Watch Rashmi Daga who gave up her corporate career to pursue her love for cooking. She built one of the India's most successful food tech companies, FreshMenu. View the video to know about her inspiring journey!
#RashmiDaga #FreshMenu #Business #OutlookBusiness #OutlookMagazine #OutlookGroup
#RashmiDaga #FreshMenu #Business #OutlookBusiness #OutlookMagazine #OutlookGroup
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00:00 Well, it's now time to call upon our women of worth who did not only dream, but in fact she also dared.
00:06 Ladies and gentlemen, she's here to tell us her wow story of how she gave up her corporate career to pursue her love for cooking
00:16 and really channeled her passion into building one of India's most successful food tech companies.
00:23 Ladies, put your hands together for founder of FreshMenu, Rashmi Daga.
00:28 [Applause]
00:39 Hi everyone. It's my pleasure to be here and trust me, a decade back, ten years back, I think it was just like a dream that you would be able to do something that breaks from the regular mold
00:53 and probably come and speak at a forum and create something which makes impact in life, in my own life and for a lot of people.
01:05 So I think it's a huge privilege to be in this place. I would like to start from where it all started.
01:12 As a kid, come from a very conservative family, I think first generation of kids who actually studied or who were pushed to perform well academically
01:24 and happened to use that push to get into Delhi College of Engineering in IIM Ahmedabad.
01:31 And I remember back then a lot of people used to tell my parents that you've got your girl too educated and you're in trouble.
01:38 Coming from that point of view in life to building a career, starting with IBM sales, and again it was a choice that was not a very common choice.
01:50 I know a lot of friends and people around would check with me, do you really want to build a career in sales and why are you doing sales?
01:58 Today I can tell you that sales is the biggest reason I'm able to do what I'm doing.
02:04 Sales as a career teaches you a lot of things, right, from building relationships, understanding business, product, actually getting someone to pay for your product.
02:14 And I think that learning in life is probably never to be compromised.
02:19 So I did about five years of sales between IBM and J&J Medical.
02:24 And I think from there, there was a bug that you have to do something own in your life and not keep doing a job.
02:32 And I think job is something that most of us are trained to believe that we work for others.
02:40 I think once you do your own startup, once you shift to the entrepreneur side, you realize that a job itself is very important.
02:46 And I think for women in India, that itself is a huge hurdle to cross over, that instead of being at home, you actually work and you build out a career.
02:54 So honestly, whether you work in a corporate job, whether you work at a startup or you're an entrepreneur,
03:00 I think we're doing a great service in moving our society forward, that we actually go ahead and work.
03:07 I think from there on, my bug was that, you know, let me build something of my own and let me try and build a business.
03:14 So first step was actually work at a startup so that you learn and probably learn at someone else's expense.
03:21 So I did learn at somebody's expense. I joined a startup called Tudor Vista.
03:25 Tudor Vista was an ed tech startup back in 2008, considered a hot startup in the space.
03:30 We were teaching students in the US. For three and a half years, I did everything that was possible at that startup.
03:38 Sales, operations, customer service, recruitment.
03:42 We actually went ahead and built one of the largest virtual workforces in India, sitting with a very small team.
03:49 So resource was a constraint. And with about eight people in Bangalore in a small office,
03:55 we were actually recruiting hundreds of tutors every month.
03:59 And these were mostly women who wanted to work a few hours, work as a consultant, in their spare time and earn an extra income.
04:08 I'm talking about 2008. We did that for three and a half years.
04:13 I did tutor recruitment and then moved on to doing some sales there.
04:19 Bootstrapped a startup. There's a lot of confidence that I've learned what to do at a startup.
04:23 I bootstrapped a startup for a year. Again, I think early timing probably was not the best of time to do a startup.
04:32 A call taken in life to shut down what is not working. So I did shut it down after a year of hard work.
04:39 A lot of learning, which are even useful today. But if things are not working, you cannot drag them on and on.
04:46 And you have to let them go. One big lesson that I learned at that time is being perfectionist does not help.
