Hosted by ACT, UnHerd brings you the unheard stories of individuals who are challenging conventional principles to disrupt the social impact landscape. From social entrepreneurs to venture philanthropists, dive into real-world conversations on what they’ve experienced and learned about changing the status quo.

Our latest episode of UnHerd features Shreyasi Singh (Founder, Harappa – now acquired by UpGrad), in conversation with Anupama Kashyap (Manager, ACT For Women). Shreyasi shares her journey from journalism to entrepreneurship, building Harappa into a leading online learning platform and her mission to empower more women leaders in India’s startup ecosystem and beyond.

Tune in on Spotify or watch the episode on YouTube to learn how Shreyasi is driving meaningful change in workplaces and breaking barriers for women in leadership.

Anupama: Hello folks, and welcome to the next episode of UnHerd – a podcast hosted by ACT. We bring to you the stories of extraordinary individuals disrupting India’s social impact & startup landscape by challenging conventional principles.

This episode is about a topic that is very close to our hearts at ACT; more women leaders within and beyond India’s startups. Highly resonant with my own professional goals, which is why I’m very excited to be joined today by someone who I’ve looked up to, and who truly embodies the spirit of breaking barriers. From journalism to entrepreneurship, an author and a passionate advocate for women in the workplace, our guest has led with purpose. She’s built a leading online learning platform – Harappa – which has redefined how Indian professionals hone their skills for success and growth in workplaces.

Welcome to UnHerd, Shreyasi!

Shreyasi: Thank you so much, Anupama. And thank you to the ACT team, who of course I love, for having me on UnHerd.

Anupama: Shreyasi, to give our audience a quick (insight) into you and your journey – we know that it has spanned from journalism to founding one of India’s most innovative learning platforms. And I think we all have these pivotal moments in our career that prompt that switch. I’m really curious to know about your story. Tell us more about that.

The spark that lit the fire: Of career pivots and crucible moments 

Shreyasi: Yes, I think my career really confuses people. I think we all have, in our lives and our careers, these crucible moments that set the direction of our next 10 years, next 15 years. And for me, that was the last stint that I had in journalism. 

Inc is an iconic American magazine on entrepreneurship and I was the editor of the India edition for four years. This was 2011 to 2015 and this is really when the startup boom was beginning to happen in India. It almost felt like doing a PhD in entrepreneurship because every month you’re bringing out 90 pages of a magazine. So from co-founder dynamics to how do you create a brand to what’s a great incentive structure for employees, how do you do performance management. Towards the end, you meet amazing entrepreneurs and founders who have this special conviction, right? Like there is this special ring in their voice, they bring this special energy to what they do and how they talk about their work. And more and more, I think I was feeling like, maybe I could do this too. I actually find great similarities between the skills that I learned as a journalist, and especially how well those skills were deployed. As a journalist, you’re very good at asking a set of structured, smart questions. 

As a founder, you also need to do that. You don’t know everything about everything, even in the company that you’re building. But I think there’s a very efficient way of (asking) a set of questions that gets you to that answer. Second, I feel like journalists come with a great deadline orientation. The magazine doesn’t wait for you to print it. It has to come out on the same day. But third and most importantly, and I didn’t know this six, seven years back when I started Harappa, there is an urge to create, you know? You start with a conversation and an empty word draft, and something emerges out of it. So I think these three skills really, I think, transferred very well and really helped me. But most importantly, it was the inspiration that I got from covering entrepreneurs and just entrepreneurship in general that let me think that I should aspire to do this and maybe I could do it too.

I actually had two pit stops between being the editor of Inc and finally being the founder of Harappa. And those pit stops were, I spent a year writing a book, which was a business non-fiction called The Wealth Wallahs. It was on the happy eventuality of entrepreneurial success for which I interviewed over a hundred people and spent a year, year and a half working on that book. And then after, working as a part of the founding team on an 18 month women’s only MBA program. And that was my first introduction to higher education and especially alternative higher education – how different models and formats (work), especially in a country like India where there has to be almost an insatiable appetite and need and demand for learning. I think that is when it first got kindled. So I think if these two (pitstops) hadn’t happened, maybe Harappa also wouldn’t happen. I also do want to give a lot of credit to my co-founder at Harappa, who’s a pioneering educationist of his own, Pramath (Raj Sinha). And I think he said that we should really work together.

