Global IndianstoryDeepinder Goyal: The resilient entrepreneur ever hungry for bigger challenges

Entrepreneurship

Deepinder Goyal: The resilient entrepreneur ever hungry for bigger challenges

Written by: Global Indian

(July 16, 2021; 6:55 pm) What began as an intranet website has now turned into one of the biggest food delivery companies in the country. Zomato, a brand that became a billion-dollar empire in just a decade, has now hit another jackpot with its ₹9,375 crore Initial Public Offering (IPO). Such has been the craze that its IPO subscribed nearly five times on the second day of its issue. A feat not many companies have attained. And, the lion’s share of credit goes to its founder Deepinder Goyal.

At the Zomato office pic.twitter.com/0hzeZD9M9g

— Sanjeev Bikhchandani (@sbikh) July 14, 2021

Ever since the record-breaking debut at IPO, Goyal has been at the receiving end of immense support and cheer from other entrepreneurs. From co-founder Pankaj Chaddah and Info Edge’s Sanjeev Bikhchandani and Paytm’s Vijay Shekhar Sharma, the laurels keep pouring in.

Pankaj Chaddha, the co-founder of Zomato, tweeted, “Congrats @deepigoyal & the entire @zomato team! The IPO is a huge validation of the value created through the years and is a landmark event for the start-up ecosystem. Feeling extremely lucky to have been a part of the journey. Keep showing the way! #ZomatoIPO”

Congrats @deepigoyal & the entire @zomato team! The IPO is a huge validation of the value created through the years, and is a landmark event for the start-up ecosystem.

Feeling extremely lucky to have been a part of the journey. Keep showing the way! #ZomatoIPO

— Pankaj Chaddah (@pankajchaddah) July 14, 2021

How it started. How it’s going @zomato @deepigoyal pic.twitter.com/zcNou498UN

— Sanjeev Bikhchandani (@sbikh) July 14, 2021

The humble beginnings

It was while ordering a pizza from his room at IIT-Delhi that an idea of starting a food delivery company struck Goyal. However, it fizzled out soon, and Goyal ventured into the corporate world with Bain & Company. It was here that the idea regerminated when he saw a sea of crowd struggling to place the order at the canteen during mealtimes. With the help from his colleague Pankaj Chaddah, who was also Goyal’s junior at IIT-Delhi, the two came up with a creative solution for saving time spent while ordering food. That was the beginning of Foodiebay.com. Scanning the office canteen’s menu and those from neighboring restaurants made Foodiebay.com an instant hit at Bain.

With the revenue trickling in, Goyal and Chaddah decided to turn their side hustle into a proper business. They quit Bain in 2009 and decided to start their own company.

The positive response encouraged Foodiebay.com to extend its wings to other metropolitan like Mumbai, Kolkata, Pune, and Bengaluru, and in one year, they listed over 8000 restaurants.

The game-changing e-mail

Foodiebay.com was doing well for a start-up, but little did Goyal know that an e-mail from a fan would change their lives forever. It was Sanjeev Bikhchandani, the founder of naukri.com and Info Edge, who reached out to Goyal telling him that he would like to invest in Foodiebay.com. The two signed the deal within few days of the email. Info Edge invested $1 million in 2010 in Foodiebay.com.

How Foodiebay became Zomato

With a million-dollar invested in Foodiebay.com, Goyal decided to change the name to Zomato. The entrepreneur soon realized that there was ‘ebay in his brand, and in his words, “one should not build a business on a name which has 5% chance of getting screwed in the future.”

Soon Zomato was introduced to the world with a massive marketing and rebranding exercise.

“We decided to keep the idea of food at the center but choose a name that is timeless and encompassing. We decided on the name Zomato. Zomato’s got a zing to it and is originally a play on the word Tomato. Zomato is not restricted to food either,” Deepinder Goyal wrote in his blog in 2010.

The Global Indian brand

In two years of the start-up, Zomato went international by launching its service in Dubai and Singapore. The same year, Zomato went social with its new tools asking its 2.5 million active monthly users to review restaurants and share their love for food.

