Adam Torres and Anu Bhardwaj discuss the Power Up Conference
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Show Notes:
Listen to coverage of the 2024 Power Up Conference: Together We Lead in Washington, DC. In this episode, Adam Torres interviews Anu Bhardwaj, Founder & CEO at SHEQONOMI, explore SHEQONOMI and the Power Up Conference.
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About Anu Bhardwaj
Founder & CEO of SHEQONOMI, the world’s first suite of mobile apps on Android, iOS, KaiOS, and JiOS focused on women-centric podcasts targeting the bottom billion. Check out our web-based directory on the link above to submit your RSS Feed or check out our curated selection of 5,000+ podcasts across 50+ languages (http://www.podcastHERS.com/podcasts). SHEQONOMI is also one of 7 female-led startups for Reliance JiO’s 2022 “Build For Bharat” Cohort featuring 50 of India’s leading mobile startups leading innovation across all JiO Platforms. 2021 Global Finalists for Financial Inclusion (The Peoples Republic of Bangladesh) for the SDG Impact Accelerator hosted by the Government of Turkey, UN Technology Bank, UNDP, and other multilateral and multinational stakeholders 2020 Global Transform Fund- (COVID Innovation) Competition WINNERS from the Islamic Development Bank for the Royal Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, The Sultanate of Oman, The United Arab Emirates, People’s Republic of Bangladesh, and the Republic of Indonesia. In 2021, SHEQONOMI launched “Amplifying Her Voice” Global Virtual Summit Series in colloboration with The State of Women Institute, Women Investing in Women DIGITAL and 55 global women’s organizations that had 3,000+ attendees, 555 global speakers. from 120+ countries, featured in 90+ global newswires including Bloomberg, Thompson Reuters, Yahoo! Finance and other prominent news outlets to date.
Prior to founding SHEQONOMI, Ms. Bhardwaj spearheaded Women Investing in Women DIGITAL, The State of Women Institute, and the 2010-2013 U.S. Department of Commerce Private Equity/Venture Capital Certified Trade Missions to the Nordics and Middle East, representing over $175 billion USD private-equity and venture-capital interests in collaboration with the International Trade Administration, the U.S. Embassies in the Royal Kingdoms of Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and the Sultanate of Oman. Her client list includes top-tier global private equity, venture capital, and fund-of-funds such as Irving Place Capital, Castle Harlan, W.L. Ross, Pegasus Advisors, NEA, HBG Holdings, Cubera Private Equity, Lion Capital, Novak Biddle, Alinda Capital, Top Tier Capital, Pantheon, Pathway Capital, TH Lee, and Veronis Schuler Stevenson.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest on the show, just head on over to mission matters.com and click on Be Our Guest to Apply. All right, today’s a very special episode. We’re shooting a series for the Power Up Conference 2024 in Washington, DC and we’re also celebrating Women’s Equality Day and a Mission Matters book launch.
We got a whole lot going on in DC and my guest right now, Annu Bar Watch. Annu, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. All right. So we got a lot to talk about. I know you’re a podcaster, have a podcast network. We’re going to go into all of that, but first things first, what brings you to the conference?
So I have been friends with Gloria Felt for almost a decade. And we met when I lived in Phoenix, Arizona, and she had her first conference and I had, I had set up women investing in women digital back then. and heard about her work, and we have stayed in contact over the years. I moved, she spent some time in New York, stayed in contact, and we’ve now come back together after 10 years.
Oh, that’s amazing. What do you think is, why do you think this conference is so special? Like, what do you think is some of the secrets to its success? I think most first and foremost, it would probably be the intentionality. And we launched her podcast on Chiconomy, which is called intentioning this. So given that, with that relationship that we had, you know, helping her with audio presence and also working with her as we were developing our own technology, our own podcast, listening apps.
I think there was that for me, especially specifically, it was just seeing where we could take this, like from. Concept to here we are at the conference and watching her 10 year history and watching our 10 year history. Like we’ve just been working in parallel together all this time. Wow. What do you think makes the community so special?
Like here? There’s a lot of overlap, so There’s many different organizations on a shared mission and your mission matters. So this is all about alignment and there isn’t a single woman here that’s not aligned with the other. We’re all working in different shades, I should say, but it’s all the same, the same rainbow.
Yeah. So one of the things that I like to always talk about is I want more people to come. I want more people to join, whether they’re corporate sponsors, whether they’re attendees, whether they’re, what would you say to the people that aren’t here today? The people that aren’t here today, I would say because next year is going to be the 11 year.
I know that come on, Gloria. Yeah, I would say find a way to engage because it’s great work and it’s great people. At the end of the day, there are so many generations tapping into this wisdom that’s here. And for me specifically, I’ve I’ve been. Programs along the year, along the, along the way. And the last one that I did was 50 women in entrepreneurship and I met some angel investors and we’re still very close and very connected.