04:54 As women, I think we have been trained consciously, subconsciously that you have to always excel.
05:00 You have to be perfect. You have to be very, very good. But trust me,
05:04 especially if you're trying to be an entrepreneur, trying to start up, perfection is something that if you keep chasing perfection,
05:11 you will be really slow and you may be left behind. And perfection is not something that takes you fast.
05:17 So my lesson in life was that iteration is good. You can start with something.
05:21 You can keep improving it if it works. But perfecting a product before even releasing it is not something that goes down very well.
05:29 So I closed that startup, moved on, worked a few roles, and then started with Fresh Menu again.
05:37 Honestly, as an individual, for all my life, I kept thinking that I have to work because I don't want to be at home
05:45 and especially taking care of food and stuff at home.
05:48 So starting a company in food was not a very easy decision because it looked like you're actually going back to where you all was running away from.
05:58 But I think Fresh Menu has been amazing because we've been able to change and help a lot of people do what they want to do better,
06:09 save that one hour of cooking every day. So it's actually an option created where good quality food cooked in a local kitchen can come to people.
06:17 And that was first principles at Fresh Menu, that we are not cooking something that we are not eating ourselves.
06:24 We are not proud to eat at our own homes. And therefore, it was very different from all that people were trying to do.
06:30 This was actually thought from day one as a fresh food company. We source material every day.
06:35 We actually cook in a local kitchen with trained people all the time.
06:40 So food that comes to customers' house from a Fresh Menu kitchen is cooked either 10 minutes, 15 minutes before they ordered or 15 minutes after they've ordered.
06:48 And that was a huge change compared to what the market was doing. Market runs a very central kitchen, factory-made, frozen food model because that's what is very, very scalable.
06:59 So again, I think scale is very important to think from a startup point of view.
07:03 But if your product does not work, you don't want to scale something that does not work as a core product.
07:09 And therefore, scale from day one is not what you need to obsess over.
07:12 First, you need to obsess over what is my service, what's my product, why should a consumer like it?
07:17 And once that happens, then solutions for scale are easier to think about, which is what we did at Fresh Menu.
07:25 So as an individual, I think as an entrepreneur, the journey has been huge in the last almost five years.
07:31 Every day has been a learning. Every day you learn a new lesson in solving problems, in building patience.
07:39 Being a mother and taking a decision to do a startup, when I was starting Fresh Menu, my daughter was three years old.
07:45 And the big question in my head was my kid is very small and I need a lot of time.
07:50 And I think it's hard to keep the guilt away every day because as an entrepreneur, I spend way too much time at work.
07:58 But I realize that my kid's going to be small for me all my life.
08:01 So she's not going to grow up and she's not going to become big and independent very easily.
08:07 So be it three or be it six, it's not going to change. But I should pursue my dream and I should not let that go.
08:13 It was a tough one for first year. First year is a big struggle at a startup. You're surviving day on day.
08:19 I used to work seven days a week. I used to carry her to the kitchen. She spent time in the kitchen.
08:24 She's been in my car while I'm delivering the food. I think she's very proud of Fresh Menu today.
08:29 And I think she's growing up to be a very independent girl. And I think she'll be way, way better than what our generation is.
08:37 These kids are much smarter. So I think I end up feeling that bit of responsibility that if we do not break away from the old mold,
08:45 our kids are not going to have a different life, a different society.
08:48 So here it is. I think I'm so glad to see so many women and so much of, you know, push for entrepreneurship.
08:57 I think women entrepreneurship is at times being considered as something which is a very small niche.
09:03 But there are a lot of us who have a lot of aspiration, a lot of strength and a lot of things that we could all achieve.
09:09 So here it is. I think India is going to change very, very quickly for women. Thank you.
09:19 Ladies, let's have a louder cheer for our women of the world. Rashmi Daga. Rashmi.
09:29 Thank you so much for telling your story straight from the heart. That's exactly how we needed to hear it.
09:35 [BLANK_AUDIO]