Champion Story 55 | Usha Srinivasan
Recorded on March 26, 2019
Biography: Usha Srinivasan is Director of the Ryerson Venture Zone in Brampton. In her role, Usha is responsible for developing and leading a new Ryerson-led incubator located in the downtown Brampton Innovation District, with the support of the City of Brampton.
Prior to joining Ryerson University, Usha was Vice President of Partnerships and Talent at Elevate, a hub for tech, innovation, and sustainability pioneers that unites world-class disruptors who want to solve society’s greatest challenges. Prior to that, she was Vice President of Venture & Talent Programs and Co-Chair of the Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging Council at MaRS Discovery District, where she used her passion to make the tech community fair and inclusive.
Usha holds a bachelor’s degree in Environmental Microbiology from the University of Bristol and a PhD in Environmental Sciences from Abertay University in Dundee. She has also graduated from Stanford’s LEAD Corporate Innovation program.
Thanks for making the time to do this, Usha.
I would love to start by asking you: How did you get to where you are now, doing the work that you're doing at MaRS and our ecosystem?
Sure. To start, I am grateful for the opportunities that have come to me in my life. I have had a varied and eclectic mix of things. I've lived and worked in so many different countries. I'm Indo-Canadian. I was born in India.
Because of my father moving a lot, we also moved. My earliest schooling was all in India, Dubai, and Iran, then I went to get a degree in the UK. I'm actually a microbiologist by training. I decided on microbiology, but at times, it wasn't actually very sexy to do. People would come up and say, “What is that? What is she doing?”
I was very clear that animal testing and that type of stuff is not for me. I chose to do good with microbes that can be better for the environment, versus things that are disease-oriented.
I went on to do research. I loved research. I took time to do a PhD program, then came to the US to do a postdoc. I'm an accidental Canadian. When I was in the US, I had visa issues. I was destined to go to University of Oregon to be an Associate Professor, where I was going to start my journey as a teaching professor: a research professor in the science area.
However, the US government had issues around visiting scientists Visas.
They said, “You have to go back to your home country because this is considered brain drain. We can't recruit you from your country. You have to go back to India or some other country, and then come back to us.” At that time, my husband and I thought this would be a short trip to Canada...
Once you come to Canada, you fall in love with Canada. We stayed.
We came here in the late 1990s. I also have two children, 17 and 19 right now, but they were born here in Canada as new immigrants. I think lots of immigrants that are reading this story will recognize that it's hard to find employment. Even though you've been studying in European countries, it’s still hard to find employment right away when you're in Canada. The Canadian experience question always comes up.
We lived in New Brunswick. We lived in the Yukon territories for a short period of time, to find and get the experience we needed. Finally, we landed in Ontario.
The first part of my life was all in research. After I had my children, I started thinking about shifting my career journey a little bit. When I was in New Brunswick, my professor was running their research lab as a profit center, which I also really enjoyed. He was asked to run it as a profit center. You charge for the services that you provide.
Of course, he hated it. All he wanted to do was teach and do research.
I found myself really interested and intrigued by this. “Hey, you could charge for these things, that's great!” And then, people would be sending us samples. We would find what fungus was on it. All kinds of crazy things. I helped them write proposals and build this website. Sometimes you discover new things you didn't have in yourself by putting your hand up.
For me, that's always something I've done. I've never feared new experiences.
I always put up my hand if I could learn something new; that is exciting to me, to learn something new. I found that I could be entrepreneurial and do something on my own, while having my children. I set up my own consulting company and it was exciting work at the Ministry of Forestry in Yukon. I wrote the Yukon State of the Environment report and so on, and I really embraced the business side of things.
Afterwards, I connected with a market research firm called Frost and Sullivan. They didn't have a role advertised, but when I spoke to the woman who was in California, the head of the environment division, they were looking for somebody like me to write some reports.
I started the journey there. At the end of eight years, I was the Research Manager for North America for the environment-building technologies practice.
