[00:00:00 – 00:00:09] Nitin Bajaj

Hey everyone, welcome to the Industry Show. I’m your host Nitin Bajaj and joining me today is Vinita Gupta. Vinita, welcome on the show.

[00:00:09 – 00:00:15] Vinita Gupta

Thank you very much. I look forward to the conversation, Nitin.

[00:00:16 – 00:00:24] Nitin Bajaj

Thank you for hosting us here in your beautiful, beautiful place. I really appreciate it. Let’s start with who is Vinita?

[00:00:26 – 00:01:18] Vinita Gupta

Well, just been very short for the audience, I would say. I am an entrepreneur who immigrated at the age of 23 from India to the US. And that was 50 years back. So it was quite a journey for me as a woman of those days. I came here to get my engineering degree and work in technology as one would expect because I was an engineer. One thing led to another. I started my company and took it public and I became the first woman of Indian origin to take a company public.

So that in short is my story.

[00:01:19 – 00:01:34] Nitin Bajaj

It’s been a fascinating one and it’s also not that obviously you were the first woman but also one of the very few people that have in general taken a public company public. So congratulations for that.

[00:01:34 – 00:01:35] Vinita Gupta

Thank you. Thank you.

[00:01:37 – 00:02:23] Nitin Bajaj

It’s been a long list of accomplishments. You’re also an amazing and a very competitive bridge player. We’ll talk about that a little bit. And you also just came out with a book which is doing exceedingly well. So congratulations with that too. It’s rare to come across someone who excels in so many different domains of life. And I’m looking forward to getting to to share a little more about that.

Tell us about the why, what has motivated and inspired you in this journey and kept you going in so many different perspectives on life.

[00:02:26 – 00:03:19] Vinita Gupta

I would say my characteristic is I am restless. I want to do something and if I have done it to a level, I want to take it to to a higher level and higher level. So that’s what has led me to different areas. But in each area, I try to do as well as I think can be done, not just based on my capabilities, but based on examples of others. So that can be limiting, but that’s what I have been doing. I’m a learner and I enjoy the of learning, I would say. So this is my thirst, my forward.

[00:03:20 – 00:03:20] Nitin Bajaj

Going.

[00:03:22 – 00:03:26] Vinita Gupta

Mission and what excites me to continue to learn and grow.

[00:03:27 – 00:03:46] Nitin Bajaj

Love that. So one part of it is just learning and growth, and the other is in many ways that thirst for excellence, where you just kind of push yourself in, you know, to a, maybe a place of discomfort. Is that a good way to describe it?

[00:03:46 – 00:04:31] Vinita Gupta

Yeah, I think so. I think I push myself because it’s always like if somebody else could do it, what am I lacking?

What am I lacking? So I keep pushing. Of course, when we push ourselves to limits, things get not just uncomfortable, they get painful. And I I wouldn’t say I enjoy the pain, but I do enjoy keep pushing because that’s the way I live my life. And life in itself without pushing is not painless. So I’ll leave it at that for now.

[00:04:34 – 00:04:49] Nitin Bajaj

A lot to be read and understood beneath that. Amongst the many things in the different aspects of life, I’m sure you’ve come across many a challenge. What’s the one you would like to call out?

[00:04:51 – 00:09:50] Vinita Gupta

Well, I think to put life in perspective, after college, I’ve been pushing myself, well, I should say beyond college, I’ve been pushing myself for the last 50 years. To boil that down into one challenge, one learning, and what transformed me would be difficult. I treat life, profession, family, all that together, which all of us experienced as a combat. So you have to be ready to jump in, pull out when it gets too dangerous for your own mental being. But, you know, things do get hot and heavy, and you have to conserve your energy so that you don’t kill yourself. So I think challenging The ages have been enormous. To count a few, I’m not even including the discomfort levels when I just came from India and I had to interact with the culture in America, which is pretty hard to do, and especially as a single person, single woman, man or woman, both.

But then when I started the company, it was like taking a plunge in the dark. I had no idea where I was going, there was no roadmap for that. So doing that and in that process, I got very quickly immersed in problem solving. I consider entrepreneurship as a problem solving exercise forever. First big challenge was when my partner left me six months after I started the company.

Here goes 50% of the company. It was the expectations before and after that I had to deal with. I was ready to shut the shop down in six months but decided to move forward and that was a painful re-immersion into doing the business as a single person. Then came the challenge of regulatory bodies wanting to shut down my company because I was in telecommunications business and there were a lot of regulations on that.

It was like, really? That could happen to me? But we overcame that. And then I was, when I was trying to raise money, for example, I found myself pregnant with my first daughter. And it was like, how am I going to handle that? So it is finding a solution and believing that there is a solution out there. There are no examples to follow.

