Women Will: We Need To Back Ourselves, Says Binal Doshi Of Plexus MD

"I abide by Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In," said Binal Doshi, co-founder Plexus MD, the Linked In-like network for doctors. "We feel shy, timid, even at a team level. We need to back ourselves up and the other women in the team, and be assertive," she said.

Binal Doshi, Arpita Ganesh, CEO of Buttercups, and Shailini Amin, founder of Moral Fibre, spoke to SheThePeople.TV founder, Shaili Chopra, at a panel discussion at Google's Women Will conference to which SheThePeople.TV was a partner.

On whether we need to think of themselves as women entrepreneurs:

Doshi spoke about her two co-founders, who are both male. In the first four or five months, it was just three of them. But she did speak of times when she would go for meetings with clients or investors and would get ignored, while the investors focused on her co-founders.

Do women help other women?

According to CEO of Buttercups, Arpita Ganesh, she has not received any special support from women. Help has come from the most unexpected places, and the people she thought she could count on have sometimes deserted her.

"It's time we started being called for entrepreneurship events and not only women entrepreneurship events," she said. She did say that the women entrepreneurs she has gotten to know have helped her a lot. They also always make it a point to help people who need advice. 

On the confidence of starting up:

The network began organically, said Binal. Her parents, and the parents of her co-founders are doctors. She is also a doctor by training. So her immediate network consisted of around 1,000 doctors, who were a call away. That gave her the initial confidence.

"We also had had the relevant expertise and domain knowledge to go ahead. We met 300 doctors one on one, when we didn't even have a website. Even if they were known to us, we had to make a pitch and explain our idea -- which often took ten minutes to explain, because we were new ourselves."

Binal said that they also started looking at other marketing avenues and made their presence available on all mediums. Now, they are on their way to creating a global network of doctors. "People always question me, asking 'are you really the best person to do this', she says. "But you just have to back yourself up," Binal said.

Here's to more power to women in entrepreneurship!

Also Read: WomenWill: Arpita Ganesh On How She Grew Buttercups Digitally