The secret sauce of Apollo Finvest

• We’ve come a long way here at Apollo. Right from building a tech startup under the spotlight of a public listed company 🙇🏼 to working with 50+ fintechs along the way to growing from a market cap of 10cr to 200+cr. All this in a short span of over 2.5+ years. What an action-packed ride it's been so far and you know what’s amazing? It feels like we are just getting started 🐣

• When you're on the fast track of life, time absolutely flies. So every now and then I like to look back at our journey. It helps put things in perspective, recall experiences, things we got right and mistakes from which we learned from along the way

• Today I would like to talk about one of the things I am proud to say we got right. This is the Diversity ✨ in our team. A team which is well balanced with an equal number of men and women! 

• This is a topic which is very close to my heart 💗. Its benefits are something I am very passionate about and I am so happy to have been able to build it into the cultural tapestry and foundation of our company

• Here are some interesting facts 🤓 about us 

  • 60% of Apollo’s team comprises of women

  • 40% of our Board has women

  • Our largest Shareholder is a woman

  • A woman single-handedly started building our tech platform, while she was pregnant. She worked like a superwoman pretty much until the day she delivered a beautiful girl into the world 

  • When we started building Apollo, for the first couple of months, we had a team of only women employees!

• I know what you must be thinking. These points seem women-centric. That does not seem very diverse. Well, this is intentional

• Today there is a clear and distinct lack of women in the workforce. If we want to achieve diversity, we must solve this problem ✊🏻

How did we do this?

• This is one of the most common questions I am asked and well the answer to this is quite simple really: Diversity starts at the very top 🚀

• At Apollo, the founding team is a man and a woman. With such a starting point, the rest just came organically

• Diversity is not something that we actively planned or hired for

• When we were starting our company, our focus like any other early-stage company was on only 1 thing: Finding product-market fit. Nothing else mattered! 🤺

• Most of the initial hiring was led by me and I had a simple goal: Find the best talent for the role

• Now when I reminisce, I think it’s because I was a woman and one who was fortunate to have been brought up in a family where men and women contributed equally both professionally and personally, I was subconsciously making decisions resulting in a well-balanced team 🧘🏻‍♀️

• In fact, I was only made to realise this phenomenon in our team composition when we had a visitor in our office one day who pointed out how impressed he was to see this especially in a tech startup

How has this helped us? Let’s talk about specific areas in the company

• Product

  • One of the goals of the Apollo platform is to accelerate financial inclusion 🌈

  • As per the Indian census, 48% of the population in India are women

  • In fact, between the 2 gender’s, one can argue the need and opportunity to build products for the financial inclusion of women is larger than that of men

  • Even leaving that aside, if you aim to cater to a market with this level of diversity, is it not wise to build a product incorporating the sensibilities and tastes of your ultimate target market? 🤔

  

  • At Apollo, we have seen immense benefits in our product thanks to our diversity. The holistic thinking it brings to building out product roadmaps, prioritisation, feature feedback sessions to the user experience is absolutely invaluable. It really helps eliminates blind spots 👓

  • When you allow only one gender to build a product, it subconsciously gets built with a bias towards that gender. This alienates customers from the opposite gender. Let me explain with an example I read in the book -The Moment of lift by Melinda Gates 

    • Ever wondered why most of the video games back in the day were either about car racing, shooting, fighting etc?

    • This is because the gaming industry back then was primarily dominated by men 

    • This resulted in games being created by boys for boys

    • This completely ignored the opposite gender’s taste leaving a huge uncatered gap in the industry

  • Not only is this unfair to the opposite gender, it’s just a straight-up bad business decision. A lack of diversity in your team can make you lose a huge chunk of your potential customers! 🙀

    perfect way to build for a market is to have the end-user base within your company. A team who truly emphasizes with the customers needs always builds the best product

• Hiring & Retention

  • Apollo’s diversity has given us a clear unfair advantage in hiring

    

  • How? Well, its human tendency to look for familiar faces and cultural wavelengths when we decide who to be friends with or what social group we would like to be a part of. The same physiological behaviour applies when we look for our next workplace and company

  • With a strong presence of women in the team, Apollo tends to attract more women to join us 🤗. This is a virtuous cycle with a strong multiplier effect. This just keeps growing stronger and stronger over time

  

  • By default, this X factor gives Apollo access to a much larger talent pool. In a competitive marketplace, this kind of DNA is a powerful magnet as we scale our team from strength to strength 💪🏻

  • Equally important, a well-balanced team leads to substantially better talent retention as well. Most companies don't realise it, but they are driving away potential and current talent because of imbalances in the team. Nobody wants to be the odd one out and if you don’t make them feel at home, they will leave 👽

  

  • These subtle but critical factors play an important role for employees choosing their next job and become subconscious reasons for quitting their current jobs 

• Culture

  • Men and women are simply wired differently. What women bring to the table, men don’t and vice versa 

  • Women are known to have higher Emotional Intelligence 🧏🏻‍♀️ and this gives them the ability to recognize, communicate and relate with emotions they feel in others or themselves 

  

  • This is a huge enabler for fostering a culture where it is normal to communicate about what’s on your mind 

  • At Apollo, our teams communicate much more freely within themselves and are more open to speak about their likes and dislikes. I think this has a lot to do with the women in our team

  • As the leadership team, we can rest easy knowing that if something is wrong in the company morale or sentiment, we will be made aware of it 🎉

  

  • Even with our partners, the communication is strong, clear and regular. It’s this human connection that helps establish a strong and trustworthy bond between 2 companies 💃🏻

  • Finally, the temperament of women and men varies widely 👀. In teams with diversity, it's often this balance that we have noticed helps in much more rational decision making and increased probabilities of establishing successful external partnerships

Why can’t this be every company’s secret sauce?

• One of my motivations for writing this piece was to clearly outline the advantages that diversity brings to the table 

• If there’s one ☝️ takeaway I would like people to have from this mini case study, it is this: Bring diversity in your leadership and decision making team

  

• This is a game-changer ⚡️. It unlocks opportunities, possibilities and perspectives you simply did not know even existed 

• This move has the potential to drive the next wave of growth 💥 in your business. It will help you explore, understand, and build for markets which your existing teams just cannot either recognize or empathically build for

• I hope our experiences encourage more companies and leaders to consciously think of adding this magic formula 🧙🏻‍♀️ in their team

• If there’s anything you would like to know more about or have specific questions regarding getting going on this mission, please let me know. Now go out and let’s execute this! Remember: Diversity is your next Superpower!  

Regards,

Diksha Nangia
CFO & Director