From Developer to Successful Machine Learning Entrepreneur: Aparna Dhinakaran, Co-Founder, CPO of Arize (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You believe there is a bias from customers?

Aparna Dhinakaran: No, I think there is a bias in the tech industry itself. In general, there are not that many women that go into AI. I don’t think that we can argue that we’ve reached a neutral point. If I saw that in reality, there would be more women founders.

Sramana Mitra: I’m not asking you the question on statistics. I’m asking about your personal experience. Do you face bias from customers?

Aparna Dhinakaran: No, I don’t face bias from customers.

Sramana Mitra: That’s my point. You have a certain background and credibility. You are a very compelling founder. If you’re sitting from across a customer or investor, I don’t think I would evaluate you as a woman. I would evaluate you as a capable founder. That’s the point that I’m going to make.

I came out of MIT Computer Science in 1995. We were a lot fewer. I did not face bias I would say because I have that background. People took me at those values. I don’t think they judged me because I’m a woman. There are fewer people going into Computer Science, AI, and entrepreneurship who are women.

Those statistical points are correct, but if you are a highly-compelling female founder, I think there is no bias against that. That is my experience at least.

Aparna Dhinakaran: You have to be exceptional to be able to do this journey. There are a lot of white male founders who don’t have to go to an amazing university.

Sramana Mitra: They have skills though. I have done thousands of entrepreneur stories. These white male entrepreneurs have skills.

Aparna Dhinakaran: Now that they’ve been given the chance and they’ve done well on that chance, can we go back retroactively, “What if we had given a woman who didn’t come from that background the same opportunity?” The nuance that I’m trying to point out is, is this opportunity also given to women who don’t come from MIT and Berkeley.

Sramana Mitra: This is a phenomenon I studied closely. Remember I started off by telling you that we emphasize bootstrapping greatly. Bootstrapping takes out the investors from the equation. The whole game is between a product and a customer. In that scenario, there are a lot of people with very average backgrounds who have done very well.

Once you have proven that you can sell your product, investors follow. In that mode, I think it’s much more of a level-playing field. If you’re trying to raise money upfront very early in your journey, I think it’s irregular. It’s the big resumes and the big brands.

Aparna Dhinakaran: If you go through a bootcamp program, you’re given funding to be able to bootstrap your business. It does take some funding.

Sramana Mitra: I have case study after case study of no-funding success stories. Customer money gives you the funding that you need if you can convince. It’s a difficult thing. There are lots of entrepreneurs who’ve been successful purely based on customer money.

For the longest time, people didn’t have access. The investment community has only started becoming much more accessible and bigger in the last few years. For the longest time, the pool of investors was very small and hard to reach. A lot of companies build themselves using customer money.

Aparna Dhinakaran: But not everyone can afford to quit their jobs.

Sramana Mitra: There are techniques. There’s bootstrapping using a paycheck. There’s bootstrapping using services. People start services companies and use that to build a product.

Aparna Dhinakaran: How often are those?

Sramana Mitra: Actually the female entrepreneurs have been more successful in bootstrapped mode, especially in e-commerce. It’s full of women entrepreneurs.

Aparna Dhinakaran: I’m not arguing that bootstrapping isn’t a good technique. I’m saying that there’s a route that they’ve had to go through that was harder to prove their business viability.

This segment is part 6 in the series : From Developer to Successful Machine Learning Entrepreneur: Aparna Dhinakaran, Co-Founder, CPO of Arize
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