I haven’t actually taken any money from them, but it’s the building of those relationships over time. And we’re all growing as, as business leaders and as executives and, Women who care about the next generation. So I think there’s something here for everyone and it’s a great place to get connected. Talk a little bit more about that women in entrepreneurship and I’ll tell you where I’m going with this.
A lot of times entrepreneurs in general, we just kind of go. forward, we go forward, we don’t know that there may be help, resources, ideas, doesn’t always have to be money. I love that you said you didn’t even take the investment even though you could have, but you didn’t because you didn’t need it. So now you’re building, but I’m sure you took knowledge.
You took other things and you also gave, talk a little bit about women in entrepreneurship. Okay, so this is what I’ve been doing for almost all my life. What it feels like. You’re born an entrepreneur, one of those? It’s in your DNA. For you, it’s in your DNA? Yeah, it’s in my DNA. It’s definitely, I came out this way.
A hustler, I came out a hustler. Poor parents. Were your parents entrepreneurs, or no? My father was, yeah. Okay, okay. My mom, I mean, she owns him, so it’s like. So she, that was her investment. I got you. I got you. So yeah, I guess we’re all entrepreneurs. What I will say is I, I came to Washington 20 years ago and I went to Georgetown and I have been an entrepreneur ever since I was like, I don’t know, like there’s been no real job internships maybe, but no real job I’ve always been starting companies from that time period.
And. One of the things that you learn is that your net worth is your net work and part of what I realized at an early early time in my entrepreneurial journey is that you keep people that are looking out for your best interest who are mission aligned very close to you. Yeah, and And I have done that Not just with take the lead, but with other communities here in Washington, I’m still connected to them and it’s that community that really helps propel you to the next level always.
And you find out about opportunities, you find out about grants, you find out about other investors and so on and so forth. And And I would say to this point, Shikonomy has been completely built on non dilutive capital, a million dollars worth of grants and opportunities. So it’s connections and so many of these people Gloria is friends with and I’m friends with and it’s that community.
And so it’s building on top of each other. And even if. If the community doesn’t know, they have people outside that are like, Oh, you, Anu, call her. Like, you know? So it just becomes one of these, it’s a, it’s a currency at the end of the day. Your reputation becomes your currency. The people you work with become your currency and vice versa.
Like they can lean on me. And so I get calls constantly, Hey Anu, could you get us more people? Hey Anu, could you help us with our press releases? Hey Anu? Like, you know, I’ve got tech issues. Hey, I knew like I can’t figure this out. So it’s, we’re all resources for one another. What was one of your first businesses that you remember?
The early days? I just want to see if we would have been friends when we were both little kid that were entrepreneurs. What’s that? One of my early ones was like comic books or like, I don’t know. I had all kinds of random things. Baseball cards. I don’t know what I was selling. I mean, what was the early days, your first business that you remember?
So I’ll tell you my earliest memories. I went to this school where we used to collect soup labels. Did you ever do that? Yes, yes, yes. For computers and things like that? So I literally would go door to door. I was like really good at door to door. And I made friends with everybody. And I was always selling something.
Whether it was gift wrap, whether it was candles, whether it was like I love it. Picking up soup labels. I was like hardcore sales. Yeah. And, I mean, whatever I could do to get a soup label. I’m like, can I sing you a song? Can I tell you, like, I’ll play Like, you know, I’ll make a puzzle with you. I’ll play chess with you.
Like whatever, you know, it’s like I made a lot of friends in the neighborhood. So I was the soup label girl. Oh my gosh. That’s an amazing story. I knew you had a great story for that. I just knew it. So fast forwarding just a little bit from the soup labels. Let’s talk about your current project and your current business.
Tell me more. Okay. This project I’m obsessed with. It’s a podcast listening app that we built during COVID and when lockdown happened, there was this intense feeling of what happens to people on the other side of the world who can’t find out about COVID and I was homeschooling my daughter, Aria. And one day zoom school stopped working and Google classroom stopped working.
And she’s like, well, what’s going to happen? We’re not going to make it to fourth grade like this. We’re all going to be like fail out of school. And I said, I’m not worried about you. I’m worried about all those other little girls. Yeah. What do you think is happening to them? And she said, I don’t know, mama, what’s happening.
And I said, it’s not your problem. Don’t worry about it. She goes, no, no, it is my problem. Tell me. I want to know again, seven and a half. So I said, okay, I’ll tell you the truth. They’re probably getting sold. They’re probably getting trafficked. And if they’re lucky, they’re being married off to someone much older than their, your age.
And so she had big tears in her eyes and she said, that’s not a choice. We have to do something. We have to help. And that was the Genesis of. Okay, now we need to get help out to these kids. How are we going to do this? So we contacted. Our tech team in India and said, guys, can you help us? And Aria had launched a crypto for kids wallet.
