Kiran Mazumdar-ShawFounder & Executive Chairperson

My father was a brewmaster at United Breweries who had studied in the United Kingdom. Because of his background, our family lived a cosmopolitan life in Bangalore. When I graduated from college, he encouraged me to study brewing in Australia, insisting that gender had nothing to do with science.

When I failed to get into a medical college on merit, I suggested paying a ten thousand rupee capitation fee for a seat. My father refused, stating that money is not currency to buy favors but to make a difference. He believed in building credibility solely through meritocracy.

Despite topping my class in Australia, no Indian brewery would hire me as a brewer. Even after I successfully commissioned a brewery 24/7, lifting pipes and spanners, they hired a man instead. They told me they could not risk having a woman lead a brewery in a hostile environment.

I was about to leave for a job in Scotland when I met Leslie Auchincloss, an Irish biotech entrepreneur. He wanted to start an enzyme company in India and tracked me down. Despite my lack of business experience and capital, he convinced me to partner with him for a year.

In 1978, the corridors of Udyog Bhavan were filled with touts demanding bribes to speed up applications. I walked directly into the office of the secretary in charge, Mr. Biswas, and explained that I wanted to build an honest company. He was horrified, gave me a desk, and processed my license in two weeks.

My Irish partner offered a buyback guarantee, which solved the initial customer acquisition problem. We extracted papain from papaya latex and developed fermentation technologies for fungal enzymes. I was excited because enzyme catalysts are green technologies that replace polluting chemical processes.

Venture capital did not exist, and banks considered a twenty-five-year-old girl with no business experience, no collateral, and a novel technology to be too high risk. They could not understand how a liquid or powder produced in a garage could be worth thousands of dollars per gram.

I met a banker from Canara Bank at a wedding reception. I explained the concept of biotechnology and shared my frustration about getting rejected by other banks. He got excited about my passion and understanding of the business and told me to visit his office to get a credit line.

I like to challenge myself and reinvent my business. Around 1996, I decided to apply our fermentation platforms to pharmaceuticals. We successfully produced statins, capturing a significant share of the global active pharmaceutical ingredient market, and then began targeting recombinant human insulin.

Recombinant human insulin was imported by Western multinationals who sold it at one thousand rupees per vial. We used a recombinant DNA technology based on Pichia yeast to produce human insulin domestically, dropping the price to one hundred rupees and forcing competitors to match us.

My best friend had to sell her property to afford oncology therapies that cost two and a half lakh rupees per dose. This inspired me to develop affordable copies of biologic drugs, leading to Biocon becoming the first company to receive US FDA approval for a trastuzumab biosimilar.

Generics are copies of small, chemically synthesized molecules like aspirin, which have simple structures. Biosimilars are copies of large, complex proteins produced by living cells, like monoclonal antibodies. Because proteins fold into complex shapes, copying them requires high-level biotechnology.

We launched liraglutide in the United States, Europe, and the United Kingdom. In India, the market for semaglutide was highly saturated, with forty-two companies launching products on day one. We decided to bypass that price war and focus on markets that offer better value.

The three billion dollar acquisition required us to take on debt, whereas we had previously been debt-free. While the market accepts high debt in massive corporations, they penalized us. We ignored the naysayers, cut the debt, and successfully built a global commercial engine.

The harshest truth is that Indian society does not respect women enough. While young women consistently outperform men academically, many fall out of the economic mainstream after marriage due to a lack of shared household responsibilities and persistent gender bias in investment capital.

Claire holds a PhD from MIT and an MBA from Stanford, and she successfully built and took Bicara public in the United States. She is a highly respected immunooncology expert who understands the science, the markets, and the importance of professional networking.

Indian VCs are willing to invest in safe, copycat service companies, but they avoid backing cutting-edge innovation. Pre-revenue and clinical-stage companies cannot list on Indian exchanges to raise scale-up capital, forcing our best innovators to sell their technologies to foreign buyers.

You should never follow the advice that everything must be perfectly planned and organized before you start. Entrepreneurship is about executing on a clear vision, navigating failures, and having the confidence to adjust when calculated risks do not go as planned.