jumpstart Studios. All right, welcome to the show, sangeeta.
Speaker 2:How are you? I'm very well. Thank you very much for having me.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. So let's start from the beginning. In your words, how would you describe yourself?
Speaker 2:It's taken me a long time to distill it down to this, but this is my byline now for everybody.
Speaker 1:It is I teach startups how to start up Right, that's a good tagline. Yeah, right, so you've started your career from the corporate world to then you had your own startups, and then empowering women to start their own businesses yeah, that's quite a journey. Yeah, so I'll come back to your corporate side of things. Right, how, what, what did it take for you to actually leave your corporate job and then go on to this entrepreneurial journey?
Speaker 2:What was?
Speaker 1:your role when you were in corporate.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, look, I have about 15 years of corporate experience and I've lived and worked on six different continents, worked with multiple different organizations, and so my journey, I suppose, was started in Africa with Lufthansa Airlines and then Ernst Young, and then my last sort of corporate tenure, or the longest, was with ANZ Bank here in Australia, and the last role I was in was a director at institutional banking and also the head of commercialization for a project that we were working on.
Speaker 1:That's a leadership position to be honest yes, senior leadership. So senior leadership and then for you to leave that and get into entrepreneurial journey. It must have taken some kind of a big push right, something that's reassured you that I will click in my startups. I do not want to be in the corporate world. What was that?
Speaker 2:so it's quite interesting. So, um, about 12-ish years into my corporate life, um, I obviously came to Australia as a migrant. You know, I lived here, and so my dream was to sit in those big glass offices up there that I would see. And I came as an international student. So, going from an international student to becoming you know um, to working in a corporate and wearing you know those suits and those high heels, and all of that was like a dream, yeah.
Speaker 2:And so that's where it all sort of started, um, and as I climbed the corporate ladder quite successfully, I got everything I wanted, like I had a lovely lifestyle, I I had a beautiful house, my husband, travel, adventure, all of that and still I wasn't happy. There was just something that was not making me happy. I was good at my job, I was really successful at what I was doing, but at some, some part of me was not happy. I would wake up in the mornings and be like not again, like I don't want to go back to this again. So I think for me that was a starting point to start really self-reflecting on. You know, what is it that I really wanted to do? And so for me, the journey sort of started with the fact that I am a third generation entrepreneur. I come from a family of entrepreneurs and I was the first one to go and do some sort of a corporate job in my immediate family.
Speaker 2:I come from a family of entrepreneurs and I was the first one to go and do some sort of a corporate job in my immediate family. So I always knew at some point I will go back to business, right. But I just didn't know how to do business in Australia, and so I think there was a little bit of. I spent a little time soul searching before I came to a point where I was like, ok, yeah, this is what, this is what I want to give a go. Okay, yep, this is what, this is what I want to give a go. And it all started. But because I was in a job, I took the risk averse path, which is I went to Melbourne Uni and did my second master's degree, which was in entrepreneurship. The promise of that course was to help build a business, so I chose not to do an MBA or an executive MBA and do a master's in entrepreneurship instead, because it it taught me how to build a business lovely.
Speaker 1:So I just this is a question that I always ask everybody, yeah, and I know that for a fact that there's not enough of it. Let me get to this question right. In your corporate, when you were working in a corporate world, did you think there was gender balance in the senior leadership? Of course not there still isn't.
Speaker 1:There still isn't. I know that. But why do you think there isn't much? You know equality, let's say, equal number of people who are women and men, let alone South Asian background. But I'm just talking about women and men, right? So what do you think the main? I'm just talking about women and men right. So what do you think? The main reason so?
Speaker 2:there are two things. One is I think and I say this a lot is the current business world was not built by women, was not built for women. It was built by men. So the structures and the policies and the way things are built in today's corporate world even in small business world, like any business landscape really is all very catered for men. That style of work is catered for men. For women it's very different. The way women work, the way women think, the way women actually do things is different. And because we're now entering a lot more into the man's world, the expectation is that you behave like them and you fit into those structures. So that is one big problem.
Speaker 2:Structurally that's a systemic problem. So the more women that come into business, the more we will change the landscape to change and perhaps create some sort of a better looking space or business space for women to enter more easily and work more easily and, you know, reach those heights more easily. The second thing that I think and of course we all know about the glass ceiling, the bamboo ceiling, all those other things, but beyond that, I think women and men are fundamentally different people. So a lot of times we talk about equality or equity between the two genders. In reality, there they can't be any, because men and women are different. They're just built differently, yeah, and the way we operate is very different. So in today's business world, a lot of women come to a point and then they're just like you know what? I can't be bothered, yeah, I can't be bothered playing this game to keep pushing up and pushing up when the odds are against me when people have built this system not for me yes you know, why do I?
Speaker 2:why do I even want to be up there, right? So, and that's why you see, a lot of women will come up to the management level, and then you see the numbers in the senior management or executive levels start diminishing significantly, because women just don't want to play that game. They, they, they have different priorities in life and we go through a different sort of hormonal cycle as well yes, nobody talks about this right.