In 2013, Sanjeev Bikhchandani pitched Zomato to venture capital giants Sequoia, and in no time, they jointly invested $37 million in the food delivery company, which then had 600 employees and its existence in 11 countries.

With an appetite for global expansion, Zomato acquired New Zealand’s MenuMania, Czech Republic’s Lunchtime, Poland’s Gastronauci, and America’s UrbanSpoon. With its US launch, the food aggregator brand entered the coveted unicorn club with a $50 million fundraiser from Vy Capital and Info Edge.

Trouble in paradise

The food delivery giant started facing trouble in its paradise in 2015 when it had to lay off 300 employees. It even made an exit from 14 countries it was in and reduced its cash burn from $9 million to $1.6 million.

Zomato vs Swiggy

It was towards the end of 2018 that Zomato started to feel the heat from its competitor Swiggy, that was making a big wave in online delivery food. But Goyal wasn’t ready to bow down to competition yet and introduced strict timelines for food delivery in 2015. And within one year, Zomato hit 1 million orders.

In 2018, Zomato felt a huge blow when Pankaj Chaddah, the co-founder, quit the company without any explanation. This was also the beginning of restaurants’ cold relationship with Zomato. So much so that a Log Out campaign was launched by the restaurants alleging high commissions. However, Zomato had a different story to tell and called the restaurants its partners.

It was in January 2020 that Zomato bite into its competition when it bought Uber Eats in a $350 acquisition.

And now Zomato has come knocking on the people’s doors for delivering its shares. How well would Zomato do as a public company? The whole of India’s startup ecosystem would be watching.

Editor’s Take

Deepinder Goyal revolutionized the food industry with Zomato. He literally brought every restaurant to our doorstep with just a swipe on the phone.: A feat that wasn’t achieved in the food business until 2008. Zomato’s rise from a bootstrapped venture to a company that is raising a record amount through its IPO augurs well for the Indian startup ecosystem. For the first time, a new-age Indian internet venture – typically not exposed to public scrutiny – will be dissected and analyzed. This will also be a test of whether India’s equity markets are ready to accept fast-growing, but loss-making companies. The Zomato IPO will be a testbed for Indian startups.

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Published on 16, Jul 2021

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Kunal Shah: The Indian entrepreneur who went from selling henna cones to running a $4 bn business

(November 9, 2021) He has run over a dozen businesses since he was 16 before founding his current success CRED, a business valued at over $4 billion. Meet Kunal Shah, the serial entrepreneur who has been making all the right moves sans any fancy MBA or engineering degree in his portfolio. What he has though is a keen business acumen and an eye for startups that hold great potential. The philosophy graduate, incidentally dropped out of his MBA course at Mumbai’s Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies in 2004. But not many know that there was a time when this Global Indian would sell everything from henna cones to pirated CDs to support his family, which was then in the financial doldrums. The entrepreneur from Mumbai Born and raised in a Gujarati family in Mumbai, Shah’s father was into the pharmaceutical distribution business in South Mumbai. Shah realised the importance of money and financial independence early on in life when his family faced a financial crisis. That is when he went on to do several odd jobs to support his family: from selling henna cones and pirated CDs to running tuition classes and running a cyber cafe, he’s done it all. When Shah graduated in Arts and Philosophy from Wilson College, he chose

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The entrepreneur from Mumbai

Born and raised in a Gujarati family in Mumbai, Shah’s father was into the pharmaceutical distribution business in South Mumbai. Shah realised the importance of money and financial independence early on in life when his family faced a financial crisis. That is when he went on to do several odd jobs to support his family: from selling henna cones and pirated CDs to running tuition classes and running a cyber cafe, he’s done it all.

When Shah graduated in Arts and Philosophy from Wilson College, he chose to not join the family business and instead opt to work with a BPO called TIS International Inc as a junior programmer in 2000. In 2003, he even enrolled for an MBA at Narsee Monjee, but dropped out soon after. In an interview with YourStory he said, “I realised that I was better off learning on my own than through a structured programme, because the curriculums and theories were a lot more designed for scoring marks and not really understanding things. So, to me MBA as a format did not work,” he said.

