Welcome to our section where we bring you stories and conversations with inspirational women. These women have changed lives and given back to the community in their own way. Today, Dania Faruqui, Revenue & Ops Manager at Glance shares her story.
Dania Faruqui, a chemical engineer from NIT Bhopal completed her MBA from IIM Indore. Like most B-school graduates, she was drawn towards the glamorous world of consulting and started off her career at Ernst & Young. While she loved the life that she was living, she wanted to be in the space where most innovations are happening: startups. She developed an interest in social e-commerce, a field that is completely new in India with few players working on it. Dania became a founding team member at ShopG, a social e-commerce platform for the next billion users.
After scaling multiple categories there, she now manages revenue and operations of the e-commerce arm of Glance, the 3rd largest content consumption platform in India. Dania also has been a Top Writer at Quora twice where she used to write earlier and has been recognised as one of the ‘LinkedIn Top Voices – NextGen, 2021.
Dania talks about how her working mother has helped shape the ideologies of her life, as working after marriage was never an alien concept to her. After marriage, her husband became the biggest supporter and rooted for all her successes. This journey will strike a chord with a person from any stage of life and will reinforce the idea that a woman can grow up to be a strong and independent professional if she is nurtured in an environment that has no gender discrimination.
Timeline Of The Video
0:00 – Introduction
0:44 – Engineering, a natural choice
1:33 – Stepping into a different career path
3:04 – Appeal of the consulting world
4:11 – Transitioning into innovational space
6:27 – Becoming a founding member at ShopG
8:15 – Parent’s reaction to the risky career move
11:08 – Mother’s role in shaping ideologies
16:50 – Strategy to be LinkedIn Top voice
19:35 – Choosing topics to write about
“…Don’t do that. There are mass brands and then there are luxury brands. Just because people don’t know what Louis Vuitton shoes are, doesn’t mean that their worth is lower. They have a much lower following but the brand value is very high. So, the number of followers and the number of likes doesn’t really mean anything unless your target audience is fixated. I don’t think you should try and be a generalist all the time.”
22:10 – Negotiating salary while switching jobs
“…The idea is to break the notion that you will only get a 20-30% hike. At this time, I find it surprising that people still feel that if you make X, your next job can give you 1.4X. But what if you learned a lot or cleared some exam, which increased your value. As a candidate, do that market research and go back and ask for that kind of money. Most people are in a self-doubt zone. Have faith in your skills and learn to negotiate.”
25:35 – Rapid fire
26:09 – A pivotal moment in life
“…When I was working at EY as a project manager, I was the youngest person who was managing a team of 15 people. Everybody was older than me and it was very difficult for me because most of the people did not like me as I was younger than them. They didn’t like the idea of someone being so young telling them what to do and they would not give me data and other things like that.”
28:27 – Three things she loves about startups
29:37 – Three Indian women she looks up to
31:04 – Five wardrobe staples
31:56 – A message to the audience
All images used are the sole property of Dania Faruqui and cannot be used without prior permission.
