Early this year, when we launched Neythri (which stands for female leader), I wrote about why my co-founders Mythili , Sruthi and I decided to launch Neythri.org , a global community to support and enable South Asian professional women to succeed. A year and 1,000 members later, I reflect on this amazing experience, and here is what I have learned.

1. Startups are just hard. I always swore I would never do a startup from scratch…who needs all that agonizing about product-market fit, minimum viable product, positioning in the marketplace, brand identity, willingness to pay, etc? Not me, I thought. And here we are, with all those questions to work through and iterate and learn from. We are fortunate that we have now built a stellar team of 100+ volunteers…women who are professional marketers, designers, product folks, engineers, data scientists, venture capitalists, event specialists in their day jobs, working to make Neythri what it is today. 
   

2. The mission needs to be steadfast… We spent a lot of time pondering the mission and the name of Neythri. How wide? How specialized? How do we stay focused? “Neythri’s mission is to foster, engage and advance a global community of South Asian professional women of all backgrounds and experience who are committed to helping each other succeed.” We realized that the primary needs of our community are to connect, share and learn. We decided a cross-generational, cross-industry effort was imperative. And we have stayed true to this mission. 
   

3. …But agility is critical. We have learned enormously what works…and what doesn’t. We ask our members at signup about what they needed most, and we survey them relentlessly after every event to see what we need to change. We have embraced a “test and learn” approach: for example, we are now testing 1:1 mentorship, 1:1 executive coaching, and how to engage with companies to extend our unique offering to South Asian women they employ. We tested cohort-based peer-groups, and found that with schedules during COVID, and the new stresses of work and home to deal with, it was better to host “come-if-you-can-make-it” peer-to-peer sharing circles so that women could connect and share advice when they could make the time. 
   

4. It is all so worth it. As we all “pay it forward” at Neythri, expending vast amounts of personal energy, we so clearly have filled an unmet need in the community across generations and industries. We have women from parts of the US where “they see no one that looks like them” coming together. The shared cultural context, the role models, the connections with like-minded women…this is what our members look for, and what they are able to find at Neythri.  We have requests from as far afield as Dubai, Singapore and India to ask when we plan to expand.  I know I get my energy and validation, as do many others, from what we hear from our members. A recent Neythri event attendee comment says it all: “it feels like home”. 
   

5. “The Journey is the Reward”…the relationships are (I hope) forever. For me, I have met amazing women as part of the Neythri volunteer team. While my intent in co-creating Neythri is to pay it forward, I have built priceless relationships. I have reconnected with old friends through Neythri, and deepened what were purely social connections through working together on our initiatives.  But even more, it seems incredible that many of my newest relationships have happened purely in the virtual domain, with women I cannot believe I only know on Zoom. We have worked shoulder-to-shoulder, and it has, at times, been a tough slog, but the kind of connections we have created are second to none. One of these days in 2021, my most fervent wish is that we can meet and raise a glass in person for the best, most awaited toast ever: “To Neythri!”