Sujatha Ramanujan has led a rich professional life full of successes and failures, creative and stifling times, and fantastic adventures to win investors. Now she’s the managing director of Luminate NY, an incubator based in the Sibley Building that supports start-ups in scaling their business.
Ramanujan considers her first entrepreneurial endeavor to be a start-up she joined as an engineer at the age of twenty. “I stumbled into it,” she says. “I had a colleague who was an artist, and she had heard about this thing, and she was drawing pictures of what it could be.” Ramanujan looked at the sketches and started to describe what they would need to build it. “And she said, ‘Do you want to join the team?’”
Although Ramanujan came into a company that was founded by somebody else with an idea, she was paramount to making it successful. “We are very enamored with the [word] ‘founder,’ but we don’t always understand what that means,” she says. “No, I’m not the founder of that business. But if I hadn’t walked in that room and built the thing, there would be no business.”
Ramanujan sees growing a company as composed of several entrepreneurships happening in stages: having the idea, making it work, making it repeatable, and making it marketable. “You can have a great idea,” she says, “but if you cannot execute every aspect of that business, you do not have a business. You just have a neat idea. Making the thing, really making it—that’s what making a business is. It’s innovation, but it’s also execution.”
After that first startup, Ramanujan began a role in defense contracting. “That lasted eighteen months before I realized it was just really, really not for me. And not because of something wrong with it. It just didn’t suit me,” she says.
She explains that the defense sector is—by design—siloed and isolating. “It’s like human blockchain,” she says. “So I had really no idea what anybody else was doing. It didn’t breed innovative thinking. I need to create; I need to be able to do things that are completely not planned.”
Ramanujan ended up at Kodak in the engineering physics lab. “I wouldn’t call it entrepreneurialism, but it was one of the most creative environments I’ve ever been in,” she says. “I also remember the engineering victory dance—if somebody came up with something really wild or unusual or had a great result in the lab, you would step out in the hallway and you would do this thing that kind of looks like Elaine’s dance from Seinfeld,” she laughs. “I seek that energy everywhere I go, and I cannot work without it.”
Some of Ramanujan’s most cherished memories are the adventures she’s had securing funding. “You’re always looking for money, being scrappy and resourceful, you can’t piss anybody off, and you don’t have an infrastructure around you. So you get exposed to some of the looniest stuff out there.”
She remembers one instance in which she could only get a signature if she rode a mechanical bull. “Everybody was like, ‘wow, she’s having it really easy,’ and then at the twenty-second mark, ‘BAM,’ I go flying.” Another time, she was visiting a potential client in China and was offered a ride in a mail truck in lieu of taking three different trains. “So I’m sitting in the back of this pickup truck, getting jostled around, thinking ‘if I fall out of this truck, no one’s going to know! Somewhere in Western China, never to be seen again.’”
In another tale, she spent the entire day with a well-known venture capitalist, tagging along for errands and listening about his private life. “Everything,” she laughs. “I got the whole story. What I did not get was a check! . . . The people I’ve met, the weird places I’ve been . . . those adventures crack me up. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”
Throughout her career, Rumanujan has experienced several different shapes and sizes of entrepreneurialism. At one point, she was working to make breast cancer screening more accessible in areas with barriers to quality care. “I won’t claim that the science of what we did at that time was that groundbreaking, but it was accessible and affordable and easy to use,” she says, “And that makes a difference. So I learned that sometimes creativity is not about the best science or the most unusual solution, it is about giving somebody something they really need and don’t have.”
She’s also experienced lessons from failure. For example, when a product didn’t work after being shipped to a client, she had to dig deeper. “I learned so much about the material, what we had to do and how to ship it, but I also learned about what I have to do before I ship it,” she says.
In addition to further technical understanding, business failures hold lessons about life. “How do I manage a client’s expectations? How do I manage disappointment and retrieve a reputation?” she asks. “All of those lessons, you cannot read that in a book. You can’t read ‘how do I handle somebody whose disappointed face is staring at me’ until they stare at you, disappointed.”
Ramanujan sees so much value in failure, it’s something she now looks for in the backgrounds of younger entrepreneurs. “I actually am extremely nervous when somebody comes to me and applies for money who’s never known failure.” She explains that can come in a number of forms: a failed business, a marriage that ended, an athletic dream that never came to fruition.
“But if you haven’t known what it means to work your tail off for something and not get it, you will not be able to survive the difficult things,” she says, “and business is difficult. It can be tough to navigate . . . You have to have some vocabulary, some tools, some things that you have developed in the course of your career that allow you to handle things.”
One challenging component of entrepreneurship is a contradiction that lies between the equally important ambitious self-starter mentality and the ability to work with, trust, and delegate to a team. “There’s a fine line between confidence and arrogance,” Ramanujan says. “It’s very important to be confident, to be positive and try things. But when you are dismissive of others, when you are not hearing other voice, then you are arrogant.”
Ramanujan explains this tightrope is especially difficult for women in the industry to walk. “Women are underfunded and not as well supported, so you turn into a kind of lone wolf. You think, ‘I will take it all down, and I’ll do it myself.’ And you do. And then you have somebody writing a $10 million check saying ‘build a team.’ And it’s like, ‘wait, am I giving up control?’”
Ramanujan is often confronted with the commonly accepted image of an entrepreneur— “some twenty-five-year-old guy pitching this great idea,” she says. “And he gets a lot of money. But what if that entrepreneur is a forty-five-year-old woman?” she posits. “Doesn’t get the airtime. Maybe she’s just as amazing. Maybe her story’s actually interesting.” And often, even if that twenty-five-year-old does have a great idea, they’re not ready to build a team or lead a company.
“I think that we put a lot of pressure on students, saying, ‘we need you all to be leaders.’ You don’t all need to be leaders. It’s okay to not want to be in charge of fifty people,” she says. “I think that when we start to accept that it is not less—just different—to have autonomy over your own self and not telling everyone else what to do, that we will have better people, more happy people, more comfortable people.”
Ramanujan explains that this dynamic puts a lot of people with “main character energy” in leadership positions who don’t belong there, sidelining tech-oriented personalities who should be in those roles. “I think that that is a huge, huge [mistake] that we have perpetrated. It has caused people a lot of damage,” she says. “What that is, is people who do not have the technical skills to run a technical business, trying to hang onto their job. And I think that if you want to run a tech business, be a techie. But I would never, if I was hiring somebody for a semiconductor business, put the CEO in there who doesn’t understand semiconductors.”
Ramanujan notes that this is a particular problem on the East Coast. “This one actually makes me mad, because I’ve watched a number of technical people always held down,” she says. “A lot of the reason that people aren’t able to easily make the switch to seeing engineers and scientists make good business leaders is because that main character isn’t the main character they want to identify with.”
Despite the complexities and layers to the entrepreneurial and business world, Ramanujan has held onto one consistent belief: “There is no substitute for really being a decent, good person.” So much of life is a matter of coincidence or environment, she says—“your physical health, your financial well-being, your education”—but the one thing we have full control over is our integrity.
“Integrity is the one thing you come into this planet with, which is entirely 100 percent yours to keep, to lose, to destroy. Nobody can give you your integrity or take it from you. It is your choice. And as long as you keep that, you keep you. And that’s important—more important than business.”
This article originally appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of (585).
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