In a developing country like India, where the employment rate is around 37%, women still constitute only 3% of business investments. They run fewer than 13% of India’s small businesses. Women running their own businesses are faced with numerous hardships. Sadly, as of now,there have only been a handful of cases where women starting with their own businesses succeeded. But, as the Indian authorities seem to be quite serious about this matter, we expect the scenario to change very soon.
With the consistent progress of the Indian startup ecosystem contemporarily, more and more women are trying to come up independently with their own startup ideas. One such charismatic name is Shradha Sharma – the CEO and Founder of YourStory. With the dream of making someone listen to her story, she somehow managed to give an enormous platform like YourStory to all such unheard voices. She made every woman with a voice realise that they needed to be heard. No wonder what must have been her story, is she a common woman like millions out there or there is something unusual about her? Let’s find out.
Shradha Sharma : The Wonder Lady (The Idea of Starting YourStory)
With the goal of highlighting the untold stories of entrepreneurship in India, Shradha Sharma established YourStory, a digital media platform for startups and entrepreneurs. She is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of YourStory. Shradha worked as an assistant vice president at CNBC TV18 (an Indian pay television business and financial news channel owned by NBCUniversal and TV18) before launching YourStory.
While working for CNBC, she discovered that she has a strong affinity for startup companies and profiles. She used to spend her time creating articles and incredible stories about wealthy people. In her blogs, she included stories of startups that eventually became successful.
She believed that people around the globe are doing astounding works but are hardly prominent enough to be noticeable. This ignited her desire to help out these people. She, henceforth, decided to write about more such people in her blogs and eventually turned her blog into a website. It was the time when online publishing portals were not very lucrative of options to pursue. Initially, her site could not gather much of people’s attention and she even was sometimes asked to leave pre-scheduled interviews because of the little fame her website had gathered.
She made her first fortune in the year 2015 when she finally succeeded in raising funds for her venture. YourStory has yielded her over 40,000 entrepreneur’s narratives and has also received investments from well-known business persons including, Ratan Tata, Karthee Madasamy, Vani Kola and T.V. Mohandas Pai. Today, as we all know, Shradha is hardly a woman who needs an introduction.
What is YourStory ?
YourStory was launched in 2008 as a digital media platform for newly established businessess and entrepreneurs. It is India’s and Asia’s most popular media platform for entrepreneurs, dedicated to enthusiastically upholding and promoting entrepreneurship ecosystem of India. According to studies, YourStory has a monthly net income of $4000 and a net worth of $678K. 12 Indian languages are represented in the stories shared through YourStory.
On YourStory.com, over 40,000 entrepreneurial stories have been published, reaching over 10 million niche readers each month from India and around the world. Shradha’s ambition for YourStory is to establish a platform that passionately and honestly shares every storey that needs to be shared.
TechSparks, MobiSparks, eSparks, Sociopreneurship, Cloud Conclave, and a slew of other meetups, workshops, and bootcamps are all held on YourStory’s platform. It also has its own startup jobs platform, YourStory Startup Jobs Board, which enables companies and professionals connect in the most curated way possible. YS Research, the company’s research arm, is focused on market research, intelligence, and consultancy in India’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Shradha Sharma : Life (personal and professional)
Shradha grew up in Patna after being born in a small town in Bihar. Shradha’s father was an Indian Navy merchant and her mother was a homemaker. She earned her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in history from Delhi University’s prestigious St. Stephen’s College. She then went on to Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Ahmedabad to study Design Management (DCM) in 2004.
Shradha served as the Brand Advisor at The Times of India from January 2006 to June 2007, in addition to being the Founder, Chief Editor, and CEO of YourStory. She continued to collect expertise and information from every available subject she was involved in, eventually launching a company that made a real and basic difference.
In a TechGig piece, she was also named one of the “5 women entrepreneurs in India you should know about.” She has been dubbed “the woman who cracked the glass ceiling” by the Hindu.
Shradha Sharma : Honours and awards
- In September 2010, she received the NASSCOM Ecosystem Evangelist Award for her tireless efforts in fostering an inclusive startup ecosystem.
- In September 2010, she received the Villgro Journalist of the Year Award for her consistent coverage of startups.
- In 2015, she was named one of the top 500 LinkedIn influencers in the world.
- In January 2015, she received the L’Oreal Paris Femina Online Influence Award.
- In December 2015, she was awarded the ET promising entrepreneurs of India Award by The Economic Times.
- In February 2016, she was named to Fortune Magazine’s list of Fortune 40 under 40.
- She also was LinkedIn’s most watched CEO on the Internet category in 2016.
Conclusion:
Shradha’s story, like many others, had its ups and downs, but what kept her moving was her determination towards her work. Every woman possesses the same caliber in them, what they need is to realise it. No matter how hard they try to put women in a box, they always come out to be stronger, resilient and more confident than ever before. So this was all about a girl from a small town, fighting against all odds of the so-called society, becoming the Founder of one of India’s leading platforms. Now you have to decide, whether you want to be inside a box or come out with a different story of yourself?
You have to decide, what will be YourStory?
When you know you have to fend for yourself every inch of the way, it gives you a different kind of grit and tenacity
Shradha Sharma
References:
- https://startuptalky.com/shradha-sharma-yourstory/
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shradha_Sharma
- https://www.legalwiz.in/blog/an-inspiring-story-of-shradha-sharma-of-yourstory
- https://www.linkedin.com/mwlite/company/yourstory-com
- https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.indiaspend.com/amp/women/women-run-fewer-than-13-of-indias-small-businesses-heres-why-731610
- https://about.crunchbase.com/blog/business-investment-to-women/
