Bengaluru: Biocon founder Kiran Mazumdar Shaw on Wednesday said that it was hostility and gender bias in the Scotch brewing industry that led her to entrepreneurship.
“I graduated as a Master Brewer from the Ballarat Brewing School in Australia in 1975. My aspiration was to pursue a professional career in brewing. However, I was unprepared for the hostility and gender bias that I faced from the brewing industry. It was this rejection that saw me turn to entrepreneurship quite by accident and set up a biotech start-up in India, where I leveraged my fermentation knowledge to produce enzymes and biopharmaceuticals instead of beer,” Ms Shaw told this newspaper, a day before her biography is set to be launched.
She said that she had no business experience and had limited financial resources when she had started the biotech startup. “I initially focused on making industrial enzymes, exploring ways in which to replace polluting chemical technologies with eco-friendly enzyme technologies. It was about disrupting industrial processes and it worked. My products succeeded in getting several firms to switch from using polluting chemicals to eco-friendly enzymes,” she said.
Ms Shaw considers Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy as a huge role model. Just like how Infosys former chairman’s wife Sudha played a key role in funding his venture, Ms Shaw’s husband John supported her by helping her buyout Unilever’s stake in biotech firm.
“In 1998, Unilever decided to exit the biotech business worldwide, of which I was a part... I decided to exercise pre-emptive rights. That was also the time when John and I got married, and then John. So John sold his prized possession – a house in London – and bought out Unilever’s stake for $2 million and thus backed my venture and took a big bet on me and Biocon!”
This, she said, allowed John to tease her. “John always teases me. He had always heard stories of Indian men getting dowry at the time of marriage. But in our case, he walked into our marriage by parting with his lifetime savings to buy the shares back from Unilever!”