Speaker 2:That's a whole topic, that's a whole go on about 100, but yeah, yeah, but that's that's a. That's a factor that is not taken into consideration that women go through different hormonal cycles in their different ages and that determines what decisions they make right yeah, and what they want to prioritize?
Speaker 2:yes, they. I mean, you know I'm, I'm 40, I've just turned 40 and at 40 I don't want to deal with bullshit. I'm not in that season of my life where I care about people's dramas. This is how I want things and this is how I'm going to pursue them. So you know, but in my 20s I was willing to put up with the bullshit and I was willing to fight the system. Now I'm not willing to fight the system. I'm making my own system.
Speaker 1:I really don't care.
Speaker 2:So I think women come to those points in their life where they don't really care to deal with the structural issues and they're like you know what, I'll just go do my own thing. You know what, I'll just go do my own thing. And this is another reason why you don't see a lot of women sitting on those executive levels, because it's not that they're not talented or not capable or things like that, it's just that they choose not to fight that battle.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that resonates with the job applications as well, whether I am posting a job within my team or anywhere, the thing that I've heard the most is that women tend to think that they have to tick off every damn thing in that job. You know position description, and if one thing does not match, they just tend to not apply that, whereas men, even if they say they see that they're matching about 30%, they just end up applying and sometimes they end up getting the job as well. And they just end up applying and sometimes they end up getting the job as well. So do you agree with that? Do you see?
Speaker 2:that as well, 100%, and I think it comes down to conditioning. So it's from childhood where this happens, where there are different rules in families and homes for men and women for girls and boys.
Speaker 2:And so you know, boys are encouraged to do a lot of things, and then the girls are not encouraged to do a lot of things, and then the girls are not encouraged to do those things through throughout their childhood, adolescence, their teenagers. There you know all of that and that impacts then the their own perception of themselves and what they can do and what they can't do, and I think for men it is always like give it a go yes yeah, for the women it's like be careful yes.
Speaker 2:There's a very protective lens that parents usually take around girls, and then there is a very you know, give it a go, you're. You know, you're a boy Like I don't know what that even means Go for it, don't think yeah?
Speaker 2:Exactly life quite a bit um, where then women start to restrict themselves and feel like, oh, I have to be perfect, like they've been asked to do that since childhood. So that comes through a lot. But also the other thing I think that comes through is, like I said, men and women are built differently and so for men, they they don't see the structural barriers, they don't see the systemic barriers, because this has been built for them.
Speaker 1:For women, we can see that, oh, if I am not as good as the description asks me to be, yeah then you know my chances are very low yeah, I'll embarrass myself if I don't meet that criteria, if I'm not able to answer those questions.
Speaker 2:So those are the things, yeah so they probably are already pre-empting chances. They're probably looking at it from a probability lens, whereas with guys I think it's a bit more of a. I'm gonna give it a go and give it a go.
Speaker 1:Who cares if it comes, it comes, otherwise it's okay. Yeah, that's the attitude, okay, yeah. So do you think women should also think like that, or?
Speaker 2:well, if you want to play in a man's world, yes, but if you want to go build your own thing and have your own system, no, and then you do. You. I mean, you know, because I think women have their own strengths to play on and if your organization is not able to recognize those strengths, then it's on them more than it's on you. But definitely, I think, to your point around. You know, if you're seeing yourself match to a position description about 10 to 30 percent, I would still say go, you know, just give it a go. And you, like you, never know what you're not able to see that somebody else is able to see in you, yes. So from that perspective, yes, not so much because you want to be like the man or the male counterpart, but more because you want to back yourself.
Speaker 1:Yes, we spoke about your journey from corporate to then starting your own startups, yeah, and then to helping others build their businesses. So let's focus on your startups, right? What was your first business that you have put up? You said you have a few. You've had a few, yeah. So share us a little bit of your journey in that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure. So, like I said I started, I went to do my degree in Masters of Entrepreneurship and the promise was by the time you finish that degree it was a 10, one year, 10 months condensed degree.
Speaker 2:And so it basically said by the end of it you'll have a startup, the overachiever in me, wanted to do more, and so during the first half of that degree, I wanted to apply everything I was learning into a business model, and so as part of that degree, like you get to do multiple projects to learn, you know the concepts and as businesses, but the one that I kicked off was was about travel. So there are two things that I love a lot, which is travel and food. Those are my passions, and so, for me, I was like, yep, I want to. You know, now that I'm leaving banking, then I want to do something that I really am passionate about, and so I said travel. I love traveling. I've lived and worked on six continents, but also like 43 countries and counting, like I really want to, like travel is my thing, and I don't travel like normal people travel. I travel more to learn about the culture and the language, so I've learned a lot of languages along the way.
Speaker 2:I also then, you know, meet locals as I go into their homes and I cook Indian food for people everywhere I travel and then I invite the locals home, people that I meet at different events and things like that, and then I will go and then they invite me back into their homes and they teach me their cuisines and how they cook, and I get to go in their homes and meet their families and, you know, learn about the culture.