And that’s really how Harappa happened. Harappa was incorporated in March 2018, which is just six and a half years back. But Harappa has just been on this ridiculous accelerated condensed kind of cycle that I think none of us imagined. Most startups don’t work, right? So you don’t take these questions so seriously. Because you’re almost like, let me try this for six months a year. We’ll see how it goes. We raised two rounds of funding from James Murdoch’s family office. And then of course in July 2022, we were acquired by UpGrad. And as of six to eight weeks back, I’ve also exited UpGrad and Harappa has fully merged into UpGrad. 

So I think it has been the most intense six years of living the entire life cycle of a business – from conceptualizing an idea, raising funds for it, building products, going through an acquisition and then finally merging that company.

First principle lens: Lessons as a first-time founder

Anupama: Sounds like such an invigorating journey over the last six years. Kudos to you for building something so amazing! I think for ACT also, we’ve come across Harappa mostly from the sense of working with women in the startup ecosystem and how we can set them up for success? Shreyasi, I know Harappa in the last six years has done a lot of intentional work with women – in supporting them and also building workplaces that work for them, right? I’d love to understand from you, how did that come to be? What was your vision, to be able to enable something like that?

Shreyasi: So very quickly, Harappa is essentially, as we used to describe it, a learning institution. And first we used to say an online learning institution, but then of course we also did blended programs. So we used to just say a learning institution that focused on cognitive, social, and behavioral skills for working professionals, right? Because the belief is that you could be a computer scientist, a public policy person, an HR manager and the fact is that these cognitive, social, and behavioral skills are critical in each of these roles, right? They transcend industry, they transcend companies, they transcend specializations.

So there was a school for managers and we had a series of programs for managers, first time managers, high impact managers, high performing managers. It had a school for CXOs where we would do a lot of programs for CXOs. But over the last three, four years across 100 plus companies and enterprises, we’ve probably trained the most number of women professionals.

I feel like this conversation has reached a crescendo sometimes. I feel like people think that we’ve talked about it so much and we’re so talked out that it seems like things would have actually changed on the ground. But in most companies, I would say, things actually change very, very slowly. Some of us might be bored of this conversation but many of us, I know, need to keep talking and need to keep speaking and need to keep doing. And I think that as a woman leader, that conviction was very personal. The cause or the calling is to leave the world of work for women better than I found it. Whether it’s Harappa or whatever, it’s going to be a thread across everything that I do in life. And one of the things that I always say is that when given a chance, make the change.  

So, I take that very seriously, that I was given a chance for whatever little change that I could make at that moment. And actually through the delivery of those programs and through us meeting women professionals from across IT, finance, manufacturing across the country, my conviction that this is necessary and needed actually kept deepening. Because honestly Anupama, the sad fact is that things are even worse. The situation is still very dire.

Traversing tough roads: Women’s careers as the greatest obstacle course in history

Anupama: I couldn’t agree more. I think having worked in this space for a while as well, the challenges, I mean, we can have a whole other podcast on what they are. What would you say are some key barriers that are holding women back?

Shreyasi: I’ll speak about both threads, my personal observations and personal experiences but also some of the things that we saw, not only through observation of our learners but we started to do a lot of research around this at Harappa.

Only 7% of the women that we polled said that they felt any kind of equitable proportion of seeing women in their management teams or super senior positions. Just 7%. I call women’s careers the greatest obstacle course in history. Because one of the things that we found is there are three almost super clear stages and cusps where fall off starts to happen. The first cliff happens at what I call the broken rung, which is the 28 to 32 year old (segment) – there’s almost a 37% drop. Then it happens just before the glass ceiling. And then over the last three or four years, another phenomenon that’s been seen is what they call the glass cliff, that even for women who make it to the top, [they] are actually leaving the workforce or are being almost ejected slash evicted from their roles or are set up for roles in which success was impossible, at twice the rates at which super senior male professionals are. So, almost at no point, can you take your continued success for granted, right? And this is happening when actually from an education, graduation outcomes perspective over the last seven to eight years, India has done so well – some streams graduate more women than men and most of those women graduate with better CGPAs. So while of course, education is a big leveler, certainly for women in India, educational outcomes have absolutely not correlated to income outcomes or career outcomes. You know, there is certainly something that we are missing there. In fact, workforce participation, especially in high value work in urban settings, has actually gone down after COVID in many aspects. 

