South Asian Trailblazers

How do the most powerful women in business actually rise? It's not by mimicking the men, nor by just following the advice to Lean In. In this episode, Simi Shah unlocks the new playbook for powerful, ambitious women. Simi speaks with Aparna Bawa — EVP and Chief Legal & People Officer at Intel, and the COO who saw Zoom scale from 10 million to 300 million users — alongside Kamini Ramani, Author of Lotus Leadership: A Modern Playbook of Ancient Wisdom. Together, they share fresh takes on fe...

Simi Shah speaks with Neerja Birla, matriarch of the storied Birla family, about how she's taking on India's most taboo topic: mental health. Content Warning: Mrs. Birla briefly references her work with victims of sexual violence. The reference is contextual and non-graphic. Mrs. Neerja Birla is the Founder & Chairperson of the Aditya Birla Education Trust, the force behind her organization, Mpower. Founded in 2016, Mpower is a full-stack mental health care and advocacy organization servi...

Simi speaks with Garima Shah, Co-founder & President of Biller Genie, on scaling a fintech to $10M+ in revenue. Biller Genie tackles a simple key problem: helping small businesses (SMBs) get paid faster. The company has doubled every year since 2022, and takes the average small business from 47 days to get paid down to 8. In an era where the glorification of venture capital has convinced a generation of founders that revenue is optional, Garima Shah wants to set the record straight on bui...

Growing up, Ankur Rathee only saw South Asians on screen playing age-old tropes. This week, he plays Ronak in Netflix's Best of the Best, a South Asian leading man written as a true hero, something Hollywood has rarely put on screen. Simi sits down with Ankur to trace his unconventional journey to acting. It runs from a family of farmers in Haryana, to a California childhood spent reenacting Bollywood dance numbers, to Princeton, where he couldn't stay off the stage. From there, it's te...

Six years ago, Hasan Minhaj and Prashanth Venkataramanujam asked a question: How has a movie about the South Asian college dance team experience not been made? Together, they made Best of the Best — a coming-of-age comedy about two best friends — played by Maitreyi Ramakrishnan and Priyanka Kedia — who join their college’s competitive Bollywood-fusion dance team — out Friday, September 18 on Netflix. Simi speaks with Hasan Minhaj (comedian, producer, actor), Prashanth Venkataramanujam (...