At BrilliantRead Media, our aim is to bring to our community some of the unique and compelling stories from India and around the globe. As part of this endeavour, we invited yet another passionate entrepreneur – Pauline Laravoire, for an exclusive interview with us. Pauline is the Co-founder at Y-East. She is a seasoned impact entrepreneur, community builder and inspiration to many impact startups and SMEs. She is actively involved in the impact startup ecosystem through her various initiatives aimed at women empowerment and creating social and environmental impact. Let’s learn more about her exciting journey as an entrepreneur, her background and her advice for our growing community:
Excerpts from our exclusive interview with her:
Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey as a women entrepreneur, please;
After spending my first 25 years in my home country France, I now live in Kolkata. This thread has entirely led my decision-making processes since then. When I entered top European business university HEC Paris, I signed up for courses in Social Entrepreneurship and Businesses, got involved with impactful student associations, developed a passion for Development Economics and Human and Environmental challenges abroad which led me to conduct a 2-month Social Impact Assessment Study in the Philippines in 2014.
After another academic year and a professional year developing general skills in Business Administration and Strategy Consulting back in France, I returned back to the field, this time through not-for-profit AQWA, which I co-founded with three of my friends.”
In 2016, the four of us took off abroad to conduct six Social Impact Assessment Studies in 12 months, at the service of corporate foundations, impact enterprises and NGOs working in the WASH (Water, Sanitation, Hygiene) sector across the globe (namely in Ivory Coast, Tunisia, Senegal, Tanzania, India, Cambodia, Ecuador, and Colombia). I then came back to France to finish my master’s degree in Sustainability and Social Innovation from HEC Paris.
I then moved to Kolkata, where I joined educational conglomerate Techno India Group as Sustainability Director and later on founded impact venture Y-East, first professional aggregating and networking platform dedicated to social and environmental impact for East and North East India.
Tell our audience a little more about your venture, please;
Y-East is the first professional aggregating and networking platform gathering actors of the sustainability and social sectors – NGOs, Impact Investors, Impact Startups and Businesses, CSR departments, Consultants, Educational Institutions… – with a specific focus on East and North East India. We have created an online platform for the same. Online registration comes with no cost and allows organisations to claim their belonging to an impactful, innovative network. Check our network here:https://www.y-east.org/our-network
Our activities mainly focus on offline and online networking and business development opportunities for our members, educational and awareness initiatives, and impact assessment studies. Y-East currently aggregates more than 100 professional organisations, hosts monthly professional meet-ups in Kolkata and Darjeeling for these organisations, has organized/supported around 70 programs and has positively impacted more than 11,000 individuals since its inception in early 2019.
I didn’t really choose entrepreneurship. It happened quite naturally and organically without very conscious and proactive thought of the process from my end. I think that’s where individuals with a real entrepreneurial mindset shine: they are capable of observing around them, identifying issues, and feeling naturally attracted to the idea of developing a solution to solve it. I never really thought: ‘I want to become an entrepreneur no matter what’.
I simply observed that there was a need, an opportunity to bring value where there was none, and took the leap of creating Y-East.”
Y-East is a professional aggregating platform that aims to solve the following challenges that I identified when moving to Kolkata:
Lack of a professional, structured network for the social & sustainability sectors
Lack of consistency, unity and coherent visibility of said players for external stakeholders
Isolated action from said players, which impedes optimised, large-sale impact
Lack of a mindset who cares about social and environmental impact, especially among youth
Unsaturated and untapped market and impact for these sectors in India
I also would like to add that having a job and being an entrepreneur are not mutually exclusive. For example, I do have a position at Techno India and I also define myself as an impact entrepreneur as the founder of Y-East.
Each individual has her own set of circumstances, resources, challenges and opportunities, which leads to a lot of different possibilities to combine both worlds, of employment and entrepreneurship, i.e. there is no rule nor framework that would apply in the same way to everyone.
