Supporting "Build for Bharat", but what about "From Bharat"?

When I was working with state governments, the golden rule for any initiative we undertook was- “The metrics that don’t get tracked, don’t get improved”. With this in mind, a LinkedIn post by one of the venture capital partners, made me sit down and spend my Sunday researching some caste data amongst the senior professionals in the VC space in India. 

I looked at the names of 93 senior investment professionals from the top 8 VC funds in India (referred to a YourStory article for the rankings), and matched them to castes basis Google search, and help of a professor who specialises in caste studies. These 8 funds cumulatively have a fund size of INR 25,587 Crores, which will be deployed within the next 2 years in ideas in line with their investment theses. The broad investment thesis for any VC fund is pre-defined, but at an operational level it is led by the partners/advisors/directors of the fund. Out of the 93 professionals I looked at: 

1. Only 3 professionals belonged to a non-Hindu religion
2. None of the professionals belonged to Islam
3. Only 1 person belonged to a non-forward caste (OBC) 
4. All other 89 people were either Brahmin, Kshatriya, or Baniya (in order of frequency)

My hypothesis is simple: private capital in India is shown as a purely “merit” game, where the persistent hard worker takes it all, whereas in reality the Indian VC space is not only sexist (something we are already aware of), but also casteist. Is it casteist by design? I’m not an expert to comment on that, but personally feel no. But can it be made inclusive by design? Definitely. Will that be the most efficient use of capital, though? Well, it depends on how you look at capital. If you look at it solely as financial capital, then no it’s inefficient. But if you look at capital as social, human, and financial, then yes, it’s the most efficient use of capital. Funds with large foreign investors will face some difficulty trying to explain the short term “inefficient” deployment of capital, but surely an India specific movement to educate the foreign investors of the systemic inequalities faced by certain communities should work- that is the push which has worked for increased female participation as well. 

It is important to draw attention to the caste factor for the simple reason that all thought leaders on LinkedIn and other such professional platforms are painting a democratic picture of the startups capital game, repeating again and again that it’s sheer persistence and hard work that got them where they are. This is fallacious because a.) there’s implicit denial of a correlation between caste privilege and success b.) refusal of acknowledgement of caste problem in corporate India c.) there’s a misrepresentation of facts in the hard work equals success narrative. The last statement is what bothered me to the extent of spending a Sunday researching and writing on this topic. Tenacity in itself is not viewed uniformly for all founders. I follow various VC partners on LinkedIn, and it’s a trend that I’ve noticed where they never reply to people in the comments section whose English is broken, but if a similar thought is expressed in witty fluent English it earns a reply. Fluency in English is one of the most basic metrics of privilege from a caste system, and in some form or other it does find a lot of weightage, often times beyond hard work. Think of it this way- if I’d been told since I was a child that if I work hard enough I can become a paratrooper in the Indian Army, and I in my naivety work my entire childhood towards it, only to realise when I go to give the defence services exam that women are not allowed on the battlefield, how unfair would it be? That is the problem with the hard work narrative. When the system is stacked against you, there’s little that you can do. 

Then there’s the whole other narrative about pumping money into ‘building for Bharat’. It seems a cruel irony that while one is willing to make money off what would sell in “Bharat”, few seem to care about building up Bharat. If there’s one thing we should learn from all the racial tensions in the US and the consequent election results, it is that representation matters. And if there aren’t any ready to use examples from the marginalised communities, it is our duty to build these examples, to enable organic growth of such entrepreneurs in the future. 

The problems are aplenty and obvious to anyone who would look twice. I want to focus on the solutions, because I don’t think it’s the VC folks’ fault that they were born in the houses they were born in, and in all fairness they themselves would have faced their fair deal of challenges to be where they are today. It also remains a high possibility that the casteist structure of the VC world is not by design. In this segment I’ll focus on how we can make it inclusive by design:

1. Democratise the knowledge- with tech at one’s fingertips creating a vernacular language Clubhouse app or Redditt shouldn’t be a challenge. Discuss how to scale up business, the fundamentals of marketing, how to prepare for VC pitches- anything and everything that is already being done on the more sophisticated English dominated platforms. Alternatively, exclusive vernacular language sessions can be run on the same platforms- there is no reason why a discussion in Kannada with Nithin Kamath can’t happen on Clubhouse itself, or on YouTube.
2. Change the definitions- anyone who knows anything about the VC world knows that folks bet on “strong founders”. Unfortunately, the definition of strong founders is still archaic, revolving around the Sharma ji ka ladka IIT-IIM story. Can we look at changing the definitions to be more inclusive? I do feel someone who has braved a lifetime of systemic discrimination and still has the courage to stand in front of a panel willing to be judged for their worth again, is definitely a strong founder. One possibility could be to have psychologists design an intuitive questionnaire to test out the qualities that a particular fund is looking at- putting all founders at the same starting point. 
3. Be accessible- coming back to the point of fluency in English being a measure of general worth of an individual, it is imperative that the VC funds use technology to develop tools which would judge the inherent idea rather than the person the idea comes attached to. Anonymous elevator audio pitches could be one such idea, where the software mediates the pitch from vernacular to English language and the VC folks hear all ideas in English, again putting all founders on the same starting level. Additionally, efforts should be made to be inclusive to all kinds of people on platforms such as LinkedIn. Be kind, reply to that comment with broken English, make the person feel seen and heard. More often than not, a big distinguisher between people from non-forward castes/ other marginalised communities, and others is the usage of the word “sir” or “ma’am” on LinkedIn. If you see someone addressing you as sir on such a platform, make extra efforts to be kind. 
4. Run exclusive programs- VC teams are small and the competition to get in is cut-throat. It would be sub-optimal to ask any VC fund to have reservations for people from non-forward castes. However, all VC funds operate on the backs of interns. I see minor inconveniences, but no major losses, if a VC fund launches an annual 2 month internship solely for people from marginalised communities. Compromise on quality need not be there, more than enough talent would be found pan-India with higher than average core competency in one skill or another, be it coding or crunching numbers in excel. Communication skills are something which can be developed with greater exposure. Similarly, whether such founders are part of one’s portfolio or not, one can run an annual mentorship program, a short 2 week exposure visit of sorts, where founders from the marginalised communities can have access to the fund’s learning resources, and more importantly, the founders of successful startups in the portfolio. 

I don’t have all the answers, in fact I don’t even know what all questions need to be asked. But I do know that the problem is glaringly widespread, and requires concerted effort to be put right. The solutions I’ve suggested are not fool-proof, and I know are inconvenient to the status quo. But the question remains- do we tolerate inconvenience in the short run while we adjust to the changes, or do we tolerate the increased burden on resources from the wasted potential of marginalised communities? While marginalisation of certain communities by corporate India is a widespread phenomenon, it is particularly distressing in the VC and PE industries as they decide where private capital will flow- which problems are worth solving and which are not. In such a scenario, it is imperative that we have at least some representation from the communities that make up the majority of Bharat. As the African proverb says- “Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter”, it is time we change the narrative, and support both building for Bharat and from Bharat.