 An Entrepreneurial Journey
Indu Navar (MS, Computer Science, ’94) has accomplished
more in her three and a half decades than most people do in a lifetime.
She is an experienced Silicon Valley technologist and entrepreneur
who has worked for Healtheon (WebMD), Silicon Graphics, and NASA,
among others. She is now the CEO of a software company, an amateur
pilot, and the mother of a 7-year-old son.
Navar began her journey as the daughter of what she describes as
a “protective and well-to-do family” from Bangalore,
India. But her path took her to the United States, far from her
home country and its traditional expectations of women. When she
came to CSU, Chico in 1992 from India, she says, “I had never
even been out without a chauffeur; I’d never even traveled
by myself!”
She came to Chico to get her master’s degree in computer
science, choosing the school for its good reputation in Silicon
Valley. Her brother was living in the Bay Area at the time, but
Navar was on her own in Chico. At first, she says, “it was
pretty scary.”
She quickly found CSU, Chico a “very welcoming school for
a student who would have really drifted away otherwise.” She
was amazed by how friendly everyone was and still laughs about
how even strangers smiled and said hi on campus and at the grocery
store.
“You get used to being a Chicoan,” she says. “It’s
almost like an extended family. The reality hit when I left school
and moved to the Bay Area. I remember asking, ‘How come people
don’t smile?’ ”
Navar herself has plenty to smile about. She is the CEO and co-founder
of Serus Corporation, a Mountain View company that provides other
companies with operations management software. Navar started the
company in her dining room in 2001 without the help of any venture
capital. In the first four and a half years, Serus had more than
$4 million in revenue. It counts billion-dollar companies such
as Cisco and Quantum Corporation as clients. Serus recently raised
more than $5 million from venture capitalists, and Navar hopes
to take Serus public soon and thereby realize her dream: “to
build a company from zero to public offering.”
Navar will have done this while parenting her small son, who was
born just before Serus was established. When asked how she managed
to tackle these two gargantuan tasks at the same time, Navar replies, “It
was like I had twins—and if you have twins, you don’t
say, ‘Oh, one twin is giving me a hard time, so I’m
going to throw him away.’ ”
She adds, “I see women thinking they have to choose one or
the other—work or family—but that’s the old age.
I think we need to live in a new environment, a new age, because
there are so many tools out there to help us with a family life
and a professional life. I think we can be successful in both.
Balancing might be required, but you don’t have to choose.
It’s not one or the other.”
Anna Harris, Public Affairs and Publications
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