In those cases. So I just did that. Fortunately, the internet market took off and as a result of that, I was not just able to raise money, hire very competent people, and thanks to them because they helped me lift the ship and as a result we were able to go public. How many companies succeed to reach that stage in technology? That is in its self a very small percentage. So I crossed that threshold.

And was I happy? Of course, I was very delighted that I did that. But there was no resting. It was like next challenge and the next challenge after that. So I continued to rise up to the new level of challenges. And in the process, I think I learned enormously, not just about how to run a business, how to value human beings, and how to keep them in the company, which is you almost have to be more of a giver than taker. If they view that you are taking up everything from them because we couldn’t pay them market salaries, so that was given, that is given in any technology company because they can’t afford the market salaries for their engineers.

So you are giving them much more less in material wealth, but the purpose, the mission, the drive, they get energized by that. That’s why they join startups, knowing that it is a big gamble, not just for me, but for them as well.

[00:09:51 – 00:10:12] Nitin Bajaj

Yeah, this is such a phenomenal and fascinating journey and a testament to your persistence, your relentlessness, despite all of these challenges. And none of these in and of itself were small, but just combined for you to not just sort but thrive and take a company public. I mean, 95% of businesses fail.

[00:10:12 – 00:10:13] Vinita Gupta

Exactly.

[00:10:13 – 00:10:41] Nitin Bajaj

And to be one of those 5% in and of itself, but even a micro percentage of that go all the way to getting publicly listed and at a time when this was not done before and not done by many women and of South Asian origin, someone as a first generation American– I mean, there’s so many accolades and so many feathers in your cap that You should write a book in which you did.

[00:10:42 – 00:10:43] Vinita Gupta

Yeah, I did. I did it.

[00:10:44 – 00:10:45] Nitin Bajaj

So tell us a little bit about that.

[00:10:46 – 00:13:29] Vinita Gupta

Well, let me show you the book that I wrote. This is my book, which was just two weeks back published, the Women in Deed. I want to emphasize the title because I learned everything in my life by doing it. So this encompasses my learnings in the hopes that people will take something that they find useful the way I learned, not just what I learned, because everybody has their own goals about what they want to learn at a given point in time. So they can push themselves just like I pushed myself, and it encompasses three things, which is in the subtitle. One is being an entrepreneur and being able to take a company public. The second is how I got into bridge.

And what I have gotten from it and I’m still on that journey. So I just tried learning from bridge because those lessons, if at all I can even say that they were even harder than lessons learned in my business because they proliferate through business as well as life. So I enjoyed that and also at an encompasses my journey with my late husband, Nitin Bajaj, who was extremely accomplished, but he passed away four years back. We had 47 years of marriage together, and we both were very hard charging people. I call it marriage of two tigers. So that is also because for an entrepreneur, one has to combine the journey at home and journey at work. And we were both very liberal with our comments on each other’s performance, which were sometimes not so welcome, but sometimes they made us better.

So that’s what our lives together was, and I think it is possible to do that and we as a couple were extremely successful rather than our individual accomplishments.

[00:13:29 – 00:13:43] Nitin Bajaj

You know again that’s another rare accomplishment where both of you are extremely accomplished, extremely competitive and are able to, as I say, two tigers cannot be in the same den.

[00:13:43 – 00:13:44] Vinita Gupta

Absolutely.

[00:13:44 – 00:13:45] Nitin Bajaj

But you made it work.

[00:13:45 – 00:13:46] Vinita Gupta

We made it work.

[00:13:46 – 00:13:51] Nitin Bajaj

Yeah. You made that blossom. So congratulations to you on that.

[00:13:51 – 00:13:52] Vinita Gupta

Thank you. Thank you.

[00:13:53 – 00:14:04] Nitin Bajaj

Now, as you look forward, what is the one most exciting opportunity that you want to share with us? So.

[00:14:06 – 00:15:25] Vinita Gupta

I am 75 years old. I turned 75 this year. 75 years young. So, I don’t define my goal and shoot for it. I basically let my heart tell me at every day, different stages of life, you get sucked into different things for different reasons and based on where you are in life. So I just want to keep living in a purposeful way to make life exciting for myself. And I’m competitive.

So I have goals and bridge. I have goals and writing. I mean, I wasn’t a born writer. I wasn’t a born bridge player. I was not a born entrepreneur, but it seemed like something I could go after, and it takes decades of effort. It is not something that happens in a few years to you. So one has to stay in the game, as they say in bridge.

You have to play your game and stay in the game. That is the only way to absorb and achieve something.