Speaker 1:That's a total new side of you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that I was not aware.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there are many sides to me, okay, but yeah, so travel is something I enjoy, and I enjoy traveling like that, and most people travel and go take pictures with monuments and, you know, go to the, the live spots, uh, the, the, you know highly marketed spots, and then they come back and they, that's their holiday.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I wanted to create a more culturally immersive travel company that helps people travel, like I travel, and so this is what I started as my first business, and so I did.
Speaker 2:I spent nights and like in the daytime I would be in uni, you know, doing all my study and work and everything, and then I'd come back home and then I'd spend nights and weekends building out my website, building out, you know, and my first trip was going to be in Bali, so I had vendors, contacting vendors, like listing them on the website, getting everything sorted in the back end, yeah, but then the one important thing we teach about in business is talk to your customer first, and I didn't talk to any customer, and when I had everything set up, then I went and started looking for my customers because, you know, I wanted everything to be perfect, which is what we're taught in our corporate jobs.
Speaker 2:It has to look good and I found very quickly that, you know, people actually were just thinking of me as another travel agent and the concept of culturally immersive travel was not resonating with a lot of the people that I was talking to and very quickly, I think, I understood that I was building a business that was based on my passion, but I wasn't building a business that had a need in the market as such and I and, but it was not, and also the business was not addressing the drivers of my passion.
Speaker 2:It was just my passion around travel, but I didn't want to be a travel agent. That was not the point. The point was more taking people on a journey and discovering things, and you know things like that. So for me, I had to sort of step back and really understand my drivers. So I had to shut that business. And it was about understanding my drivers, which are more around variety, change. I love learning and so you know, if I built a business that was more based just the passion versus the drivers of the passion, that was my biggest learning. There is. Like you know, if you, you need to build on the drivers of your passion, not the passion itself so the industry is agnostic.
Speaker 2:It's what drives you right and so my second business then was called Foodtropia, or is still called Foodtropia. It's not shut, it's shelved, but it was about having dinner parties in strangers' homes.
Speaker 1:Okay, so again, very, that's also kind of part of your, you know, travel thing where you cooked for people, and then they Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so this I did with two other co-founders One was from Spain, one is from Spain and one is from Colombia. Other co-founders, one was from Spain, one is from Spain and one is from Colombia, so Dario from Spain he's a hotelier in Spain and he was here studying the same course with me and Laura from Colombia, who was also studying the same course with me here, and we were all passionate about travel and food, and so we really wanted to create and Melbourne, for example, there are over 200 ethnicities we speak about more than 150 languages.
Speaker 2:But how much do we really understand about each other's cultures? Like I'm Indian, but if you come to my house, I don't cook butter chicken every day. Yes. But for most people Indian means butter chicken. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so very English way of seeing the curry Correct and so for me, it was really important that you know people.
Speaker 2:Actually, that piece was about how do we help people understand each other's cultures and maybe they go into each other's homes and that's how they understand culture. So, instead of going to a restaurant, you choose to go eat in an Indian home and you get a different experience. So that business we kicked off in 2019 as well. In mid of 2019, we did a a whole heap of marketing and we had dinner parties, we had people, we did a lot of testing and we did it the right way of you know, going through the customers first and not building anything out before the customers, before we got revenue and customers. Um, and it was fantastic, like it was really good. Um, we had a lot of people interested, we had a lot of and even till today, people call me to talk about that business and people also call me and ask me when are you starting it again?
Speaker 2:but what happened is like COVID hit it was 2019 right so 2020, covid hit and you couldn't go into each other's homes anymore right yeah, and so I had to shelve the business. But in the meantime, during COVID, then other things happened, other businesses kicked up, and so then I couldn't go back to food to repair. So it's still shelved. We'll see. If I find the right co-founder we might kick it up again. Yes, yeah. And so on the back of that, then, what happened is consulting businesses started, so I first started with just my name.
Speaker 2:It was just about consulting with other small businesses during COVID because they were shutting down and I had time on my hands to be able to help them. So I went back to my corporate job, realized it was not for me, I quit my corporate job and I spent some time just working with small and medium businesses in Melbourne, helping them go online, stay afloat, like not shut their businesses, and I started doing a lot of pro bono work with startups Because startups with a lot of universities that were running programs around startups. So I started spending a lot of time just working with startups because I had the corporate experience yeah, and I had my startup experience and I could combine the two and help a lot of different kinds of businesses.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay.
Speaker 2:So that's where it all started. Different kinds of businesses yeah, okay, so that's where it all started. And then another business that we started in between was called APOC, australian Professionals of Colour, which is a not-for-profit organisation. Now we started it as a social experiment, pretty much on Facebook, just to see if people really wanted to talk about the challenges that people of colour have in the corporate landscape here in Australia um and that and during COVID, like people were sitting at home they could, you know, do these things, so they actually we had a lot of interest.
