ZipDial CEO who left glamorous Silicon Valley for India: don’t call me a woman founder

Valorie Wagoner, founder of Bangalore-based startup ZipDial, is a champion of women’s empowerment – just don’t single her out as a female founder. “How I feel about being a woman entrepreneur is irrelevant,” she says, adding that fixing problems like the lack of female students in science and engineering should be a priority in the tech world.

Women’s issues have been under the spotlight lately after a wave of sexual harassment allegations hit Silicon Valley. The controversies raise all sorts of questions about whether the tech industry is welcoming enough to women, and what people can do about it.

While Wagoner’s far away from the heat of the action, male dominance in tech is a global trend, especially in India. On Twitter, Wagoner calls herself the “only foreign lady tech CEO in India” – an anomaly within an anomaly.

But she embraces that, having traded San Franciscan normcore for Indian sari a long time ago. Wagoner was a part of Ning, a community website builder started by Netscape founder and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. She later joined SayNow, another Valley startup, and took up a stint at eBay. She made the leap into India in 2008, heading strategic initiatives at mChek, a mobile payments company.

“I like solving big problems,” she says, echoing criticisms of how cellar dwellers in the Valley are addressing trivial needs while ignoring opportunities in emerging markets.

“I don’t get my kicks out of creating the next big mobile game. There are brilliant people doing that and making tons of money and that’s awesome. I hope to make tons of money solving other types of problems.”

What exactly is she tackling? ZipDial has found footing by taking advantage of the missed call phenomenon in India, where phone users give each other missed calls as a way to communicate. It’s Yo before Yo was around, and also a means to avoid hefty mobile charges. The company’s insight is that consumers can use missed calls to respond to both digital ads or non-digital ads – a user could for example call a number in exchange for receiving cricket scores.

Now, Wagoner wants to transform ZipDial into a Google Analytics for the offline world. While global firms are expanding into India and other emerging markets, they’re flying in blind as the majority of consumers are still on feature phones, which are difficult to track.

“There’s exceptionally little data on these consumers on a personal level. They pay for everything in cash, so they’re invisible from a data perspective,” she notes.

See: In India, you can respond to Facebook ads with a missed call

Stumbling into entrepreneurship

Wagoner, who did a Master’s thesis on microfinance at Stanford, believes that economic development is fundamental to solving a lot of the world’s problems. This explains her preference towards emerging markets and so called B2B2C models that impact consumers through working directly with brands.

“I want to help businesses get done better. I want to add value to them create jobs, and launch new products…there’s so much room in emerging markets for disruption.”

This sums up Wagoner’s approach towards her career. She figured out that she wanted to do her own startup in 2004, but only started ZipDial six years later. “It took me three years of working to have the confidence to believe in myself to do a startup. It took me another three beyond that for me to do it. It was a long process of confidence building, not that I was thinking about how to achieve that every day.”

ZipDial’s upside