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

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."