She fought back after the dotcom bubble and struck oil with big data

Sudeshna Datta, co-founder of AbsolutData.

Ah, the mythical woman entrepreneur. She’s a creature of mystery and elegance, strong beyond belief and centered enough to balance work, family, and internal happiness. Sudeshna Datta doesn’t indulge that sort of rhetoric, though. “There’s no difference between men and women when it comes to quantitative fields in India,” she says. “People just focus on skills here.”

While I’m not sure if I agree, she definitely knows better than I do. As the executive vice president and co-founder of AbsolutData, she grew her firm from three employees to over 400. The big data analytics company spans across forty countries. In 2008, it was ranked one of the fastest growing companies in Asia by Deloitte, and won NASSCOM’s emerging company of the year award in India.

It’s been fifteen years since Sudeshna first co-founded it, and it’s weathered all sorts of tech storms. Today, it has offices around the globe, including San Francisco, Delhi, Singapore, the Middle East, and the UK.

We decided to stick with the startup route but this time to do something a little closer to our experiences.

That’s not something she brags about, however.

Before this, she started – and shut down – a home furnishing company, managed wholesale brands at a multinational food conglomerate, and got her MBA at Cornell University. She grew up in Delhi.

Today her focus is on staying modern. “We’re a large company of about 400 people now and the space has changed so much over the years,” Sudeshna says. “Our biggest challenge now is how to stay ahead of the curve in terms of capabilities, and introducing new ideas and new types of leadership. We’re bringing in social media into our data analytics side and it’s an entirely new thing.”

Betting on data

Data is the new oil. Photo credit: Wikipedia.

The dotcom bubble happened between 1997 and 2000, where internet companies saw their values rise really fast.

When it burst, web startups across the globe collapsed and scattered.

Sudeshna’s first startup, Globedecor, was one of the casualties of that. “It was a company that brought retailers and furnishers from different parts of the world together,” she recalls. “When we shut it down, we weren’t ready to go back to our usual jobs. We decided to stick with the startup route but this time to do something a little closer to our experiences.”

For her, that’s quantitative marketing. It’s about making rational decisions based on collected data. So she decided to start AbsolutData with her husband, Anil Kaul, and their friend, Suhale Kapoor.

Before the bandwagon

Focus on the moment