A new colleague had just started at Frost and Sullivan, the company I was working with. Being new, he was so excited about his work. He hadn't been grounded down yet, in the consulting world. He had been talking about he and his wife, who was working at MaRS, and I said, "Oh, what's MaRS? What do they do?" He started telling me about MaRS and we started to focus on that.
It was in 2008, when MaRS wasn’t what it is now. The website was very bare bones at that time.
In a very dark moment, thinking about mental health, it was definitely difficult to work in an environment where people were not valued. In the consulting setting, I was having very hard times for sure. Times where your manager is not supportive of your team, and where there are unrealistic expectations put on people that's affects everybody's mental health.
Those kinds of things are difficult. It was one of those dark moments where you're thinking, “Okay, I don't want to leave because that's not in my nature to quit until I find something else.” At 2 AM in the morning, going on the MaRS website, I was so excited about the vision that they had. The way they communicated what they wanted to do.
I just sent my resume to this one person who had a cleantech background. Low and behold, I heard back the next morning. Basically, he had sent my resume to the Managing Director of the Business Acceleration Program. He said, "Oh my God, we've been trying to hire a director for our Market Intelligence team, and I just sent the ad to the recruiter.”
I was just blown away. It was a happy coincidence. He asked me to come and see him the next day, and I went. After three months, I had the job.
I appreciate you being so honest in your share. As somebody who is now a leader at MaRS, how did you cultivate that voice, that power to be able to advocate for yourself?
Ten years ago when I first started at MaRS, I didn’t have the confidence to be open and vocal. I was just participating, asking, really just doing my work and keeping a low profile. “Just do your work and be unnoticeable.”
Because of the generosity of the amazing leaders that I have worked with at MaRS, like our previous CEO or our founder, Dr. John Evans -- hearing about what an amazing man that he was; and others that I have reported to... I took little pieces from all of them. Everyone who encouraged me, who supported me.
As a leader, whatever role you are in, you have to support your people and help elevate them so that when they become leaders, they will elevate others. I feel I have a voice and I feel comfortable being open because I was supported in my organization. We've built that into the culture.
I was in the shadow of other leaders that brought me to where I am. In the past five years, I have found my own voice.
I lead my team. I had about 50 people in my team. I ran the team and I'm very open about my own challenges. My daughter is bipolar. My tactic has been that this is my family, this is my village, right? If I came into work and I didn't have an opportunity to share about my stresses on a daily basis and I just kept it in, I don't think I could have brought my authentic self to work.
As human beings, we all have good days and bad days.
The way I run my team is that we're human beings. We're here to support each other. We'll all have good days and bad days. If we can't be vulnerable and open with each other, then we can't be good leaders or good colleagues to each other. You have to do it, yourself. You can't expect your team to do something if you are not willing to put yourself out there.
I'm sure that there's a risk associated with that. But I have found 99.9% of the time, the more I am vulnerable and open, I'm received with equal reciprocity of openness. Because I've been open about dealing with my daughter's mental illness, a lot of people have come to me privately and said, "I'm also struggling or my daughter's struggling or my husband's struggling." They've been very open with me.
I'm not a therapist, but I just gave them the permission to say something to me. When I see them in the building, I always say, “I see you, I see.”
You get more attuned to people's body language and how they are. You know that they're probably not having a good day. Maybe you have a coffee or acknowledge, “That's being human.” Workplaces don't have to be very corporate-like, for lack of a better word, where you're just there to work and you leave. We spend more and more hours of our lives at work than we do at home.
That's my leadership style -- to be out there. Then I know my team can also. I'm giving my team permission to be that way with each other.
When I was a teenager, I struggled with my mental health. I was trying to communicate to others, especially my family, that I needed support. My parents were loving, but I was in a place where I didn't really know what was wrong.
What you shared moved me sincerely as a daughter, who has built that relationship with my parents. They met me halfway and led by example.
I think that's huge. As a parent, it is such a hard thing for a parent to recognize that your child is… For any parents, that thing of, “Oh, my child is perfect, I gave birth to the perfect child. That child can be anything, they're invincible.” My daughter has educated me.
