Once A hero, Always A Hero
For Ambiga Subramanian, the journey has been intense — with moments of happiness, anxiety and disappointments. Despite parting ways from husband, Mu Sigma co-founder Dhiraj Rajaram in 2016, the former CEO of data analytics firm Mu Sigma and the first woman to head an Indian unicorn, is now on a social experiment with her new venture hyphen.social. It a social-networking application for which she has teamed up with Mu Sigma ex-head of operations Goutham Ekollu.
“My company is still a young startup. The purpose of the company is to help more people speak up and share their thoughts. I have a hypothesis around why so many people want to share but don’t. I want to validate this hypothesis through my product. You can call it a social experiment of sorts. Always take your team along in the journey. Never think of it as your journey and the others as just enablers for you. It’s their journey as well. Culture is something that you have to work hard at. If you get the culture right, a lot of other things will fall in place,” revealed Subramanian in response to queries on email.
She also maintained that “It took time for me to become self-confident and bold. These are important characteristics for anyone, not just entrepreneurs, not just professional but in personal life as well. I wish I had developed these sooner in life. Sometimes, speed of action is more important than quality of action. I used to take a lot longer to make decisions in the past. Over time, I have learnt that sometimes faster decisions are better than better decisions. Obviously, success depends on making good decisions quickly. But it is important to have clarity that sometimes you can’t wait for the optimal answer and speed becomes important.”
When asked to spell out the vision for her company, she said, “I think the world needs to hear multiple points of view around any topic. We seem to be going more and more towards people liking a certain point of view and getting bombarded with more of the same point of view.”
