How I Decided to Close My Social Venture and Move Back to the US

When I kicked off 2017, I lay at the crossroads of a few big decisions — should I close down my social venture of 2.5 years, and move back to the US after five and a half years soldiering it out in social enterprise in India? I knew that once I made the call, there was no looking back. There was little chance that after breaking my lease (on a place I had lived for almost 5 years,) sorting and packing pretty much my life’s belongings, saying goodbye to my friends, and more importantly, ending this strange life of living as a foreigner in someone else’s land, that I would return. That would take an enormous amount of emotional fervor and passion that I honestly doubted that I’d find in the later stages of my life.

I felt ambivalent toward this Big Question in the first week of January 2017 — on one hand, Iesha’s business model didn’t seem to be working out and we were running out of money. On the other hand, there were people who believed in my mission and were passionately persuading me to stay, trying to convince me of my unique role as a leader to bring adolescent gender and sexuality education to India — few people have the skills to create the kind of content or conduct the sort of sessions that I could, let alone the business skills to try to turn it into something scalable. Many felt that it was critical for me to keep going after coming so far, that the mission that I had taken up (or rather, that had taken me up — I almost couldn’t have ignored it if I had wanted to) could not be completed if I left. I wasn’t sure if it was short-sighted of me not to listen to those who believed in me, or if I had just come to symbolize a lot for a lot of people — inside and outside India — who didn’t understand and couldn’t really change the real, live market dynamics I was facing.

So here I was. I had experienced a surreal couple of years that I always thought couldn’t be put into words. But if I had to, I’d say it was like being in the driver seat of a race car, going 200 mph, with other people in the car with you, with constant curves and not being able to see too far ahead. With the road being in India.

It was also like being put through a fire — an internal cleansing of sorts. In entrepreneurship, what’s on the inside is the only thing that manifests on the outside — which means a leader has to literally be constantly evaluating and burning down her own inhibitions, fears, and weaknesses, before the venture as a whole can trudge forward. This means that intense mental processing is going on at all times, and internal (personal-level) and external (startup-level) changes are happening within the span of weeks. You have your blinders on, and you’re in the trenches for months and months at a time, moving forward without looking up. That’s why I say that I changed as a person every couple of months. Who I am now, in terms of how I perceive, process, and act, is almost an entirely different person that who I was a few years ago. And though it was a liberating process, it was not a painless one.

Should I stay or should I go? I set to the process of analyzing my journey — and I realized that contrary to what I felt, we had gone through and achieved a lot. And I had a learned a couple of critical things while attempting to build a revolutionary social venture that had the power to change young boys’ and girls’ attitudes around gender, their own bodies, emotions, and peer relationships, and how to consume the media critically. Teaser: The things I learned had nothing to do with the relevance or efficacy of our actual product, nor the buy-in of our students. It was about everything else.

1. First and foremost, funding matters. The Indian social enterprise sector is missing the boat.

The startup space globally is known for flamboyant pitches meant to impress startup accelerators, investors, and customers. Entrepreneurs — especially social entrepreneurs — are expected to become walking, talking beacons of light, with visions grand enough to inspire the most jaded. They want us to be stars, so they can showcase us in their lists and articles and events and shows.

There’s a problem with that though. We’re not beacons, and our businesses usually can’t save the world. Our job isn’t to the save the world. It’s to creatively experiment, play, and test out things that haven’t been done before, that could be of value to a very well-defined and particular group of people. The key phrase is creatively experiment: we need financial freedom to do that. The other key phrase is haven’t been done before — there’s a very high chance that our customers won’t understand what we’re trying to do, and we will need a lot of support, money, and time to achieve anything.

That’s especially true if we’re trying to intrinsically change socio-cultural behaviors and systems, rather than offering stop-gap solutions. In the social enterprise space, the companies most getting funded are gadgets and technologies that purportedly “fix” something — for example, things like medical screening technology, or clean cookstoves. Of course, the importance of medical screening for low-income rural people is non-debatable. But what about social enterprises focusing on the big picture — Trash. Sanitation. Rape. Sex Trafficking. Urban mobility. Corruption.

These are problems that involve deep systems change — they involve targeting the problem from several angles simultaneously, bringing together many different stakeholders including the private and public sectors, citizens, and NGOs, and being very creative with changing ingrained attitudes that have existed for thousands of years in India. These sort of problems take a couple years’ of funding to even figure out where to start solving the problem. These are the problems that so-called “social” investors shy away from. Yet these are the reason that the social enterprise sector exists in the first place.

The social enterprise sector doesn’t exist just to fund technology solutions that can be monetized and scaled rapidly. It exists to solve the most pertinent and pernicious social issues. In India, there should exist a new social enterprise funding rubric that weighs potential systems change impact versus business model viability, or there should emerge a new sector altogether that invests in changing systems and behavioral patterns. Moreover, there should be early-stage grant programs that support systems-change entrepreneurs in building powerful behavioral-change solutions and in exploring the market from every possible angle for a year or two before jumping into a business model. As long as our only funding option at the early stage is equity-based seed funding, the problems that social enterprises choose to tackle will remain small and constrained (and immediately monetizable), and our biggest problems will persist.

Basically on my end, I didn’t want to create a business that *happens* to make social change. I didn’t fall neatly into a sector like K-12 education, or healthcare. I wasn’t set on creating a technology solution until I figured out what the best way to solve the problem was. I was hell bent on solving a very real problem, but the problem was so complex that it was going to take me some time to figure out how to tackle it sustainably. There was no funding for me in the ecosystem.

So, I turned to the mainstream startup space. There, I felt like I could express my ideas with more freedom. I wasn’t criticized for targeting high-income segments along with low-income ones. And it almost felt like mainstream startup advocates could see the big picture better than the social enterprise people could. However, there still wasn’t funding available for a venture that, by the nature of its work, needed time to figure out how to monetize its offerings before raising funding.