Some people would live out of their own venture only as full-fledged, self-made entrepreneurs; some others would use existing resources they have at hand to create other new verticals, products, services or processes within an existing company and would, therefore, be called intrapreneurs; some others seize the opportunity to build up another unit or venture from existing organisations and resources. The spectrum of career possibilities is wide. A more relevant question is: do you have the entrepreneurial mindset or not, and how do you apply it?
Note: I prefer using ‘impact entrepreneur’ instead of ‘social entrepreneur’ to avoid the ambiguity and connotations towards charitable work that the word ‘social’ carries along. It is more appropriate to highlight the impact-focused mindset of such entrepreneur, who is able to combine it with venture building skills.
What gets you out of bed in the morning i.e. what’s your source of motivation?
My mind has been haunted by the same question for the past 7 years now: ‘How to efficiently dedicate my limited time and capacities here on this planet to generating the greatest positive impact I can in favour of our societies and environment?’ I have always been thinking that nothing is more worthwhile than devoting one’s professional career and skills to ethical activities creating real value and increasing overall wellbeing.
I think this is my source of motivation: how can make sure that I make myself useful for a greater purpose? How can I make sure that I am not going to end as a useless brain and resource, keeping the finiteness of my life and the so many challenges that we need to find solutions to in mind?
More specifically, I guess I have always cared for the people who haven’t been as lucky as I have been at the life lottery game and feel an immense responsibility to work towards a world of equal opportunities – hence my passion for impact.”
What challenges/obstacles did you face in your journey so far?
The greatest challenge for me is to accept that this world revolves around and works on money-making. As an impact entrepreneur, one of your jobs is to manage to smartly combine impact with profit-making, and both aspects are absolutely crucial. However I know that I am intrinsically not money-focused at all, so I have struggled to make my venture and make it be perceived as, a for-profit business model. I am currently working on these financial aspects as financial self-sustainability is essential.
Having said so, it needs to be achieved without losing your inner and authentic focus on the real impact that your venture generates, because the impact is the real factor, vector and goal of any impact entrepreneur. It’s important to stay authentic to who you are while having to accept, embrace in use money-focused realities to your advantage.”
Another challenge has been for me to understand and adapt to cultural and mindset differences between France and India. As a French national, born and raised in France, my realities, my language, the reference standards that I have learnt in my home country are very embedded into who I am and how I perceive of professional productivity. All of this, however, does not work the same way in India, which is continuously pushing me to review what’s working in France and not here and vice versa: what arguments to use to convince? What language to talk? What tone and approach to take? How tech-savvy are the customers/beneficiaries? All of these realities change from one geography to another, which, at the beginning, really felt like most of my learnings from first 25 years of my life would be useless here and I had to learn everything again. Thankfully, we share the same human nature all over the globe so core realities, e.g. human psychology, emotions remain the same.
What comes first for you – money or emotions?
The question is quite vague and would need refining. These two concepts are not comparable and ought to be thought about separately.
Do I value money and how much I make? Yes, how to survive otherwise? Do I want to be a billionaire? Absolutely not, as I am very much against the concept of extreme wealth and wouldn’t want to embody ideologies I’m fiercely against.
Do I leave some space for emotions in my personal and professional life? Yes. Do I let myself dive in negative emotions and take control over me? No.
It’s all about nuance and balance:
Earn money honestly and ethically, enough so that you can have a comfortable life, without jeopardising and contradicting your own beliefs
Accept and embrace the reality that humans are emotional animals and that emotions are therefore going to show both in your personal and professional life, coming from yourself and from your team members. Provide a frame for them to be expressed out without spilling over your venture’s productivity.
How do you handle the pressure and manage stress?
I used to be very bad at controlling my stress. I still am, from time to time; it’s part of my nature. I take on and accept a lot of responsibilities on my shoulders even when I am my own boss and no higher authority to report to. Or in other words, the higher authority I report to is my own goals and mission.
I call it the ‘changemakers’ syndrome’: the sometimes overwhelming feeling that you have to contribute to ‘saving the world’ and therefore you can’t afford to waste a day, not even a second being unproductive towards your mission.”