[00:15:28 – 00:15:52] Nitin Bajaj

As we talk about the future, I’d like to take a pause and reflect and invite you to share two moments in your past life and career. One where things did not work out as you had expected. There was disappointment, maybe failure, lessons. And another instance where things exceeded your expectation and became a success beyond your imagination.

[00:15:54 – 00:19:59] Vinita Gupta

Sir, maybe I’ll reverse the order of questions. I would say The biggest achievement that I remember from running a company was that I was the first level manager when I left my corporate job and started my company. But then I was able to hire people who were my vice presidents who were far more capable than I was.

And why did they join me? I have some notion now, but at the time, I was just delighted that they joined me. And I needed their help because I was managing so much at home with my children, family, and then I had a company to run and I had taken venture capital, which meant I had a commitment. I wasn’t just doing it for myself. I wanted my venture capitalists to feel that investment was worthwhile in me. And I compared that where I wanted to show to my parents that they invested in my engineering education and in sending me to the US. That was financial hardship.

It wasn’t like they were poor, but it was a financial hardship. And I wanted to show it to them that I will be there for them in their old age. And fortunately, they moved to the US and I was able to take care of them in their old age. So I’m very delighted and happy about that. Failure wise, I had a lot of failures, small and big ones. And let me start off by describing even though failures shaped me, but they didn’t hold me back. My failure was, if we call it a failure, after running up a public company for five years as a public company, The winds changed.

The markets are ever changing in technology. So internet, very soon what we call internet bubble burst in 2000 and my company went public in 1994. So six years later, my suddenly revenues collapsed as a public company and public markets are very unforgiving. So the stock took a plunge. Employees got disenchanted, especially engineers who were working on newer products, and they started leaving. Consequently, I could not deliver the products in a timely way, which took further hit on the revenues. So it was a spiraling down, and eventually the handwriting was on the wall, and I decided it was time to move on.

And as much as I was very disappointed, with that outcome, yet it prepared me for life later on that I got so emboldened that if I could handle that, I could handle anything in life. And I think that is what I have become since. So this is life for me. And, you know, then my husband had a lot of health issues. I tackled those, and he passed away four years back. But again, I did let myself being held back even though, of course, I felt the emotions. Of course, I took a few years to recover from that.

But, you know, that’s life.

[00:20:00 – 00:21:46] Nitin Bajaj

You know, that is so deep in so many ways. For someone who is extremely competitive and extremely accomplished and relentless, the ability to comprehend all of that and move on must have taken a lot. Like to kind of say, you kind of put it in simple words, but I’m sure at that point it wasn’t simple. It wasn’t easy to, in many ways, people look at this and say, are you giving up? You did not give up, but you had the wisdom to say, yeah, it is time to look at, you know, life in a different perspective. So I really I applaud you for that. And also, as you mentioned, to deal with the personal challenges that were going on and just the ability to step back and look at the bigger picture, it takes a lot of wisdom, it takes a lot of courage, it takes things that you don’t have a playbook for.

So I can only, I don’t think I can even imagine what you what it would have gone through and what it would have taken and the experience that you’ve been able to capture. And I’m really glad that you have been extremely vocal about sharing these things through your blogs, through your articles and now through your book. So thank you for being vulnerable and transparent and in setting that roadmap for others that are following you.

[00:21:46 – 00:23:02] Vinita Gupta

Well, let me add a little bit. The reason I’m smiling is because those things were disappointing but you know life gives you a lot of handouts also. So I felt fortunate in somehow it came in my psyche that you know good things happen in life and for no good no thanks to you because it’s not always you’re doing. Similarly bad things happen and they are also not your doing sometimes. Sometimes they are so it’s not like I don’t look back and analyze. The only thing the game of bridge has taught to me is don’t try to fight yesterday’s wars. That chapter is over. Move forward.

That’s the only way you are going to be able to do something more worthwhile, hopefully, in your next second act or whatever, which was bridge for me. So that’s why I don’t I don’t let myself get down on myself for too long. I do get down, of course, I am human.

[00:23:04 – 00:23:08] Nitin Bajaj

It takes a lot of wisdom, so congratulations on that.

[00:23:08 – 00:23:08] Vinita Gupta

Thank you.

[00:23:09 – 00:23:27] Nitin Bajaj

Now, I usually ask people, what do they do for fun? So in your case, obviously you enjoy bridge, but it’s also something you’re competitive, you’re one of the best at the game in the world. I want to ask you that question, what do you do for fun? What do you do to de-stress?

[00:23:29 – 00:27:37] Vinita Gupta

Well, what do I do to de-stress? I think the first thing I do for de-stressing is not let myself get ahead of me, which is you don’t start patting yourself on the back.