So, I just kept at it by myself.

2. External factors can break you

When you’re funding your own venture, every day feels like an emergency: “we’re running out of time, we’re running of money, and we must validate our business model NOW” became my internal running mantra. As a result, like many startups, we bit off far more than we could chew.

We were testing three different business models at the same time. We never felt like we had the time or resources to get the data points we needed in any given segment. We were constantly pulled between spending woman-hours in customizing our offering for a niche customer just to make a sale, or saying “no” in order to build our core vision for the business. We had team of three people, including me.

I felt frantic — that’s the least conducive environment for thinking expansively and creatively, which is what we needed if we had to push through something as revolutionary as sex education in India. (Again, funding = breathing space.)

We were also learning a ton about Indian society’s attitude toward sex education — in short, we used to find one or two allies within an organization (a school, NGO, ed-tech company) who were really excited and supportive of our work. But then, it was that person’s burden and responsibility to convince every other stakeholder, including school administrations, parents (in the case of schools), donors (in the case of NGOs), etc, which became a long and arduous task.

Basically, the very ignorance and shame that had created such a toxic gender and sexuality environment in the first place, was exactly what was stopping us from changing things. Though the enlightened elite (accelerator programs, press) and the youth (who had low ability to pay) loved us, that middle-aged, upper-middle-class segment we needed were largely ignorant and confused (many women had never even gotten basic period education in their youth), ashamed (of the subject matter in general and of their own bodies, usually carrying decades of silent sexual baggage, including abuse), and carried a deep fear of rippling the waters of the status quo in a society that values status above all else.

Moreover, they highly devalued our work and preferred paying for traditionally “sexy,” money-making, and math/science oriented education, like “robotics” or anything that had to do with getting their child into engineering college. World-class workshop facilitation, experiential education, holistic growth, and socio-emotional development were not concepts that most people had ever been exposed to. Again, the very ignorance that had created the chasm was not helping us to solve it.

The only reason we got as far as we did is because we were deeply, intrinsically married to the struggle. Three to four highly educated, highly ambitious, “woke,” smart, savvy women. If we couldn’t do it, who could? We were hell bent. We were going to change things, whatever it took. But even we weren’t enough for the challenge we had taken on.

Besides the socio-cultural barriers on the customer side, we also learned some hard lessons about trusting people, whether they were clients or vendors or legal service providers. We were scammed, lied to our faces, didn’t get the deliverables we paid for, weren’t paid on time. Given how hard we were working and what we were up against (with no funding), each one felt like a blow.

Finally, on the administrative side, I was navigating some dense bureaucracy and inept customer service that even my Indian teammates spent a disproportionate amount of time untangling. To give you a sense, it took me 8 months to get the company registered in India, and another three to just get our bank account functioning.

Yes, we had taken on a lot. But we were ready for the fight — if we couldn’t do it, then who could? To us, it was about the pre-teens, who loved our content, who were thirsty for information, who changed their attitudes and behaviors in a heartbeat, whose day-to-day lives became easier and more navigable as bullying and teasing dropped in the classrooms where we ran our course, and the long-withheld information that we gave them was like a new flood of confidence and self-understanding. But there were just too many people in between them and us. We weren’t making it to the people for whom our product was built.

I believe that there always exists on one hand, clear sets of information and analysis that are easily digestable by the over-active human brain to qualify our actions. However, we usually ignore the very important, if not primary driver of our actions, which is our right brain — our emotions, resulting from a combination of our human relationships, our inner drive and desire to succeed, and our intuition.

What did my right brain think about this whole situation? Quite a lot, actually. From the get-go, I faced a critical dilemma. On one hand, I believed the following:

1. we are powerful beings who can manifest whatever we want in our lives. Everything (money, success, positive events) is energy, and energy is thoughts, and we control our thoughts and intentions. (For more on this, check out the amazing book You Are A Badass by Jen Sincero.)

2. if you follow your deepest passion and skill, you will ultimately reap the fruits of what you’re putting out in the universe. In other words, my inspiration wasn’t wholly mine, therefore it had to work.

At the same time, I knew the following to be true:

1. I had no partner in crime.

I had a small team, but no co-founder. There was no one else with financial skin in the game, who shouldered the responsibility and burden of making this work with me. I was alone.

2. I had no mentor.

I wished there was someone experienced, wise, who understood my business and with whom I could be frank and honest when things got tough. Despite the number of accelerator programs I had been through, I didn’t have a wise figure with whom I could be vulnerable, and the few people I did like/relate to were still in the thick of their own careers and didn’t have time for me. So instead, I kept my vulnerability under wraps, kept my shiny entrepreneurial face on at all times, and navigated the waters all by myself.

3. My lifestyle was wearing on me.

Though I had been there for five years, I was still in India, a foreign country. I had acclimated, but I could never completely relax — it was still to some degree, just as exhausting and stress-inducing as when I first got there. My mental resolve was there, but my emotional stamina was waning. I hadn’t written a blog post, played the piano, driven my car, cooked a meal, sat on a lawn, or even gotten interested in a TV show in ages.

There was a fundamental disconnect between these two emotional realities. Which one was true? Which one should I allow to guide my actions? Until now, it had been the first one — but that wasn’t working out so well at the moment. I still believed I could manifest what I wanted with the right type of will and focus, but I didn’t even feel like it at the moment. My cup was running on empty.

Iesha was my mission. My mental resolve was still there. I had not given up — I could never give up. But right now, it was time to stop. Let go of my single-track mindset. Take a second.

If our content is meant to reach thousands, it surely will.

But right now — it was time to go home.

❤