Shah met Sandeep Tandon, an investor in TIS, who struck by Shah’s personality soon developed a lasting professional relationship with him. Shah worked with the BPO for over 10 years, before deciding to branch out on his own.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4px19xzK7zI[/embed]

The entrepreneurial streak

He then spent time working as a freelance designer and programmer before building a small SaaS company that underwent several changes and pivots to finally become Freecharge. He’d founded this with Tandon, and successfully ran it until 2016 when he chose to bow out and went on to serve as chairman and advisor to many companies such as BCCL, chairman of the Internet and Mobile Association of India, an advisor to Y Combinator and Sequoia Capital India. Incidentally, Freecharge was eventually acquired by Axis Bank.

By 2018, he decided to start up again and founded CRED, a member-only credit card payment app. The app allows members to manage all their credit cards in one place, sends them bill payment reminders and rewards them for timely payments. The startup generated massive buzz for its astronomical seed funding round and also for its unique business model.

Shah with his entrepreneurial streak, believes that one needs to risk capital to be able to grow one’s business. At the same time, he wants to see wealth of others grow as well. Shah said, “We see our fundraise as a responsibility to build a rewarding ecosystem for Cred members and an opportunity to share value with stakeholders. Hence, happy to also announce a $5 million ESOP buyback for the team members who have contributed to the Cred journey.”

[embed]https://twitter.com/kunalb11/status/1380039329603461120?s=20[/embed]

In a little over two years, CRED has amassed over 6 million users and is now valued at over $4 billion. But for Shah valuations hold little meaning; he believes that unicorn tags are the hopes and beliefs of stakeholders. Earlier this year he tweeted, “Unicorn tag, high valuations are all vanity metrics till the company delivers profits. Many companies like Amazon & Facebook were loss making for several years but became truly valuable only when they delivered profits.”

Entrepreneur with a difference

Shah is also a keen observer of consumer behaviour and has been focusing his businesses on offering people a great consumer experience. CRED has been rolling out several innovative features for members such as Rentpay to pay a monthly credit card rent for a small transaction fee, CRED Cash, an instant credit line accessible in three steps.

Interestingly, Shah is also not a big believer in degrees and qualifications when hiring talent for his company. “I am a philosophy major, I can’t care about other people’s degrees that much. I do believe in people who are generally excellent and believe in excellence and care about it, it may have demonstrated in many things. For example, one of our team members, a senior leader, has not even done graduation, the best degree that person has is 10th pass, but it’s okay,” he said in an interview.

Apart from running his own business, Shah is also an active angel investor and advocate of India’s startup ecosystem. According to a recent Hurun India report, Kunal Shah tops the list of entrepreneurs with the most number of investments in startups that may turn unicorn in the next few years. He is invested in nine such companies. Shah is followed by Binny Bansal and Ratan Tata.

Global Indian Kunal Shah

He is currently invested in over 50 companies including Ola and Gojek. His reasoning for investing in startups is simple. In an interview with The Ken he said, “The number one thing that I look at is what I can learn from the founders. My thesis for an investment, whether in angel rounds or up to Series B, is to be associated with the smartest minds. I let the founders determine the size of the cheque. During angel rounds, startups look for both money and potential learning or the investor’s ability to guide them from their own experience. Founders who believe I can offer that, approach me. I invest in companies and founders who are introduced to me and whom I can learn from.”

For a Mumbai lad who started off with working several odd jobs to stay afloat, Shah is now actively investing in startups in a bid to pay it forward and fund job creators for he believes that is the need of the hour: job creators.