I have developed the syndrome for the past 10 years and it is sometimes detrimental to your mental health for sure. Over time, however, I have realised that stress is a feeling that was self-generated and self-imposed in its nature, i.e. most of the times, we stress because we make the decision (consciously or unconsciously) to let external events and peers get to us and play with our nerves by giving them more importance than they should have. I realised that stressing was a choice in a lot of ways and that it was up to us to learn how to control it. We can decide to go out through the very same life events with, or without stress; in the former case, we let it play with our mental health, we let it exhaust us, we let it deteriorate our relationships with others. In the latter case, choosing to go through life without giving in to stress improve our self-love, better our relationships, and in a lot of ways increase our self-control and professional productivity. That’s the choice I’ve made.
What is one strategy that you believe has helped you grow as a person?
The strategy that has helped me grow the most is coopetition, i.e. a model entangling competition and cooperation. As Y-East’s founder, I’ve come to meet a lot of other impactful organisations that were also working in the social and environmental sector in their own way. Some of their activities could be perceived as a competitor to Y-East’s activity verticals or ambitions, but instead of going into the full competition and therefore taking the risk of deteriorating stakeholders management and relations, I prefer to acknowledge their great work, learn from them, get inspired by them and find ways to smartly collaborate and find synergies, using each organisation’s specific strengths and expertise.
In your opinion what are the keys to success?
Success is a set of indicators that primarily need to be self-evaluated. In other words, one of the keys to success is to value your own success with your own criteria and be self-confident in this success even if it is not widely recognised by mainstream indicators. For example, I do not personally value my success with the amount of profit I am able to generate, but with the number of lives, I have been able to positively inspire and influence. Be also proud and savour the small victories, for example, you’ve nailed a speech in public while you’ve always been bad at it. Identify these personal victories based on your own spectrum of abilities and success indicators, build up your self-confidence on these personal victories, and use this self-confidence to move forward stronger.
This takes me to my second input: another key to success is our ability to challenge ourself and not rest in our comfort zone. If you never dive in the unknown, mechanically, your personal growth will stop. It might be scary or difficult to change your habits, try something new or start off developing a brand new skill, but it’s our only way to optimise our learning curve and discover abilities we would never have discovered within ourselves otherwise. This is what happened to me when I moved to India for good: it was very scary of course, but I would never have learned so much, nor would have I become so versatile and adaptable without this experience, without trusting my guts that everything will be fine and that it will benefit me in the long run. I have actually never been interested nor attracted by an easy, comfortable life.
Finally, never stop questioning yourself and your long-term strategy and direction. Stop once in a while to think about what you’re doing and where you’re heading, and take time to pivot or adjust if you feel that you’ve gone away from your initial intent or core authenticity, professionally or personally.
What advice would you give to someone starting out particularly aspiring women entrepreneurs?
First advice: never take any advice! Or rather, do not take advice if it doesn’t make sense to you or your situation, always question pieces of advice that you receive. Advice will come to you from individuals that have different abilities and different circumstances and therefore it might not apply to your own, so always welcome them with your own filter. You wouldn’t want to follow the advice that would take you away from your core beliefs, your gut signals and your own self-confidence. Most of the time, you are the best person to exactly know where you want to go and what you want to do.
And second, just do it. If you have an idea for a specific activity or business, stop hesitating and start taking action. It cannot possibly start big anyway. One has to accept that the first step is going to be a small one: publicly announce your intent to your family, friends, online community; or start the dialogue with your potential beneficiaries or clients; or take a pen out and draw your vision; or create a Facebook page based on your idea. It will grow in time in ways you hadn’t imagined. And worst-case scenario: it will remain in your memory as a beautiful little challenging journey of learning.
BrilliantRead is committed to bringing stories from the startup ecosystem, stories that reshape our perspective, add value to our community and be a constant source of motivation not just for our community but also for the whole ecosystem of entrepreneurs and aspiring individuals.
Note: If you have a similar story to share with our audience and would like to be featured on our online magazine, then please write to us at [email protected], we will review your story and extend an invitation to feature if it is worth publishing.