Speaker 2:A lot of people came in. We were starting to bring guests on and talk about you know their careers and they how that that it all played out, um, and you know so that in about three, four years time that snowballed into becoming a not-for-profit organization. We're now a charity registered organization as well. So I'm the co-founder of that, although now and also was the board director, but I no longer serve as the board director, like I've stepped down. And the midst of all this I had a lot of people asking me about hey, sangeeta, you've made the move from corporate to entrepreneurship, like you've left your employment and started businesses. How do you do it? So I'd get a lot of people asking me those questions, and so I was like you know what? Maybe there's a gap here in the market where just somebody needs to show people how to move from or transition from employment to entrepreneurship.
Speaker 1:So that's your identifying your business case behind Jumpstart, correct, so?
Speaker 2:that's where Jumpstart Studio started. Case behind Jumpstart Correct. So that's where Jumpstart Studio started. It is all about helping people go on the entrepreneurial path at the very early stages of their business and it is a.
Speaker 2:the model of Jumpstart Studio is all about partnerships, so we partner with the entire ecosystem many different kind of players in the ecosystem, so that when people come to us, we have pathways for them on different things and that has slowly now evolved and that started off more as one-on-one coaching with startups and ideas as they came to me, but a lot of my work now has evolved into designing programs for universities and for government agencies.
Speaker 2:So we run our own programs, but we also design and deliver programs for other organizations, and these are startup programs, basically so pre-accelerator and accelerator programs, where people come in with an idea and we help them turn it into a business lovely so that I didn't know that there's something like that existed, so it's good to know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, how long did it take for you to establish a jump established jumpstart studios?
Speaker 2:yeahstart Studio. Well, the idea sort of started in 2021. So that's when I sort of, you know, said, okay, there's something here and we need to build it out. But yeah, to where we are now, obviously it's an evolution. It's always evolving, like it's still evolving. There's still more work that we're doing around it to keep building it out. Yeah, but it takes time, like it's never a overnight thing absolutely.
Speaker 1:And if you have to describe jumpstart studio in one line, yeah, what is what? How do you describe it and why should people go to jumpstart studios?
Speaker 2:uh, so the way currently it stands is we design and deliver startup programs and innovation programs for universities, governments and corporate organizations. That's pretty much the tagline for it, and they can be any kinds of programs, but it's all about startups and innovation. So we teach the startup way of doing things, the startup frameworks, things that come from Silicon Valley that have been propagated in Silicon Valley for years. We're bringing those a lot into the forefront here now in Australia.
Speaker 1:That's great. So Press Play Ventures is part of Jumpstart Studio.
Speaker 2:Correct. So some of the programs we run under Jumpstart Studio and our flagship program. We have two flagship programs. One is Press Play Ventures, which is specifically designed to transition women from employment to entrepreneurship. So we got a grant from the government organization here, launch Week, to support 100 women on a full scholarship to go from employment to entrepreneurship. And so we've run three cohorts so far and done about 120-ish founders in the three cohorts 120 women came into your cohorts all together, all together, that's awesome, yeah.
Speaker 1:So what was the idea behind just the Press Play Ventures? Because that's only for women, right, correct, whereas Jumpstart is for anybody.
Speaker 2:Yes, is that correct? We design different programs under Jumpstart, so another one is the Overseas Accelerator Program which is about helping Indian startups globalize in international markets. So they're different programs, but women it's just for women.
Speaker 1:So what is the idea behind it? How did you actually come up with that program?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so statistically, if you look at the startup landscape, so similar to what we were talking before is you know, like in the corporate landscape there's not a lot of women?
Speaker 1:you know, reaching the higher sort of levels.
Speaker 2:That's the same problem we have in the startup landscape as well. The higher levels I suppose in startups are around funding, right, so it's getting funding for your business eventually. And what we see is and there's a report that's come out um from folklore ventures and cut through ventures this year which says that only two percent of the total funding went to women founders uh last year in 2024 in 2023. This is in Australia, and in 2023 it was four percent, so we've actually gone down from that right.
Speaker 2:So there's and you read different reports, there's anywhere that everywhere you will read, it's under five percent usually and this is not just Australia, I'm talking worldwide you will see that under five percent ish of the funding goes to women founders, and so this has been the reality of the ecosystem for a very long time. But what I think people don't get to see a lot is that that 5% of funding, or whatever that number, is so poor at the bottom of the funnel. Nobody's looking at the top of the funnel. How many women do we even have in the pipeline? In the ecosystem.
Speaker 2:And so in Victoriaoria, it was identified in 2023 that um only there were only a thousand women founders, right, a thousand women founders in a population of 6.7 million is a terrible statistic yes um, and I'm sure there are more than a thousand, but we just don't get to hear about them, we don't get to see them.
Speaker 2:So we wanted to create something that was bespoke, that helps more women come into the ecosystem, and so our sort of mission with the hundred women transitioning from employment to entrepreneurship and lowering the barrier for them was to improve that thousand number by 10 percent. So improve that statistic by 10 percent, and we had two years to do it. We've done it in a year and a half. That means there's hunger.
Speaker 2:The market wants this yeah there are women who want this, yeah, but it's just that it the pathway didn't exist for them. Yeah, and so for us. It was about creating that pathway, was also about understanding what women need. Right, because a lot of the programs are not like. There are other programs out there that people can go to pre-accelerator, accelerator, all of those that are more mixed. They're not just women focused, but because they're not women focused, they're not designed for women yes they're designed at a very different level.