Follow Kunal Shah on Twitter and LinkedIn

Reading Time: 8 mins

Apoorva Mehta: The Indian-origin entrepreneur in Time100 Next who changed the way America shops for groceries

(November 5, 2021) Early on during the COVID-19 pandemic the world went into a lockdown and uncertainty prevailed in terms of accessibility to essentials like groceries and medicines. That’s when a host of apps and services stepped in to help ease the lives for those with means. One such app that emerged in the US was Instacart, founded by Indian American entrepreneur Apoorva Mehta. The grocery delivery and pick-up service offers services in the US and Canada via a website and mobile app and allows customers to order groceries using personal shoppers. Though launched in 2012, the service found a huge uptake during the pandemic with several people opting to have their groceries and essential delivered to them keeping in mind social distancing and lockdown norms. Backed by marquee investors such as Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, Valiant Capital, and D1 Capital Partners, Instacart is today valued at over $39 billion and this Global Indian was included in the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2013 and was included in the Time100 Next in 2021. The lad from Jodhpur Mehta was born in 1986 in Jodhpur before his family moved to Libya shortly after. He spent a majority of his childhood in Libya, before moving to

="_blank" rel="noopener">Global Indian was included in the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2013 and was included in the Time100 Next in 2021.

Global Indian Apoorva Mehta

The lad from Jodhpur

Mehta was born in 1986 in Jodhpur before his family moved to Libya shortly after. He spent a majority of his childhood in Libya, before moving to Canada with his family at age 14. Here he graduated from University of Waterloo in Electrical Engineering in 2008. Incidentally, Mehta had an avid curiosity in technology. In an interview with LA Times, he said, “Everything from atoms, all the way to what you see on a computer when you go to Google.com, I wanted to learn everything in between.”

He began his professional journey as a design engineer at Blackberry before moving on to Qualcomm and then finally Amazon. While at Amazon, he worked as a supply-chain engineer in Seattle before quitting and relocating to San Francisco to branch out on his own. His goal was to try a bit of everything to finally figure out what it was that truly interested him. After two years at Amazon, he decided that he didn’t feel challenged any longer and decided to move on. What his jobs did teach him, he said, was that he liked to build software, and he wanted to be challenged.

Global Indian Apoorva Mehta

Serial entrepreneur

A serial entrepreneur of sorts, he founded 20 startups within a span of two years, but each of them failed. These included an ad network for social gaming companies and even a social network specifically for lawyers. Truth be told, Mehta didn’t know much about any of these subjects, but he liked putting himself in a learning position and try to solve existing problems. His experiences with these startups taught him a valuable lesson: it was important that he solve a real problem that he actually cared about.

This time round, he put in some thought into the issues that he himself faced on a day-to-day basis. That’s when he realised that there was a huge gap in one area. The young entrepreneur lived in San Francisco, didn’t own a car, but loved to cook. Often times, he would fail to get the groceries he wanted in his neighbourhood and would end up commuting some distance to get what he wanted. “It was 2012, people were ordering everything online and even watching movies online. But the one thing that people did every week was still being done the old-fashioned way: buying groceries,” he said in an interview.

Global Indian Apoorva Mehta

Road to success

He came up with the idea for Instacart, an on-demand grocery delivery platform. Within a month he came up with a crude code for an app that could be used by people who needed groceries delivered to their doorsteps as well as a version for personal shoppers.

He finally founded Instacart in 2012 and struck gold with the delivery services startup that has gone on to become a household name in America. Incidentally, the year he founded Instacart, Mehta tried to apply for funding through Y Combinator, but missed the deadline. He eventually managed to land a meeting with a Y Combinator partner by sending across a pack of beer using Instacart and was later admitted.

Though the idea for an on-demand grocery service wasn’t new, Mehta was convinced that Instacart would click. Smartphones had become ubiquitous and people were finally comfortable carrying out financial transactions online. Mehta managed to tie up with reputed grocery chains such as Whole Foods, Target, Safeway, Loblaws, Albertsons, Kroger, Costco, and CVS.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9dAvY_nX_U[/embed]

Funding began to pour in and some reputed marquee investors came on board, turning the tide for the startup. As the pandemic broke, Instacart saw a drastic increase in profits as more and more customers began to rely on its services during the ensuing lockdowns and virus scares. In fact, in the early days of the pandemic, the service saw a tidal wave of orders and there came a point when Instacart didn’t have enough shoppers and had to go on a hiring binge in March 2020 to bring on board an additional 300,000 gig workers.

