Forbes | 23 March 2023
Pallavi Shrivastava starts the conversation by narrating the ‘untold’ and the ‘other side’ of the story. “If you’re a man, I think you too would have faced some kind of bias,” reckons the co-founder of Progcap, a Google-backed fintech startup that provides working capital to small and medium-sized businesses. The MBA grad from XLRI Jamshedpur continues to underline her take on gender, bias and discrimination. Everybody, she maintains, irrespective of the gender, face some kind of direct or indirect biases. Underlining the omnipresent nature of the problem, Shrivastava tells us how to deal with it. “Realise that you have a choice. You have the power to change the narrative,” she says, adding that merely talking about the bias and ranting are not going to move the needle.
Change happens when one changes the filter, and stays focussed. “After a point, your gender stops to matter,” says the first-generation entrepreneur who was born in Kanpur and brought up across multiple cities due to the transferable nature of her banker father’s job. “I always wanted to run my own venture. This clarity was always there,” says the computer science engineer who reckons her first failure in life was not making it to the IIT. Later on, though, she realised that engineering was not her calling. Shrivastava joined Infy in 2003, and over the next decade dotted her CV with multiple job stints, including ones at Hinduja, World Bank and IFC. With every job, she knew she was preparing herself for the role of a founder.