The journey of Serein

In July 2015, in between embracing motherhood and my full time job as an Applied Mathematician, I kept looking around but could not find the answer to a question that was on my mind – Why are there so few women in the field of science or more broadly in leadership roles? Now when I look back, I think I was being driven by a serious mission to find an answer to this question.

When I started out I wasn’t quite like the savvy founders you encounter in India’s silicon valley. I had about 100 odd LinkedIn connections and all of them belonged to the mathematical world. With no office, no network amongst the HR community, no business degree but armed with a laptop, an experience of a PhD in a field where there are rarely any women, a head full of ideas and a LOT of passion, I decided to study and try to understand the barriers women face in workplaces.

The first year on this crazy  journey with an unknown destination was filled with loads of challenges to say the least.  With no space to call our own, every meeting was held in various coffee shops all across Bengaluru. Most client meetings I took, my little toddler came with me, waiting outside with her father [the photo is from one such meeting in 2015]. During the first 3 months, there were very few takers for the product – who had ever heard of using science and research to foster inclusion! But there were some – a handful of idealists who wanted to go beyond the checkbox training their organisations were doing for many years. 

By June 2016, the workload was too large to manage with interns and consultants. I hired one of the interns as our first employee, a fresh graduate churning out content for sessions I was facilitating. It was quickly followed by a lawyer and a youngster to manage operations. Together with the legal expert, I started facilitating training programs on workplace safety backed with a lot of research and data as we believed that it was a critical step in creating a more inclusive environment for women in the workplace. That summer, we received a sweet gift from our first client. They were kind enough to offer us a few desks in their office. It wasn’t much, but having a dedicated space to work and a conference room for meetings felt like a luxury. It was a small victory, but definitely a significant one for me. 

By 2017, my little baby Serein had grown and was not a toddler anymore. We needed our own space. We moved into a one-bedroom flat in Koramangala in Bengaluru. The flat was far from perfect, the roof leaked during the monsoons and those days we were crammed into a tiny room. But it was ours and it represented the growth of Serein from an idea to a tangible reality.  It was in this humble space that we began to put together the essential elements of our business—our learning management system, our e-learning courses, our first research study. Every day was a hustle but we did not give up and always chose to see the bigger picture.

Fast forward to 2022, and Serein had outgrown the tiny flat. We moved into a cute little rooftop office, complete with helicopter views of the city. It wasn’t just an office for me but  it was a reflection of how far we had come. The space was warm, a place where our team could talk, collaborate and truly feel at home.  It was a space where we could be ourselves and do our best work. It was this very place where our team count increased substantially.

And now, in 2024, I look around at what Serein has become, and I am filled with pride and my dream has  definitely come true. We have built a team that pushes boundaries and takes risks with ideas. I have always promoted that it’s okay to fail, as long as we learn and grow from it. We have embraced sustainability and frugality in everything that we do, surviving and thriving as a highly profitable bootstrapped company without the need for any investor funding. Our office is more than just a workspace, it’s a place of collaboration, where people come together to create, innovate and support each other in our mission of creating safe, diverse and inclusive workplaces.

I started Serein with nothing but a passion for change, and today I am blown away to have received the answer to my question which was lingering on my mind on one hand and as well as to witness what can be achieved with hard work, resilience and a lot of risk-taking. 

Every part of this journey, from that tiny room in Koramangala to our beautiful rooftop office, has a story. It’s not just about the physical space.  It’s about the people, the ideas and the belief that we can make a difference.

This is Serein—a reflection of who we really are and what we stand for. We are opening up Serein to explore collaboration opportunities with all of you on my network. Please feel free to drop by our new office and we would love to have a discussion with you over a cup of hot filter coffee!