At 33, Mehta went on to become one of the youngest billionaires in history. He believes that most startups fail and entrepreneurs who launch a company for the sake of it are even more likely to fail. He said, “The reason to start a company is to bring a change that you strongly believe in.” And Mehta truly believes that smartphones are the supermarkets of the future.

Follow Apoorva Mehta on LinkedIn and Twitter

Reading Time: 8 mins

Vidyut Mohan: The Indian entrepreneur who bagged Eco Oscar for recycling agri waste

(October 25, 2021) Every year, reams of newsprint are filled with reports about the poor air quality in the country. Come winter, and news about smog in North India due to crop burning, a dismal air quality index, of a capital struggling to breathe, and schools and offices being forced to halt operations take over. In fact, the toxic haze can even be seen from outer space. The tug of war between governments and farmers looking to get rid of agricultural waste seems endless. This is when Vidyut Mohan, a Delhi-based entrepreneur stepped in with his startup Takachar. The firm has developed a unique technology to convert agricultural waste biomass into usable fuel and fertiliser, with the potential to change the way India breathes in the near future. Lending credibility to Vidyut’s work is the fact that Takachar recently bagged the inaugural edition of the Earthshot Prize under the ‘Clean Our Air’ category. Set up by Prince William and the Royal Foundation, the awards are dubbed as the Eco Oscars that honour initiatives that showcase human ingenuity in mitigating the environmental impact of climate change. The winners, who received £1 million to carry forward their work and research, were selected by a jury panel that included Indra Nooyi, Sir David Attenborough, and Prince William. [embed]https://twitter.com/EarthshotPrize/status/1450424956450480130?s=20[/embed] What Takachar does Founded in 2016, Vidyut began

ners, who received £1 million to carry forward their work and research, were selected by a jury panel that included Indra Nooyi, Sir David Attenborough, and Prince William.

[embed]https://twitter.com/EarthshotPrize/status/1450424956450480130?s=20[/embed]

What Takachar does

Founded in 2016, Vidyut began working on a solution to prevent stubble from being burnt. At the same time, he also wanted to create income opportunities for farmers. Since then, Takachar has been dramatically increasing the amount of crop/forest residues that are transformed into marketable products around the world. Takachar manufactures a small-scale and low-cost piece of equipment that uses oxygen-lean torrefaction to process waste biomass such as rice residuals and coconut shells into fuel and fertiliser. In an interview with The Print, Vidyut said, “[Our equipment] has its origins in the French-style roasting of coffee beans. It roasts the biomass in controlled air [in the absence of oxygen]. It takes out low energy molecules leaving behind carbon-rich material that can be used as fuel or fertilisers.”

This enables farmers to sell this carbon-rich material in the open market and make a business out of it. This in turn, becomes an incentive for farmers to avoid burning agri waste and break the toxic cycle of smog that takes over a majority of the country each year. "It eliminates 98% of the smoke compared to what is generated by open burning and mitigates carbon emissions,” explained the social entrepreneur who was listed in Forbes 30 Under 30.

Indian entrepreneur Vidyut Mohan

By reducing air pollution that arises due to the annual crop burning, and by making renewable biomass based activated carbon that is competitively priced when compared to fossil based activated carbon, the equivalent of up to 100 million tons of carbon dioxide can be mitigated each year.

Back to basics

Born in Delhi, Vidyut studied at the Sardar Patel Vidyalaya before graduating as a mechanical engineer from Bengaluru’s RV College of Engineering in 2012. He then moved to Netherlands for his Masters from TU Delft where he studied sustainable energy technology and sustainable entrepreneurship. After graduating from Delft as an honours student in 2015, Vidyut worked with Simpa Networks as a senior user experience researcher for two years before joining Berkley Lab as a bio energy consultant. He also joined Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s J-WAFS as a bio energy consultant.

