#28 Founders of Neythri and a first-ever South Asian-led venture fund
Chitra Nayak, Mythili Sankaran, and Sruthi Ramaswami talk about starting a South Asian sisterhood
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Hot of the Pod 🎙️ Mythili, Chitra, and Sruthi, Co-founders @ Neythri
In this episode, I spoke with Mythili Sankaran, Chitra Nayak, and Sruthi Ramaswami, Co-founders @ Neythri.
Neythri is an organization dedicated to creating a network of South Asian professional women. More recently, they launched the Neythri Futures Fund, a startup investment fund with an investor base of primarily South Asian women.
Now, a little more about the women behind Neythri:
Chitra Nayak is currently an independent board member at Infosys, LifeWorks, and other companies. Previously, she served as COO at Comfy and COO at Funding Circle. She was at Salesforce for eight years, where she served as COO of Platform and SVP of Sales Development.
Mythili Sankaran led regional operations for the U.S. - India Business Council and the American India Foundation. Previously, Mythili also served as CEO of Koollage. Earlier in her career, Mythili spent several years at IBM and AT&T Bell Labs.
Sruthi Ramaswami is a growth equity investor at ICONIQ Capital. Prior to her current role, Sruthi was at Goldman Sachs. She is the co-founder of Shakti Collaborative.
Excerpts from the pod below:
Tell me about the genesis of Neythri. How have your personal experiences shaped how you approached building Neythri?
Chitra: As Mythili mentioned, I started the Salesforce Women's Network. I co-founded it about 11 years ago, at a time when there were no ERGs (employee resource groups). We had to convince the head of HR that creating a women's network was in no way discriminatory to others.
It's amazing to see how far the world has come. But ever since then, I've had South Asian women coming to me — both at Salesforce and beyond — saying, ‘Is there something here that is just for South Asian women?’ That had been percolating for me for about 10 years. So when Mythili came to see me, it seemed like the perfect precipitation moment for us to think about doing something.
Sruthi: The other thing that's interesting about our community for me is growing up, I went to all of these family parties. And I saw the divide between South Asian women and the moms having their conversation in one part of the house, and the dads having their conversation about money, work, investing in another part — despite the fact that many of the moms were working, had ambition, and could participate in the same conversations. So that was always in the back of my mind as to why weren't these groups converging? Or why wasn't there a space to do this?
Thank you @MMCandyCheng for this great feature on @BusinessInsider. Pleasure sharing @NeythriFund's vision of closing the long-existing funding gap and supporting more South Asian female representation on "both side" of the venture table.Tell me about the Neythri Futures Fund, your inaugural investment fund where the investor base is 90% South Asian women.
Sruthi: I think it's telling that South Asian women have created incredible careers and experiences, but have never been given a path to give back to the next generation of innovators and startup entrepreneurs. And that's what we hope to enable for our LPs.
We're at a point now where there is a critical mass of South Asian women who actually have capital to invest, who actually have the experience to invest. And we hope that part of what we do with the fund is also inspire that confidence — that you can be part of these conversations, you can do this, that your talent and expertise are highly sought after.
Have you noticed any interesting patterns that have resulted from building this fund?
Mythili: I've now gotten at least a dozen inbound requests from people I don't know, especially from the Midwest and other parts of the US who want to create similar funds with their communities — all women. And this is really important. Because, we have a playbook of sorts. I can tell them about the things that work with a community fund like this and what don't. Even if I were to do it again, I would do a number of things very differently.
But if you look at venture, this is an ecosystem that talks about disruption all the time. And yet, it is the ecosystem that is the least bit disrupted. So you need these different kinds of disruption models like ours. Imagine if we had many such models across different communities beyond South Asians, especially started by women. I feel very encouraged, not just by our community, but by the fact that we can share this playbook with other communities.
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What we’re following 👀
📺 In Culture
Kal Penn comes out and is engaged. Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge is coming to Broadway.
💸 In Business
Priyanka Chopra’s manager, Anjula Acharia joins Buzzfeed’s board. Several South Asians get named to the For(bes) the Culture 50.
🎵 Listen to emerging South Asian artists.