At the time we presented this at the United nations at blockchain for impact. And we figured out a way to take our podcast and hook it up to her digital wallet. Amazing. And then it’s listen, learn and earn. So anyone listening to anything earns tokens, like rewards, points. And then you can exchange them for gifts.
So this started off on one tangent where we were like, let’s figure this out and build it. And fast forward, we won a lot of grants and competitions. The first being the Islamic development bank COVID innovation competition and 5, 000 people, 175 countries. There were 30 winners, seven women, and we won the grand prize.
So we got the money from Saudi Arabia, Oman, UAE, Bangladesh, Indonesia. So, our apps were built on Android, iOS, KaiOS, and a new platform called Jio. We’re waiting on their phone. It’s been four years and I’m sitting quietly because we’ve been doing this in stealth. We’re now in cloud phones and we’re reaching the bottom billion.
And what does that mean? It means you and I can afford a data plan. You and I can afford a smartphone. You and I have money in the bank to pay for our cell phone bills, subscriptions, right? Subscriptions, yeah. All that. And if you’re living on less than 5 a day, this is not your priority. You’ve got to put food on the table and hopefully you don’t have to sell one of your kids, right?
To get the information. And it’s not something we talk about, but we should, because there’s a half, half the world’s population is living on this than $5 a day. Mm-Hmm. . So without knowing, we started building on two G, 3G, 4G, and these feature phones. Yeah. And then $30 smartphones. Wow. And $40 feature phones.
Yes. And now we’ve got them on laptops, low cost TVs, low cost every Wow. Everything. We started in India, now we’re all over Africa, we’re all over Latin America, Mexico is one of our biggest populations, Papua New Guinea, literally all over the, all over the world right now. What’s your vision, what’s your big vision for the platform?
So the big vision is everyone should have a voice, or be heard. Yes. And how do we do that? We get. People that can now listen on these low cost devices. And we have 5, 000 podcasts in 65 languages. So Arabic, Swahili, Bahasa, Bengali, Urdu, Pashto, Spanish, French, Tagalog, of course we have English, English, and the rest are all these different languages.
What we can do now with generative AI is we can take content in Bengali, Convert it into English and from English it can go to Spanish. So this woman in Calcutta can now be talking to someone in Lima. Wow. And they’ve never been able to do that on a device they can afford. Wow. Right? So a 10, 12, 30 phone is not going to break the bank.
They don’t have to sell their daughter. Yeah. Right? And then once they start getting access, they can start monetizing content just like you do. And that gives them a way out of poverty. It’s not that we didn’t know how, we just didn’t do it. We didn’t do it because they can’t pay subscriptions. Yeah. Let’s be honest.
And they can’t afford these phones. It’s not like we didn’t have the tech. We did. So why didn’t we do it? So all these questions are being raised now and it’s not, Oh, five years from now or 10 years from now, we already did it. It’s been done. I can see the phones working. Yes. So give it to the kids, give it to the women, give it to the girls.
And when you talk about investing in women, give them a voice at a bare minimum. What’s been the response, like what’s been the response from all these different communities as you go into them? How has it been received? So I’m on the build side, and right now I’m looking at a camera and I’m looking at you.
But otherwise I’m looking at a computer screen. Or I’m doing Zoom calls trying to build this technology, right? I see the numbers, and I’m getting interest obviously from the Islamic Bank. Of course. First, most important person is I look at Aria, my daughter, and she donated her college fund. I look at the numbers, and I’m looking at Aria, my daughter, and she donated her college fund.
Wow. To build this. She was the first angel, like literal angel. And she’s like, I want my, my money to go towards helping other girls. So you look at someone like that and you say, okay, I did well. And this is a win because she’s learning something on how to be a better person. The second is the Islamic bank.
They’re now in 56 countries. So they took a bet on us. They never expected this to work. We went. Beyond the proposal that we wrote Algorand foundation they ran out of money in the middle like we got like 85 percent of that grant Luckily, and then crypto markets went crazy We also won SDG impact accelerator.
So they They’ve been quiet. We haven’t told them what’s happened. And then most recently we’ve partnered with an organization called Women in Cloud and Women in Cloud is getting ready to announce this week. We have a partnership with them where we’re going to award 2, 500 Scholarships for getting more women in AI valued at 11.
11 million dollars. Absolutely amazing. So that is like, you can build the best tech, you can have the best content curated, but you need women on the other side who are going to help with this generative AI, the translations, the algorithms, the data sets. So let’s go train them. And now we needed a corporate sponsor to underwrite these scholarships and that was Microsoft.