Always passionate about the environment this Global Indian was always involved in eco projects. As a student he worked to estimate solar radiation and solar site surveys for The Energy and Resources Institute, and worked on the service system design of biogas energy services in rural Karnataka with SELCO Foundation among a host of other projects. In 2017, Vidyut was named an UNLEASH Energy Talent; he is a fellow at the School for Social Entrepreneurs India as well as an Echoing Green Fellow.

Indian entrepreneur Vidyut Mohan

After his initial research for his Masters’ thesis at TU Delft, Vidyut returned to India to work with village communities in the Himalayas to convert pine needle waste into a marketable charcoal-based product. It was during the course of this work that he discovered a way to dramatically scale farm residue utilisation through technology in order to support farm-based livelihoods. This eventually led him to found Takachar in 2016 along with Kevin Kung, where he developed the current technology to help farmers in India turn agri waste into fuel and fertiliser.

In an interview published in Tata Center, Vidyut said, “During the burning season, air pollution in Delhi is 14 times the safe limit. I want to change that. I have always been passionate about working in the field of energy access and creating income opportunities for poor communities. I believe this is the ideal approach for climate change mitigation in developing countries.”

He began by designing a small, low-cost device to roast agricultural waste at high temperatures. This ash is then converted into charcoal, fertilisers, and activated carbon that can be deployed in water filtration systems. Once the prototype was ready, Vidyut and Kevin attached the device to trucks and took it to over 4,500 farmers, some even in remote locations. They collected coconut shells, rice husk, and straw. Since inception, this device has processed over 3,000 tonnes of crop waste into marketable products.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6-pmufDFOc[/embed]

Takachar’s technology and equipment underwent a successful pilot program in Kenya where the fuel generated was sold to over 5,000 farmers. “We will now be embarking on a commercial pilot program using a commercial prototype in two parts of India. The first is at Rohtak with the World Food Programme using rice straws, while the second is near Coimbatore using coconut shells [as biomass waste],” Vidyut said.

Awards and recognition

Their efforts were recently recognised by the United Nations Environment Program, which named Vidyut a 2020 Young Champion of the Earth. The award provided Takachar with seed funding and mentorship to help tackle one of the world’s most pressing challenges.

The recent Earthshot award has come as a shot in the arm for Vidyut, who now hopes to work with 1 million farmers by 2030 and believes that Takachar’s technology could help prevent the release of as much as 700 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions. The award itself was a result of a nine month long vetting process. “After we were nominated, Earthshot reached out asking to submit an application,” Vidyut told The Print. The duo had to submit a video pitch about Takachar and attend a two-hour long interview before being selected among the top 50 finalists.

“We didn’t know ahead of time that we had won. It was completely unexpected, has resulted in a tsunami of interest from so many people and has put our work on the international stage,” he added.

Follow Vidyut Mohan on LinkedIn and Twitter

Reading Time: 10 mins

Mukti Bosco: The Indian social entrepreneur who is changing lives with her healing touch

(September 2, 2021) Twenty years ago Mukti Bosco, then a post graduate student in health management, was on a field visit to Hyderabad’s Charminar area. She struck up a conversation with some women from the area and asked them what they would do in the face of an unforeseen emergency, most of them said that they would mortgage their assets. But it was one woman’s response that changed Bosco’s perspective forever: she told Bosco that she had to pull her six-year-old son out from school and send him to work at a tea shop as she had borrowed ₹5,000 for her husband’s typhoid treatment. The incident moved her so much that Bosco decided she didn’t want to be a mere bystander, she wanted to do something to change things - and Healing Fields Foundation (HFF) was born. Headquartered in Hyderabad, HFF has been providing training and support for women as health change agents in their communities. The Foundation works in rural areas of poorer states to impact change in the areas with the greatest need. From working to prevent health problems and facilitate access to health services and entitlements from the government, HFF has been working across the sector and has done extensive pandemic relief work as well. In fact, HFF has recently been recognized

and Healing Fields Foundation (HFF) was born. Headquartered in Hyderabad, HFF has been providing training and support for women as health change agents in their communities. The Foundation works in rural areas of poorer states to impact change in the areas with the greatest need. From working to prevent health problems and facilitate access to health services and entitlements from the government, HFF has been working across the sector and has done extensive pandemic relief work as well. In fact, HFF has recently been recognized by the World Economic Forum as one of India’s Top 50 COVID-19 Last Mile Responders.

