Kiran Mazumdar Shaw reveals how she started Biocon at 25 with Rs 10,000 in bank

'I was high-risk in the eyes of everyone that I had to meet, starting with bankers... Bankers didn’t want to touch me,' Biocon founder Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw said.

Curated by : Ankita Sengupta

August 03, 2023 / 12:23 IST

Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw also shared that once the finance was sorted, she faced problem in hiring people. (Screenshot from Nikhil Kamath's podcast, ‘WTF is with Nikhil Kamath’)

Billionaire and founder of Bengaluru-based Biocon, Kiran Mazumdar Shaw recently opened up about the struggles she faced and the “foolish courage” that led her to start the biotech company when she was 25 and had Rs 10,000 in her bank account.

In conversation with Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath on his podcast, ‘WTF is with Nikhil Kamath’ Shaw shared how being a woman with no business experience made bankers see her as high-risk.

“I was 25 years old, I was a young woman, I had no business experience, I had Rs 10,000 in my bank and I was trying to start a strange business called biotech which nobody understood. And I was high-risk in the eyes of everyone that I had to meet, starting with bankers," she said. "Bankers didn’t want to touch me. I just wanted a credit line and in those days, there was no venture funding… it was debt finance. I wanted a loan and I wanted a credit line. I found it impossible because of all the reasons I just mentioned."

Adding how bankers wanted her father to step in as a guarantor, she said, "Very often bankers would tell me 'Your guarantee would not suffice. Your father will have to give a guarantee.' I said my father had nothing to do with my business, so on principle, I don’t think he should give you a guarantee. If you can accept a guarantee from a male entrepreneur, why not me? Those were the days when there was such a strong gender bias."

Kiran Mazumdar Shaw then revealed that once the finance was sorted, she faced problem in hiring people. "People didn't want to work for a woman. I found it very difficult to hire people. So my first two employees were retired tractor mechanics who needed a job desperately. It didn't matter to them whether it was a man or a woman hiring them," she said.