Speaker 2:Um, and sometimes you just have to understand women need things like flexibility. You need to understand, like we mentioned before, about their life cycle and the different stages in their life cycle and what do they need on those different stages. So a lot of women that we see coming into our program and, because we've positioned it as a employment to entrepreneurship, a lot of the women that come through our program are in that mid-career cycle where they're, you know, between the ages of 30, in their 30s and 40s yeah, usually so 35 to 47-ish. Like you know, we see a lot of those women like the majority of our cohorts are made up of women in that because they've had some corporate experience. Yeah, they've realized this is not where they want to spend the rest of their lives. They have ideas, they want to build something meaningful and impactful in the world.
Speaker 1:And so they're seeking for pathways and support on how they can do that. We'll get into the detail of it because I have a follow-up of the questions, but before that you said you've helped 120 women Just through this program?
Speaker 2:yeah, but I'm sure there are more through other programs. Yes, but this program yes.
Speaker 1:And how many were success? How many of them were successful?
Speaker 2:What does success mean?
Speaker 1:Okay, it depends on the success.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so they define their success right. So for a lot of women, success could mean something like oh, I've gone through the program and by the end of it I have a paying customer. Okay.
Speaker 2:For some people it could mean I've gone through the program and I've just learned that this is not the business I should be doing, right right, this doesn't, this is not the right business for me, or there is no market for this business, so that means the idea doesn't even fly. But at least you haven't spent thousands and thousands of dollars trying to prove a business in the market that just doesn't have a need in the market. So for many, for different people, it's different things. For some people it is about oh I've, I've taken this leap, I love this entrepreneurship space, I'm going to leave my corporate job. That can be success too.
Speaker 2:So success can mean different things for different people, and so we don't define success for them. Okay, what we say is here's, here's how you do it the right way. This is how you explore your idea to make sure that you know you can build a successful business at the end of it. And if the idea is not, uh, panning out, that's success, because you've saved so much time and effort. And now maybe there's a different passion you want to follow. But now you have the tools and the methodologies to apply to that different passion and perhaps see that fly.
Speaker 1:Press play ventures. Okay, We'll talk a little bit about it. So why do you think women should go for press play ventures? What does it actually give?
Speaker 2:What's the Like with everything, to be successful, there are three key ingredients One is mindset, One is your strategy and one is execution. So these are the three things that come out of Press Play Ventures for you. So anyone coming into the program. It's a 12-week program. And what we help you do is first go through the mindset of what it's like to build a business, and throughout those 12 weeks we are working on your mindset. You don't really notice it until you come out on the other end yes, but you're the.
Speaker 2:The big shift that happens for women is a mindset shift, because from employment to entrepreneurship, to be honest, it's a different mindset. An employee mindset to an entrepreneurial mindset is very different and often we we tend to think like oh, I've worked before, so I can build a business. The reality is, you studied many, many years you prepared before you got a job. Yeah, how much preparation have you? I can build a business. The reality is, you studied many, many years you prepared before you got a job yeah how much preparation have you done to start a business right?
Speaker 2:have you studied anything about it? Have you absolutely?
Speaker 1:what have you?
Speaker 2:gone through right so the piece around press play ventures is that whole piece. It's education to help you change your mindset to really understand what it takes to be an entrepreneur. And you may choose at the end of it that you know that's not right for me, like Like this is not me, like it doesn't work for me, and that's perfectly fine as well. That's the whole point of a pre-accelerator. A pre-accelerator is helping you bring your idea in, and one is work on the mindset. Second, is your strategy piece right? So it's about what strategy do I need to have in place to make sure my idea takes off? What are the different components of that strategy? So that's something you will get out of the program. And the third piece is execution. We do ask you to get out there and get out of your comfort zone and build the business and talk to customers. For a lot of founders, especially women, selling something is very uncomfortable.
Speaker 2:Sales is a very uncomfortable job selling something is very uncomfortable, sales is a very uncomfortable job and so, as part of this process, while we don't push you to sell anything, we do ask you to get out and get out of that comfort zone of you. Know, I don't want to tell people my idea or I don't want to sell them something I don't want. But if you're not, if you're not making money, it's a hobby project, it's not a business. Yes, so it's about actually, how do you make that idea into a proper monetized business? By getting out of your comfort zone. So we push you, we give you tasks to go do throughout the program to push you out of your comfort zone to talk to people. And you know it's not about oh, I'll send a survey to 100 people it's more about talk to people, and people are scared of talking to other people.
Speaker 1:Networking is always important, yeah, but more than networking.
Speaker 2:it's about you know who is my customer. Do you even know enough about the customer? Because you're building the product for your customer, right, you're not building it for yourself, but most businesses, or most startups, tend to build it for themselves Because they feel like, oh, if I have this problem, 100 people have this problem. Maybe, maybe not. So you've got to go out and check it out, right.
Speaker 2:So, these are the things you'll get through the program. So the three sort of key pieces are mindset, strategy and execution, and then there are three pillars of the program, which is education.