[caption id="attachment_9131" align="aligncenter" width="575"] Indian social entrepreneur Mukti Bosco Mukti Bosco[/caption]

Rocky beginnings

Growing up with medical professionals at home - her father being an eye doctor and her mother a nurse - Bosco knew she would also follow in their footsteps. But her path was unclear until she finished her degree from Christian Medical College & Hospital, Vellore. "That is when I knew what I wanted to do something for the society," recalls Bosco in an exclusive chat with Global Indian. She graduated in Occupational Therapy from Vellore and later completed her Master's degree in Healthcare Management from the Administrative Staff College of India and John Hopkins University.

[caption id="attachment_9132" align="aligncenter" width="564"] HFF volunteers A Healing Fields Foundation CHE at work[/caption]

The Charminar incident shook Bosco more than she’d anticipated. "It broke my soul and that's how Healing Fields was conceptualized," she says. Mother to a 5-year-old son herself, Mukti resolved to do something in the health sector so that no underprivileged person had to sacrifice their children's future again.

The initial days of the Foundation were difficult. Few people took her seriously, but Bosco knew what she was doing. "When they saw I was determined, support started pouring in," smiles Bosco, who is also an Ashoka Fellow. With zero experience in the social sector, she stepped in with a positive mindset. "Social entrepreneurship is always in a startup mode and nothing can be taken for granted. I learnt most of it on the job," she says.

Working for impact

In the last twenty years, Bosco has been giving back to society by leading Healing Fields Foundation into several areas. From training and supporting health and hygiene initiatives for women in rural areas to training health professionals at the grassroots level and beyond, the aim has been to reach as many people as possible. Healing Fields has worked across the country in states like Telangana, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Assam, Odisha, and Jharkhand.

Healing Fields has so far has trained 5,000 community health entrepreneurs across 10 states, reaching 6.25 million people. This year, HFF plans to undertake a new project called TeleHealth. "This project aims to train a health leader to conduct basic health checks, as well as connect her to a network of clinics through a digital platform," says Bosco. "She will be therefore able to earn extra income for herself while bringing last-mile health services for her community," she adds.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usiLaSLakBg[/embed]

One evening in June, a health worker at the Healing Fields Foundation in Bihar received an urgent call from Bheriya village in Kaimur district. Around 20 children were vomiting and displaying symptoms of diarrhea in the village. Immediately, a team comprising Community Health Entrepreneur (CHE), the Gram Pradhan, Healing Fields staff, and the doctor was formed.

The CHE assessed every child who was unwell and advised the parents regarding maintaining hydration. ORS and medicines were given free of cost, and children with severe symptoms were shifted to a hospital. The team also coordinated with the local government officials and organized a health camp in the village to assess and identify the cause of the illness. It turned out that it was due to food served at a wedding.

The quick action by HFF meant that the problem was nipped in the bud. When a problem relates to children, the Foundation makes it a point to solve the problem as early as possible.

It may have been a twenty-year journey with Healing Fields Foundation, but for Bosco every day is new, filled with challenges and new ideas to serve the community.