I think the most upset and angry that I’ve been was with this data point. We actually found that the greatest pay gap between male professionals and women professionals was at the CXO and CXO minus one level. I think it was Rs. 74 to Rs. 100. I was like, my god, how much more do you need to prove yourself? This can’t be about merit and skill because you are a CXO or a CXO minus one. But at the time when you felt like, my gosh, I have made it, I am a part of the senior most whatever but actually you’re possibly confronted with the greatest pay gap. 

In fact, another thing that we found in the What Women Feel report, and this is my personal experience as well, especially over the last two years and my naive imagination or my naive assumption was that the more senior you get, you’re insulated from the petty biases and microaggressions. We’ve actually not found that. Tenure isn’t a sunblock against bias.

I personally experienced that as well. I think in a way it is sometimes a woman with power and influence who pisses off the world much more than somebody who doesn’t yet have that influence. In fact, we saw that early managers, first-time managers who were women faced the most biases because maybe their newfound status and power made others around them very uncomfortable.

Anupama: I think the greatest obstacle course in history is such an apt way of describing the problem statement we’re speaking about. And I can so well resonate with this. I did my engineering. I couldn’t see a career there mostly because of the dearth of women I saw in roles of leadership or influence. And I know it’s just one part of the huge pile of challenges women have to face. But Shreyasi, a lot of times when we speak about this with people, it becomes a very ‘inclusion and fairness’ conversation. But I know it’s so much beyond it. Research after research shows that gender diverse teams actually have a great impact on business outcomes in terms of employee culture, NPS, and investors having more faith in organizations, right? But what has your viewpoint been on this, being a founder yourself, but also being an advocate for having more women in the workplace? Why do you think gender diversity is important in workplaces for organizations?  

Shreyasi: You know, both with gender as well as in gender, if we talk about women. And I think race. To me, those are the two fault lines where it’s immediately apparent who you are. The minute you walk into a room, or the minute you speak on the phone, right, or even your email ID, people know that you’re a woman.

So I think it’s so immediate, it’s so tangible. It’s also half the world, right? In many populations, it’s 51-52% of the world. What are you going to be able to achieve with half the world locked out, it’s not 5%, 6%, 8%, right? It’s half the world. How does the world progress with half the world’s talent unvalued, half the world’s talent unlocked, half the world’s talent being unfair, half the world’s talent not being given opportunities for their potential. It’s an almost unfair or unreasonable expectation to imagine that with half the world not happily, fruitfully engaged in work that has value or is valued, where they are actually engaged.  

Think about having a world where that larger number is disenfranchised in such critical ways. And that’s why it’s important. It’s not a ‘nice to have’ (conversation). I think the orientation has to be to create that, especially when it comes to women and women’s agency.

Anupama:  Even at ACT, our whole thesis also focuses on the fact that having more women in roles of leadership or roles of influence, as we like to call it, shows so much more impact in terms of organizations, policies, culture, programs that are rolled out and has an impact throughout the pipeline. In your own experience, you’re a women founder and you’ve seen women in roles of leadership. How does it change? 

Shreyasi: So immediate downstream impact, it’s very tough to establish that right? And which is why people will disbelieve it, because it’s such a longitudinal impact. It takes, like I said, decades for businesses to really say, what this will become. But I’ll tell you the immediate and clear impact I think it has.

Even when you are running the business, right? I’d like to think that the fact that I was there and doing all of these uber cool startup things like raising funding and getting acquired – I do feel like it certainly added a set of confidence to many of my women colleagues. In fact, probably the best compliment that I feel like I’ve ever got as a CEO was this young – I think she’s a computer science engineer and she used to work in our product team – very smart young woman who had seven, eight years of work experience and then she was with us for two, two and a half years. And she was wearing this stunning sari and bright red lipstick. And she said, you know, this is the first time as somebody part of the product or engineering team that I can be dressed like this, yet go to a SCRUM meeting and give directions to engineers. She said, never before in my career as part of product and engineering teams would I have dared to be so feminine, yet be doing probably some of the best quality work that I’m doing in my career. I got goosebumps.

I think we were 50% or more women. But not only that, twice a year, I would write an email to the team to say that these are the six bands that we have. This is the percentage gap or not between women professionals in our company. So sometimes it would be like, wow, women associate directors are actually getting paid more than male associate directors and I’m hoping that that becomes a way that others also do it.

