[100 Emerging Women Leaders] Meet the woman who launched short-video social app Rizzle

Short-form videos have become very popular, especially in the past couple of years. Interesting editing and visual elements ensure these videos hold the eight-second attention span of the current generation for hours. 

Former Qualcomm executive Vidya Narayanan felt that these short-form videos were bringing a new wave of visual storytelling. In 2015, she decided to come up with a platform, UrbanAMA, for short conversational videos. The Ask-Me-Anything feature lets users, including government officials, sports players, renowned book authors, and others, interact with the audience through their videos. 

“This was the time when TikTok was at the peak of its popularity globally. But we realised that when people are handed a camera for the first time, not everyone can come up with something new or interesting. So we began with a conversational video format,” Narayanan says.

But Narayanan wanted to expand the type of video content the app supported. 

In 2019, she co-founded Rizzle App, a short video content-sharing platform, with her friend Lakshminath Dondetti. Similar to TikTok and Instagram Reels, users can use photo and video-based templates and graphic elements to become visual storytellers. The videos created can be shared on other social media platforms. 

Apart from promoting the creator economy, Narayanan also advocates for more women in tech. She recalls experiences of facing unconscious biases that revealed the importance of having more women in the tech world. 

“When I was nine months pregnant with my second child, I was in a boardroom meeting with a couple of men. They started talking among themselves about how their wives left their jobs when they got pregnant and took a backseat to let their husbands succeed. I don’t think they realised the implications of such conversations in front of me,” she recalls.

Narayanan also feels that people don’t naturally think of women when they hear the term “engineer”. This can create multiple problems in the career progression of women in tech.

Before donning an entrepreneurial hat, the founder worked closely with a number of women in the computer science department of UCLA Berkeley, one of the most progressive schools in the US.

“But even there, these women had to deal with aggressive men around them. This discouraged many of them from pursuing their tech careers further. Sometimes, they had to switch to some other major or department,” she says. 

To deal with such problems, Narayanan suggests women find good mentors, both men and women, and observe how they have advanced in their careers. 

“Sometimes these mentors don’t even know that they are my mentors. I observe them from a distance, understand how they achieved their success, and learn to progress in my own career,” she says. 

Narayanan also urges women to be an active part of a conversation that includes both men and women. 

“Leadership is always taken and not handed. When you exhibit leadership, you can demand and get recognition for your efforts and skills,” she says.