Speaker 2:So, one is we teach you, you will get tools, you will get educated through the program. The next piece is coaching and mentorship. So we have world-class coaches that work with us and within the program, we have four of us in press play ventures that run the program together. So I can't do this without my team and they're fabulous. And so we will actually mentor you throughout the program. And then what you get at the end is the network connections and ecosystem connections because again, when shifting from a corporate world to a startup world, it's a different ecosystem of people, it's a different pathway of the way things are done and who's who in the zoo.
Speaker 2:It took me four years to figure it out, but we don't want that to happen for other women. So the reason we've created this program is to help women get to the outcomes faster than we did ourselves. So all four of us are startup founders ourselves in the program who are building this program. So we understand what it takes to transition. So we've sort of tried to condense the pain points for women to make sure that they can get to the outcomes faster than we did that's lovely.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's good to get that boost and to know that there's something out there to actually bounce off ideas and go through the process and have a backup before you actually jump in the world and not knowing what you're doing. Right, yeah, so we are talking about startups. Yeah. Now could you give us a difference between a startup and a business like?
Speaker 2:a business startup and a business like yeah, business, right, so, yeah, okay. So people use the word quite interchangeably nowadays. Um, a startup is also a business. So let's get that straight. Like, a startup is not a different thing from a business, it's still a business, um, but a startup has a definition which has come out of the silicon valley. So steve Blank, who is known as the father of startups in the Silicon Valley, sort of coined this many, many years ago, where he calls a startup a temporary organization looking for a scalable and repeatable business model. Right, so the? In simple words, what that means is you're looking for a business that can scale rapidly, and often, and especially here with launch wakes definition, it is about those, those that use technology to scale rapidly. So a tech or a tech based or a tech enabled business, that that is looking to scale rapidly or using technology to scale rapidly, is what we call a startup. Right.
Speaker 2:On the other hand, if you're, like you know, opening in a little supermarket or a grocery store on the street, downstairs a lot of you know down the street people will often call that a startup too. But that is a business. That's a business, right. That's a small business that you're opening. So small business, a startup is also a small business, but it's just that it's using technology and the vision is to scale rapidly and grow globally very quickly, and so the path that they take to that growth is what defines them as a startup Versus you know, somebody who's opening a little supermarket next door and maybe 10 years later will open a franchisee somewhere else or whatever. That's a very, that's a normal small business.
Speaker 1:It's a local business. Yeah, yeah, that's a good, good way to understand. Yeah, right, yeah, okay. So, women founders, men founders, what are the key differences? Oh, big question um because you have jumpstart studios right, which is catered for men and women, and then Pressplay is your program for women. So you would clearly know the differences, like lifestyle, everything.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And mindset, all of those things yeah absolutely Key differences.
Speaker 2:Key differences, sure. I think it's very similar to what we see in the corporate world, where we see, you know, men are more willing to take the risk. Women are sometimes thinking more logically before they. Women need to have things mapped out in their head, yes, before they can actually say, okay, I'm going to do this. They think about it way more than men think about it, right? So, especially at the idea stage where we see women come in into our programs, is they've given it so much deep thought that they've got, you know, a lot of questions around what it is for men?
Speaker 2:they're happy to accept things at face value yes um, so you know, but whereas for women, like it has to make sense, it has to be, you know, dissected, and they've done the dissection in their head and they're like but they need the whole life cycle yeah mapped out, I guess in a way right.
Speaker 2:So I think that is one key difference we definitely see is the depth at which women absorb the information and then assimilate the information and use it, versus men.
Speaker 2:We've definitely seen that. Um, the other difference I would say is that I think for a lot of women founders, they have different priorities in their lives kids, your mortgages, your parents, you know there are so many different facets to their lives that they're balancing all the time, right, so there is a balance that they're. It's a dance that they're doing with this balance with so many different players that they are, and it's not like they have to, but they want to also, right, they want to be good. They want to be a good mother, they want to be a good daughter, they want to be a good wife, you know, they want to be able to do things for their family, but they also want to be a good employee at work, and then they have this passion that they want to pursue. Yeah, so there's a whole mix of things happening for them, whereas for men, I think it starts. They disassociate themselves in these different identities. They don't carry all the identities together in a sense.
Speaker 2:Most women carry all these identities together.
Speaker 2:So being an entrepreneur, an employee, a mother, a daughter, a wife, it's a whole mix that you're carrying, they're not willing to drop any of that success, yeah, they need to success, yes, whereas for men, it's very easy to say okay, you know what, I'm working on this startup. They will talk to their wives about it much quicker and they will be like you know, I won't be able to do the school drop-offs and pickups, I will not be able to do this. I will not be able to do that, and you know they carve out that space to prioritize working on the business. Women wanted to seamlessly fit into their life.