Amazing. I took some of this, but I want to make it clear. How do people get involved? Whether it’s on the corporate side, whether it’s as a content creator, business, your small business owner, how do people get involved from all the different angles? So walk me through that. Absolutely. So mission matters podcast.
I’m guessing you. You’d like, like more listeners and you’d want to get it as broad as possible. And you’re already one of the top podcasts that’s out there. When this new opportunities and listenership opens up, you want to be able to reach those people. And I have a membership right now where if you pay a thousand dollars, you become a lifetime member and I’m going to get you into KaiOS.
I’m going to get you into cloud phone. And anything else where we’re building. So this reaches a new audience that’s on these low cost devices that may not have had access. That’s a starting point. If you’re a corporate, you may want to participate. And so that’s the content creators out there. That’s the content.
And that’s opened you gave us as an example, but what type of other content, because all the people watching, like what kind of other content creators are able to get involved? So right now it’s limited to podcasts only. And you can either do it free, you give me your RSS, and I put you on a curated, curated list.
What kind of shows too? That’s what I meant by that. I don’t mean, I know it’s a podcast, but I mean what kind of shows are you looking for to curate? We have health, we have social impact, we have entrepreneurship, we have leadership, we have tech, meditation. Oh, so it’s a lot. It’s not one particular niche and you’re probably going to keep building different niches.
Am I off? Like hundreds of categories. Wonderful. Already. That’s what I wanted to make sure was clear. Go ahead. Yes, so we have hundreds of categories. And we have curated topics like climate change, women’s sports, women’s health, mental health specifically. So there’s doctors out there that have made content.
And many times it’s in English, but there’s 1. 2 billion women who still haven’t seen a doctor around the world. Now imagine if I took that English content and made it, turned it into Spanish. Then you have women on the, in Latin America that can access this content that maybe have hormonal issues or maybe have breast cancer issues or different things like maternal health.
Right. And so there’s different ways to collaborate. And let’s say you don’t want to make a podcast. But you found this amazing podcast that’s been helping you deal with cancer. Maybe you can underwrite that, sponsor that podcast for going global or converting into different languages. So this is a new model of like, People like you and me who want to serve, help amplify others, voices, including our own, and make sure it reaches people that need it.
Cause that may not have had an education. They’ve been forced out of school. 900 million girls were forced out of school. So now how do they, how are they going to get back in? How are they going to learn? So these are things like not everybody learns by reading. Some people learn by listening or watching like you.
We’ve seen that with YouTube now. Of course. So this is. One of these opportunities that everyone can support and be part of the solution. Yeah, and that’s so that’s the content creators now the corporate side. What kind of things are you looking for in corporate partners? Wonderful. So corporates Let’s say you have an internal podcast And it’s something That you want to bring your community together internal community women’s groups or whatever.
It could be any group I’m talking to several right now that are corporates that are like we have an internal podcast. This doesn’t leave You You know, our network and it’s firewalled and so on and so forth. But we have a series around women entrepreneurs and can you help us co create this? And it can be for different countries or different regions.
And once we co create this, we can spotlight our top female entrepreneurs and that’s a way to help them build their businesses. Or we can even create a network around women, businesses, business owners that have their podcasts. We could create a channel for them. And then these companies can either underwrite that, support it, be a guest.
Or even host. So there’s different ways for them to participate. And then most importantly, the skilling. So let’s say we’re talking about digital transformation. There’s a way for women who don’t speak English to also share their content. And they can say, we’ll underwrite a podcast in Bengali, or we’ll underwrite a podcast in Spanish.
Absolutely amazing. I love it. I’m a huge fan and advocate of podcasts. Podcasters love to support them, bring them on the show all the time. Yes. Last thing I want you to do, I want you to look into the camera and tell everybody else how they can get involved. I want to hear websites. How do they do it?
Okay. Lovely. So for those of you who are tuning in today, please check out podcasthers. com. It’s P O D C A S T. H E R S dot com and you can find us there and it will link to everything that’s on the apps for Chiconomy and you can go on our socials. We’re on Instagram, we’re on YouTube, we’re on Facebook, we’re on LinkedIn.
So we will see you there. And if you do come and find us on LinkedIn, you can search under Chiconomy, which is S H E Q O N O M I. And our community is building and you can see our ambassadors, you can see our members, you can see the conferences that we’re attending, and also special events. Discounts and codes that you might want to use for conferences like take the lead.
Yeah amazing and for everybody watching just so you know we’ll put the links in the show notes so that you can just click on them and head right on over and Speaking of the audience if this is your first time with mission matters and you haven’t done it yet Hit that subscribe or follow button. This is a daily show each and every day We’re bringing you new content new ideas and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way in your journey as well Well, I knew again.
Thank you so much for coming on the show. It’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you, my friend. It’s been an honor. I’m hoping we have more of these in the future. Amazing.