Reading Time: 5 mins

Uppma Virdi: The 30-year-old Indian-origin lawyer who made Australia fall in love with chai

(November 3, 2021) Who would have thought that a cup of tea could propel a 20-something Indian Australian into the country’s big league? But that’s exactly what happened with Uppma Virdi, a Sydney-based lawyer, who shot to fame with her venture Chai Walli. So much so, that in 2016 Virdi was selected as Businesswoman of the Year at the 2016 Indian Australian Business and Community Awards (IABCA). Quite the accidental entrepreneur, Virdi chanced upon the idea for Chai Walli when she was working as a commercial lawyer. Despite a full-fledged legal career ahead of her, advising some of the fastest growing tech startups and a growing portfolio of employment, IP, and commercial clients, this Global Indian decided to set up a new venture on the side. She founded Chai Walli, a tea business focused on introducing to Australia authentic Indian and Ayurvedic teas. The venture took off and soon Virdi was included in the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. [embed]https://twitter.com/UppmaV/status/1394446827533987840?s=20[/embed] The girl from Chandigarh Born in Chandigarh in 1990, Virdi was raised in Melbourne where her family moved when she was one-year-old. She did her Bachelors of Law and Commerce from Deakin University and a Graduate Diploma of Legal Practice from The College of Law. Throughout her student years, Virdi worked actively;

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[embed]https://twitter.com/UppmaV/status/1394446827533987840?s=20[/embed]

The girl from Chandigarh

Born in Chandigarh in 1990, Virdi was raised in Melbourne where her family moved when she was one-year-old. She did her Bachelors of Law and Commerce from Deakin University and a Graduate Diploma of Legal Practice from The College of Law. Throughout her student years, Virdi worked actively; sometimes as a customer sales representative and sometimes as a seasonal clerk. She also worked as a paralegal towards workers compensation and also completed her secondment with Toyota Motors in Australia.

Through it all, her love for tea remained a constant. Always the go-to person to make tea for family gatherings and friends, she once made as many as a thousand cups of tea during her brother’s wedding. In an interview with SBS she said, "In the Indian culture people come together through tea. Whether it's a happy occasion or a difficult moment, tea is all pervasive. I tried, but couldn't find many good tea places in Australia."

Global Indian entrepreneur Uppma Virdi

Brewing mantra

Virdi launched Chai Walli in 2014 while still doing her day job at a law firm. Her introduction to tea, she says, was courtesy her grandfather, who was an Ayurvedic doctor. He was the one who taught her how to make a cup of good herbal tea. It was these lessons that she channeled into her startup and began offering Australians a good cup of chai. Her chai business began as a side project while she continued in her day job as a lawyer. She would spend evenings and the weekends blending chai with a pestle, which she would then take to the markets to brew fresh masala chai for the customers. Her tea began gaining popularity and soon Chai Walli was a phenomenon in its own right.

Initially though, her family had quite a few misgivings about this lawyer plunging headlong into the chai business. “My parents were against my decision. They wondered why I wanted to be a tea-seller of all things. That’s when I had to convince them that chaiwallas too can do something worthwhile,” she said in an interview.

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Road to success

In a country where coffee was the norm, Virdi made inroads with her steaming cups of Indian chai and its various variants. She began her journey of popularising tea with seminars on The Art of Chai with the aim to educate Australians on the nutritive benefits of Ayurvedic tea. Her workshops did the rounds of social media and she began selling her tea in small stores in Australian markets. She tied up with poor tea farmers in India and imported their produce to Australia. For Virdi, this was an opportunity to familiarise Australians with Indian culture and what it meant to be a first-generation Indian migrant.

Today, Virdi’s online store sells a variety of teas and related products such as candles, pots, kettles, strainers and tea flavoured goodies. The original Chai Walli blend is made with 11 fresh spices, with the warm and cool spices being tempered as per the season to enhance the chai experience. Her workshops where she coaches people on how to brew the perfect cup of chai is quite the rage with tea enthusiasts.

Global Indian entrepreneur Uppma Virdi

Chai Walli won the best chai award at the Royal Hobart Fine Food Awards in 2017 and was the finalist at the Best Health Food and Beverage Awards. In all, the brand offers 15 Ayurvedic blends and teas with the tea being sourced from organic farms in India. For now, the lawyer-turned-entrepreneur, who was featured in Forbes 30 Under 30 is on a mission: to rid the world of bad chai.

Follow Uppma Virdi on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter.

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