Becoming an entrepreneur is a leap of faith. Regardless of when or even if your business sees the light of day, starting up is still a tremendously hard thing for someone to take up, work on and say out loud to the world.

The leap of faith still exists when you're a woman founder, but with a bunch of other variables you didn't ask for also thrown in.

But I'll tell you what doesn't change. It still takes the same amount of passion, the joy of building, stress, frustration and the ability to manage fires that might go off anytime to keep the ship steady, and eventually succeed in the long run.

Being a woman founder does present its own challenges and hurdles that are often unexpected or even patronising. Because if you've decided to jump into the world of terrible and exciting, then these are just additional hoops that you have to jump through.

That's why role models matter. I must confess we - I - have been disappointed at not being able to get a lot more woman founders and their stories on First Principles. You can be sure we're trying to change that over time.

But in today's supercut episode, we bring together five women founders from earlier episodes.

This episode features Vineeta Singh of SUGAR Cosmetics, Smita Deorah of LEAD School, Ruchi Kalra of Oxyzo, Radhika Gupta of Edelweiss Asset Management and Soumya Rajan of Waterfield Advisors.

Welcome to First Principles—The weekly leadership podcast from The Ken.

Let's get started.

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Apply for the Young Business Leadership Programme!

What is it?

It is an ambitious and exciting role where we take a handful of talented, ambitious and eager-to-learn graduates from India's top colleges and put them through a two-year program where they will work in different roles and functions at The Ken.

And throughout the two years they will learn virtually all key aspects of building, innovating and scaling a modern "journalism as a product" organization, well, from first principles.

If you want to understand the "why" of why we're doing this, you'll find the details to that here, but if you're just excited about the opportunity from the little I have told you and you're just thinking about "how" do I apply, here's the link for that.

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Also, have you listened to the latest episode of The First Two Years(or TFTY)—The Early Careers podcast from The Ken?

In the latest episode of TFTY, host Akshaya Chandrasekaran goes on a quest to explore how to solicit feedback as requested by a listener of the podcast. Akshaya directed the listener's question to guests on the episode who shared surprising tips and pragmatic ways to ask for feedback. What exactly did they have to say?

Listen to the episode here to find out.

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You can sign up here!

Also, if you enjoyed listening to this episode, do rate us on your favourite streaming platform, and if you have opinions on what we should be doing differently or just any feedback, good or bad, write to us at fp@the-ken.com. We'll be sure to read it.

Five female founders speak about leading with empathy, ambition, and not being apologetic and just focusing on building

First Principles