Speaker 2:So the and that is one of the things we've learned at Pressplay is how do we make it flexible enough for it to fit into women's lives? And this is why we say like you know, we don't want you to drop your jobs and be here full time, we just want you to dip your feet into entrepreneurship. So the messaging has been you, you know, we're lowering the access, um and the barriers to entry into the ecosystem for women. Yeah, so it's not the barriers of the women themselves, it is more just how things are. That's their reality and so we have to serve that reality. It is not about saying women have barriers. It's about what's women's realities and how do we reduce the barriers in the ecosystem, correct?
Speaker 1:yeah, so that they can enter and participate and be and flourish in that ecosystem that's a very important factor because I can relate it, to relate to it as well I'm pretty sure you can relate to it. So it's. It's a good thing that someone's actually thought about it and made a program that caters for the mindset of women. Right, it's not there. It has to.
Speaker 1:Something like this should come up in corporate world as well, I think right now, a lot of companies are doing flexible working and everything, but it does not actually cover all the cases, although there's pressure on, you know, women all the time, things like that but all the areas should actually think about women specifically, because most of this, as you said, yeah, they're built for men, yeah, so, yeah, that's if I, if I, can add one more thing.
Speaker 2:I think the other thing is women also like to have a bit of a tribe.
Speaker 2:They like to see other women that are in the same space and have a little bit of a community kind of a I wouldn't say a community kind of a feel, but it's more like they want to have other people walking the journey alongside them and they want to be able to connect with those people and the feminine, other feminine energy, not the masculine energy, and so we see this a lot like.
Speaker 2:One of the biggest things that women in our program have told us they value is that it is a women-only program and that they can come and actually openly talk about their challenges, um, and they can connect with each other. And we and so many women from our program have come out as becoming best friends after it or, you know, have gone on to partner, to build, like they came in with different ideas but then they found that, you know, they like working with each other or things like that, and they've gone on to become co-founders and build their own businesses, build one business together, kind of a thing that's awesome, so it's great like we're helping women find the support that they need in other women as well and finding their tribe.
Speaker 2:So that that's, I think, a very important factor for women. I don't think it's so much for men.
Speaker 1:Okay, as such.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I guess. So Okay, I have a few questions Like educate me, kind of a thing. Yeah. Right, so I'm a person who wants to start my business. Yeah, I'm scared that my business idea might fail. Yeah. What do I do? What's the first thing that I need to?
Speaker 2:do? The first thing you need to do is get my book, which is called Start Right how to pick a winning business idea and make it successful. Okay, because everything that I learned in my very expensive University of Melbourne master's degree of entrepreneurship is distilled into that book. So I would say start there, yeah, or come talk to us at Pressplay or Jamstap.
Speaker 1:Okay, okay, cool. So whenever the business comes into my mind or similar people that I have chatted about haven't started their businesses but the first thing that occurs is that we need money to invest into it. How true is that?
Speaker 2:So what we teach and what we're a big advocate of is it's not money. What you need is customers. If you have a business idea, the first thing to figure out is are there customers? And so we talk about how you can first sell before you build. So what do you need the money for? You need the money to build something right.
Speaker 2:But don't build first, because that's what most people do. I have this idea I have to go build something and then I'm going to go market it, build first, because that's what most people do. I have this idea I have to go build something and then I'm going to go market it. No market first, sell it first, get some money and then deliver the product. Okay, and so we teach you how to do that, and we do it through multiple different ways, but let's one of the techniques that we use, for example, is rapid experimentation, and rapid experimentation has three different ways that you build out the product in three sort of stages, which is pretotyping, prototyping and mvp, which is first you pretend the product exists to sell it, then you go build a prototype to test it in the market, the usability of it, and then you build an mvp, which is the sellable product I love that.
Speaker 1:I love the pretotyping because I've never heard about that before, so, yeah, it's a. It's not my concept. Love the pretotyping, because I've never heard about that before, so it's an amazing idea.
Speaker 2:It's not my concept, so pretotyping was defined by Alberto Savoia, who is the former head of engineering at Google.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And he's written a whole book about it, which is called the Right it. And it gives you many different techniques of pretotyping, depending on your business and what you're trying to build, whether it's a product, business a service business. How do you pretotype different types of businesses to test the market, to do some rapid experimentation and get interest from the market?
Speaker 1:I should come and do some pretotyping, I think.
Speaker 2:You should come and join the course for sure.
Speaker 1:All right, so share a success story that you think is like amazing, right, you would have anything, any success story, through your program.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's lots. Look, over the last sort of few years I've worked with over 600 founders, so there's a lot of success stories.
Speaker 1:But if I was to pick one more, recent one, and if that is South Asian background, even better.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Okay, then maybe I'll give you two. So one that has been very successful recently that has just raised 1.6 million dollars. Um, her name is Ellen Gonda. She came through our first cohort of breast play ventures, nice, and um she's a med tech founder, so building in medical technology and um working towards making IVF a non-painful process for women, which we all know IVF is a painful process and it like people have so many emotions attached to that process because they're trying to conceive a child and just through her own experience of conceiving a baby through IVF, she just knew that the process was so painful.
