Former Managing Director of Facebook India, Kirthiga Reddy: How to Seize Life-Changing Opportunities | E70
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How can individuals seize life-changing opportunities?
Be curious, be bold, be hungry and explore different opportunities. Kirthika Reddy, she was the first employee from Meta India and Managing Director for India and South Asia.
Facebook was really important as a stepping stone. I had the opportunity to build one of their four global operations centers that now serves their 3 billion plus users.
She was also the first female investment partner at SoftBank, where she led 1 billion of new investments.
A lot of people think you need to have a really big bank balance to be able to do investing. I've had people who invested $3,000.
And now you're the founder of Virtualness, an AI-powered blockchain platform.
A lot of people in Anna ask me, how do you know when is the right time for the next thing? And my answer is actually pretty simple.
The VC world is not easy to break, especially, sorry, as women. How did you break in? How did you break in? Today we have a story about many firsts. Kirthika Reddy, she was the first employee from Meta India and Managing Director for India and South Asia in the heart of the country going digital and mobile, like incredible. She was also the first female investment partner at the 130 billion SoftBank Vision Fund, where she led 1 billion of new investments. And now you're the founder of Virtualness, an AI-powered blockchain platform, which we will talk about. But Kirthiga, you grew up in India. Tell us more about your family, your life there. Take us back in time, if you will.
Sure. Ilana, so excited to be here and so excited to connect with your wonderful audience. My journey growing up in India, I actually moved every few years. My father was not in the army, not in the Navy. He was with the same company for 30 years. My mom thinks he has a travel bug. My husband thinks I inherited the travel bug. But what that did was, as one of my business school professors said, it might be a brutal childhood, but makes for wonderfully adaptable adults. And that upbringing really gave me a lot, Ilana. I remember when I was applying for my engineering degree, my parents said, if there is an engineering university in the neighborhood, that is where the girl child would go to. And when I wept and said,
but why can't I apply to some of the higher rated universities? My father said, Kirtika, you can go to an incredible university and do nothing with that opportunity, or you can make the best of what you have. And Ilana, fast forward, I actually graduated with the second rank in the university, which included some of these other colleges that I could not have applied to because they were far away. And that was a very important tenet of making the most of the life of the cards given to you. Yeah. making opportunities there. They might almost seem that opportunities don't exist, Alana.
So create your own luck, basically. Be all in and create whatever you can from what you have. And I think this is a theme in your life, which we see again and again. We'll talk about that. Do you know where the hints of leadership and entrepreneurship started coming up for you?
I would have to say, sticking to the childhood theme, when I saw the rise of what was happening in computing and I began to see the digital divide between people who have access and who do not have access to and knowledge of technology, I started a computer users club in my college days. So this was in my undergraduate days where we used to go out and teach people who didn't did not have the digital skills so that they could partake in the digital economy. And Ilana, that divide, unfortunately, just continues to exist and continues to grow. Even in the midst of this AI revolution that we are in right now, I think a lot about people who are in the midst of AI and how is it that We can also make sure that the larger ecosystem, people across socioeconomic strata, across demographics, can make use of the wonderful advancements in technology. So I think it goes back there. And a big driver of what I do, Alana, is also looking at my mother's journey and that of mine.
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