It’s just not my nature. I just keep saying, oh, that was good, you know? But what I do is I enjoy multiple things, doing multiple things. So, for example, I write a I write blogs and now I wrote a book. You know, it was fun to learn how to write blogs, but it was fun till it became a long endeavor of writing a book.

Then it becomes painful. Similarly, social bridge was fun to do, but competitive bridge is very intense. So it’s no longer. I also do painting. So oil painting, which I learned in high school. And I do that even today because first of all, it lets me decompress or my mind go in a different way. And I’m not thinking about bridge.

I’m not thinking about writing. I’m not thinking about relationships. You know how you can get entangled in your own thoughts by thinking, oh, that person doesn’t like me. Maybe I didn’t say things in the right way. We just imagine. That’s so human for people to do. And that’s what gets me upset about myself rather than what the other person may or may not have meant.

Because how do you know what he had meant? Because there are people are thinking so many things about life that they are not quite focused on you and you are deriving conclusions that what could it have meant. And that is this part which I try to learn how not to do.

So, and I traveled. I love to travel. I love to go to wilderness experiences. And once we took a lot of trips with our kids in cruises. And one of the best one was going to Antarctica, which was painful. So you have to have some discomfort in order to have an ultimate experience. And it was going over Drake’s channel, which really gets you, I don’t know, 80% of the people in the ship were sick that they didn’t show up for breakfast.

So I kind of sailed through that. Not sail through. I was sick also. But I didn’t. I said, okay, that was that. But then they offered an opportunity on the ship to take what they call Antarctic Plunge. And I was over 55 then, probably the oldest one in the line to take an Antarctic Plunge.

I said, How difficult can that be? Yes, it’s going to be cold, but I can’t even imagine how cold it will be. So it is just mindset you make and you do it. Somebody said, you, can’t take that experience away. It was so enthralling for me. You know, other people may not have thought anything. My daughters jumped, but they were in their teens or 20s.

So, yeah, of course they could do it. So I like, I like to just challenge myself a little bit more because I get the thrill out of it. So that’s been my nature, my life, and I just lived my life the way I think I should live.

[00:27:37 – 00:27:39] Nitin Bajaj

So there’s a little bit of crazy involved in that, I get it.

[00:27:40 – 00:27:58] Vinita Gupta

Of course. Of course.

You know, big. Being crazy, being aggressive, being bold, ruffling a few feathers, it’s necessary to do anything in life. If you are a miss nice person, life doesn’t take you anywhere.

[00:27:59 – 00:28:02] Nitin Bajaj

It’s part of living a full life.

[00:28:03 – 00:28:24] Vinita Gupta

Yeah, I guess so. I mean, I left the life that I can come up with. I mean, nobody taught me how to live life. Nobody teaches anybody how to live life. So you come up with your own. Playbook and you do whatever you do. I think the only thing I would say is don’t let yourself get down.

[00:28:26 – 00:28:36] Nitin Bajaj

I love that perspective. Which brings me to my favorite part of the show. We call this the one-line life lessons. Vinita, I would love for you to share your life lessons with us.

[00:28:39 – 00:28:42] Vinita Gupta

I think one life lesson for me.

[00:28:42 – 00:28:42] Nitin Bajaj

Is.

[00:28:44 – 00:28:55] Vinita Gupta

Do not admire anybody too much and do not let anybody undermine you. That is in your hands.

[00:28:56 – 00:29:12] Nitin Bajaj

Love that. It’s very deep, very relevant and something that’s close to my heart. If you have more, we would love to have you share more of these online life lessons. So please continue and provide any perspectives if you have any.

[00:29:13 – 00:29:29] Vinita Gupta

Well, I think people just think too much and do too little. So if you want to do something, go for it. Life will tell you whether you will succeed or not. Don’t get opinions of other people.

[00:29:32 – 00:29:35] Nitin Bajaj

Love that. Don’t look for validation. Just go do it.

[00:29:36 – 00:29:36] Vinita Gupta

Right.

[00:29:37 – 00:30:05] Nitin Bajaj

Vinita, thank you so much for making the time to share your journey, your amazing story and your life lessons with us. Again, congratulations and kudos for the fascinating journey you’ve you have and more importantly for sharing it with others and creating that pathway for others to not just follow in the footsteps but also to find their own ways. Really, really appreciate it.

[00:30:05 – 00:30:11] Vinita Gupta

Thank you very much Nitin. I’m honored that you chose me to be on this show.

[00:30:12 – 00:30:13] Nitin Bajaj

Thank you so much.