Speaker 2:And now her mission is and she comes from a corporate background and all of that she dropped her job and she joined us because she specifically wanted to build something in the space and it's been nine months since she's finished the program and she's gone on to get funding. She's spent like. She, of course, went through other like we pipe people from the pre-accelerator into other accelerator programs. So she did an accelerator after us and then she went on to raise funding. She was looking, I think, at about 250,000 at the start and she ended up raising 1.6 million Wow. So she's done really, really well and in fact, I've invested in her business as well. So you know, when we find good, good founders, it's not just about the education and the coaching, but it's also can we back?
Speaker 2:them financially and you know like I've backed Elena back to multiple number of founders financially as well. So it's the. That journey has been one of the successful ones that's come out of press play. Another one from a South Asian background that I can give you is after and so this is Yesha Patel and Nehal Jain, and they basically are looking at textile waste Right and upcycling textile waste and, very surprisingly, there are no facilities to recycle textile waste in Australia.
Speaker 2:So they've actually diverted tons and tons and I can't remember how much it was Maybe it was nine tons or maybe it was more that they've diverted that textile waste from Australia to India. Wow, um, so, literally, and I've seen Isha's journey right from the start, because she was my she was actually, um, a colleague of mine and the master of entrepreneurship program that I was doing in 2019 okay, um, so she started there and then she went through the press play program as well with us and she's gone through a few different ones, but she basically she is building a very successful, uh, business that is very impactful as well and you know sustainable sustainability and things like that.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, so there's many success stories. There's another one called pega khalegi, who's building like a. So she was originally. She comes from a tech background, she was originally building something very different and after having done our program, she actually realized she needed to pivot the business and she's now building something in the accounting space, so um, which is, like, you know, a tool, a tech platform to assist the accounting practices. So we have a number of these stories that are just, you know, people doing amazing things, yeah, and realizing, if I was to say, through our program, but also through a lot of other sort of work that they do, is just how it takes a lot, it takes a village, to build a startup.
Speaker 1:So I've actually met all of them in your event. So it's, yeah, the journey is amazing, yeah, so there's, there's so many.
Speaker 2:I can keep rattling off, but we have a lot of, you know, people and this is why I said, like, success is different for different people.
Speaker 2:For some it is raising funding. For some it is you know, actually, the impact that they're creating. For others it is they're getting customers, they're getting interest from the market, and you know running stories, yeah. So start right, tell us about your book. Start right, yeah, what is it deliver?
Speaker 2:So start right is similar to what I mentioned before the three principles of mindset, strategy and execution. Um, that's what you'll find in this book. It's 10 chapters. It basically, if you've got an idea or you have multiple ideas, that even if you're starting there, it sort of it sort of helps you distill into picking the right idea and then the the steps that you need to take to make it successful. So there's 40 odd exercises within the book.
Speaker 2:So it's a very practical book. It's not just about reading theory, yeah, it's about actually going and doing those exercises. All the templates for all these exercises are up on my website. They they're for free, so you just go and you know, download template after template and start working through them. And this is especially for people who are either strapped for time, can't make it to a program that we run so that's sometimes what I tell people to do or if a lot of people come to me and ask me to coach them. My first point is read that book, do those exercises and if you still have problems, I will coach you.
Speaker 2:So, it was it's really come out of the best selling book. Yes, it's won an award.
Speaker 1:So, it's got the.
Speaker 2:Literary Titan Gold Award last year.
Speaker 1:Congratulations.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much.
Speaker 1:I would totally love to do that. I'll do that.
Speaker 2:This is my copy.
Speaker 1:That's your copy, thank you, but we have two more copies to give away more copies and there's something that you have to do to win those two copies. I mean, win the copy one person, two people can win it, okay, cool. So before we wind up, right? Um, please give some advice for women who are looking to jump into entrepreneurial journey yeah, I.
Speaker 2:I think the best advice I can give you is actually finding support, finding people who can help you on the journey, and this is why the book is called Start Right, because it's not just about starting up it's about starting right.
Speaker 2:The foundations you lay for your business are going to determine how successful your business is going to be, and this is exactly what we teach in the program Press Play, ventures and also the book.
Speaker 2:So either read the book and I know a lot of people don't like reading, so if you don't like reading, then come join our program, which is the Pressplay Pre-Accelerator Program, so you can find it on pressplayventures and essentially we run two programs a year. We actually have a program opening up in April. The applications are opening up in April, closing in May by mid-May so I highly recommend you come check out the program. We're offering up to 85% scholarships on the program as well for women, and so please come along and have a look at what the program offers, and it'll be great to see more women come into the startup ecosystem, because our mission is really to get more women, you know, building businesses that they love building and living a life that they love living and doing the work that they love doing. Um, in the hopes that, you know, eventually the business world will change and we're not building from, but it's not built by men for men. It's actually built for everyone and it's creating impact across the world that's awesome.
Speaker 1:So, guys, if you're interested in starting your businesses, startups you have ideas, you know where to go. There's a cohort starting in April, so go for it. But otherwise, thank you so much for coming on the show. It was very informative. I think you have enlightened me in the business journey. Great to know. Thanks for having me, priyanka. No problem, thank you for watching another episode of Brown Queen Diaries. This is your host, priyanka, signing off until next episode.