Anupama: What I’m hearing you say is that you’ve seen and witnessed a shift in terms of having a good role model, building that culture of inclusion. To a lot of people who ask why gender diversity is important within organizations, I think that’s just bang on. Just switching gears a little bit, Harappa I know has worked with both big corporate clients and startups. Our research on WISER (Women in India’s Startup Ecosystem Report) shows that in representation of women, startups are doing really well. There’s a long way to go, but it’s definitely better than where corporate India is currently at. So if I were to ask you, what are some broad trends you’ve observed, especially in the startup ecosystem in terms of what’s going well or what needs more focus on, what would you say they are?

Shreyasi: So here I have to be honest that I was really surprised when I saw the first WISER report in terms of the startups doing much better than established companies. I have to say that we actually found it much easier. Most of our, I would say 90% of our revenue from the women-focused programs actually went to some of India’s and the world’s largest companies. What I’m seeing in startups, one is of course that there’s just greater entrepreneurial activity. And many women, women across all tenures, are trying to be entrepreneurial, setting up businesses. I just feel like the overall culture and attitude to risk taking, to being on your own, to being a person with multiple skills if you’re starting out even a small business. I think it’s really overall good for women professionals because that will transcend. And it creates many more opportunities within the constraints of their societal structures for them to be able to create wealth.

I think the other thing that startups are really useful for is there’s no place to hide, right? Everybody, especially if you’re under a sub hundred people team, certainly there’s no place to hide. Everybody needs to pull their weight. So I think startups, if you find the right startup at the right time, I think startups can really script rewarding careers. Larger companies are still much more resistant to unconventional CVs, right? Startups are that way much more like, listen, you can do the job. If you can get the job done, come and do it, it doesn’t matter what you’ve done before. 

Future forward: Making workplaces work for women

Anupama: Shreyasi, that actually brings me to a very important question. Why should organizations focus on building workplaces that work for women? What is in it for them in terms of building gender diverse teams, why should they focus on it? Where do they start?

Shreyasi: It’s so tough to get good people, right? As an employer, as a manager, as a boss, all you want is good people to build products, sell products, manage people, manage teams, manage projects, all of that, right? The fact is that you want to look in every segment of the population to be able to get the skills. I say this sometimes, it’s controversial, I actually do believe that our companies and our employers are ahead of our homes and our societies when it comes to giving women an equitable (standing). I feel like most of us, many of us, including me, could face very different realities at home, or in our extended families, or in social situations than we actually do at the workplace. 

I place a lot of faith in companies and organizations being able to keep furthering that and hopefully society will catch up. I think professionals and certainly women professionals really need to be publicly praised for their contributions.

Public recognition doesn’t mean a town hall with 10,000 people CCed. They’re very small things. So one tip, and I used to say this, calendar it, right? Once a week, I would send an email highlighting or acknowledging other women peers. And I think we have to create some of these very large societal things into mini tasks that each one of us can do without any help from anybody else. Second is manager sponsorship. I feel like that the manager relationship is really one of the most critical relationships to get right. You don’t have to change the world for all the women you meet all the time, pick one. 

Over the last three or four or five years, I’ve used my role models really well, and really opportunistically, and I encourage all women professionals to do that. Role models are a guide to your future, who you will be in the next 10 years. I have Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie as one of my five women role models. I find her incredible – her luminosity and her ability. She’s a great public intellectual, talks a lot about feminism, but her ability to talk about a lot of tough things with a smile. Particularly as a founder, I found those skills so useful. Because you need to wear, sometimes you do need in many contexts and situations, you need to wear your activism lightly for that activism to be impactful, right? So my homework for all of your listeners who are listening to me and actually, all professionals can do this, not just women professionals, is having a role model mood board. You are here, this is where you want to be in five years, 10 years, who are the people who you think are viable and for what skill? 

The last thing I always tell women, colleagues and professionals is you know when you say don’t talk behind people’s back? I said flip it. You must talk about a woman peer or colleague when she’s not in the room, but say good things. 

Anupama: Shreyasi, it’s been so lovely chatting with you thank you so much for your time and being on our podcast. 

This brings us to the end of our (season finale) episode of UnHerd. We’ll be back with season 2 in March 2025. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to our Spotify and YouTube channels where we’ll bring you more unheard stories of people who are passionate about creating impact at scale in different ways. People who truly stand apart from the herd. Follow us, like, subscribe and share.