I don't mind saying this… For the first couple of years, I was convinced that traditional medicine was worse for her and I should put her into naturopathic medicine. I was convinced that the regular medicine she was prescribed was bad for her, and they were. I mean the side effects were ridiculous. They had not diagnosed her properly. They thought it was anxiety disorder. Then it became depression. Then finally it was actually bipolar.
I would wean her off medication because I thought it would be bad. I love my daughter so much. I would wean her off and put her on naturopathic medications thinking, “Yes, I'm doing something good for her.”
In fact, I wasn't. It was good for three months and then she would have massive episodes, because her brain is just wired differently.
The system is so complicated to deal with. It took me a long time to accept that you have to let the system work for you. You have to push and ask for things within the system. One of the biggest challenges I have is about outpatient doctors. When you go to emergency, you have your emergency doctor. That doctor does not check in with your regular psychiatrist to say, "Hey, I'm seeing this patient. What do you think? Should I continue on the medication? She came into emergency." Have a chat, have a conversation before you change the medication.
We would be back again in emergency. They would say, "Oh, stop this medication, add this something else." Back again to the other psychiatrist then, "Okay, let's try this." It is devastating for the subject, right?
Until you get the right medication, easily 15-20 different medications that have been tried on her. Thank goodness she has been stable for the past five months. But, it was a nightmare to get to where we are right now. She's the most resilient human being I've ever met. She's gone through all of this and still going to go to university in Maine, rocking it.
As parents, there's this denial that nothing's wrong, “You'll be perfectly fine.” I'm hoping that there'll be lots of South Asian people reading this thing and saying to themselves that this denial is a huge issue. It's taboo to talk about it in the families.
In fact, I'll still go so far as to say that I have zero support from my own family around this other than my friends. Because it's not common. I don't have any support around it. Not my sister or my parents living here with me. I don't talk to them about it as much because it's a taboo subject, right?
In our communities, people don't don't want to talk about it. That's the last thing that they want to focus on, other than saying, "Hey, how can we support you?" It continues to be an issue. If the entrepreneurs that work with MaRS are an indicator of the Toronto ecosystem, 50% of our entrepreneurs were not born in Canada. They probably are from the Middle Eastern community, Asian community, Eastern European community, from other parts of the world.
Thanks for sharing that. Given everything you shared, what can people do in our tech community to move mental health forward? What can we do together?
The first one is to lead by example, like I said. That would be important. The greater number of senior leaders who come out and talk... There's a gentleman by the name of Sam Duboc, I don't know if you know him.
Oh yeah, he's lovely.
You know Sam, right? I mean, it's huge for somebody like him who used to run BDC and also a Venture Capitalist, for him to come out and say, “I have depression issues.” Like boom! It was huge that somebody came out and said that. That's what I mean by lead by example.
I've been touched in a different way than my child, but God blessed me with it. I feel like I am just resilient. I just keep going. Not everybody is able to be in that way. We need more of our leaders in the tech community coming out and saying that it's okay to have those dark moments. That nobody's going to judge you for that. Seek help. There's therapy; it's not a bad word.
People are human and we are able to move along.
As we talk about mental health, there’s a sideline conversation that I’m very passionate about, especially for our young people -- to have a talk about healthy eating habits. Because these things are very related. I have found this to be true with my own daughter. There's definitely things happening in our system that we can reduce. We can have better coping mechanisms. When you have better eating habits and you have physical wellness, it is all very connected to mental illness -- exercise and eating.
Entrepreneurs that are going through sleepless nights. They're probably not eating regularly. Sometimes they don't have enough money to eat proper food. You always have these jokes about eating ramen noodles and whatnot. I don't know what actually happens because I've not had to live that life, but I feel they're all interconnected. It's not in isolation.
As a parting message, I would say that more leaders that come forward.
Thank you for doing this work to get more people to talk about mental health in an open way. So that people feel, “Hey, it's okay. If such and such can speak about it, I can talk about it. It's okay for me to say it and be vulnerable.” I think that's best. That's what we can do, that is at least in our control in our ecosystem here.
Well, thank you so much for leading by example. Appreciate you doing this with me.
You are welcome. Thank you for the opportunity.