Not a unicorn, but a zebra: Visible Founders celebrates entrepreneurial journeys of migrants

“Being an entrepreneur means having to start from zero, but for migrant entrepreneurs, it means starting from below zero.”

This sentence from the Visible Founders docu-series instantly hits home for me as a migrant. While I may not be building a business from the ground up, I have had the opportunity to talk to many founders, especially those of South Asian heritage who have struggled to make their voices heard and faces seen in a foreign land. This is despite the fact that diverse founders outperform the market, and make do with very few resources.

Directed and produced by Anand Tamboli along with Sangeeta Mulchandani as co-producer, the four-part series charts the stories of four immigrant founders and their three businesses. Tamboli says the series is his way of showcasing the human sides of entrepreneurs and their businesses, particularly those whose journeys are not told by mainstream media.

Tamboli is an entrepreneur, author, and the founder of 3DOTS Studio, while Mulchandani is the founder of Jumpstart Studio, which assists early-stage founders to start and grow their businesses.

“Not every business can be a unicorn,” Tamboli tells SmartCompany, while talking about the scalability of different businesses.

“You can be a zebra as well, and that’s okay.”

Joseph Oliver Yap, the co-founder of ZeroTag — a startup aimed at promoting reusing materials to solve the problem of packaging waste — echoes the sentiment. He says the startup community is “obsessed” with the idea of a unicorn valuation, even though many of those companies have been burning VC cash with no profitability in sight.

Oliver Yap says most of ZeroTag’s funding came from government grants but only when it had a product to showcase its viability, and at the heart of it lies creation.

Nurturing ‘ridiculous’ ideas

“The good thing about creating is it can shut people up about problems and show them the solution… that it can be done,” says Oliver Yap.

The co-founder, who migrated from the Philippines to study material design, shared his arduous journey of dealing with red tape, bureaucracy and even the lack of community support. As an immigrant wanting to start his own business in Australia was a “ridiculous idea”, his migration agent had told him.

“He told me to just forget about it,” he says.

Deepa P. Mani, another entrepreneur featured in Visible Founders, is the founder of Chandralaya a dance academy that undertakes various art collaboration projects that allow young children to thrive in the “multicultural” Australian society. Mani left her corporate 9-to-5 job to establish a business in Melbourne, which now sees students travel from as far as New South Wales every week.

“The young generation is going to grow up with people of different communities and ethnicities around them. How do we make them appreciate and respect those different cultures?” she says.

“I believe art has a way of bringing people together.”

Tamboli says the idea for Visible Founders came about after his conversations with numerous startup founders and entrepreneurs.

“It became clear that small businesses and entrepreneurs who build them are more resilient. Many of them are socially focused and community-oriented. Despite that, they don’t get the attention they deserve.”

The series, which premiered in Melbourne last week, also covers the story of the founder of Soni Wealth, a property investment firm, founded by Chirag Soni, who originally hails from India.