Moojan Asghari (MSc Corporate Finance 2015), the visionary entrepreneur who brings down barriers in tech

Moojan Asghari, who completed a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering in Iran before obtaining her dual degree from EDHEC (Grande École / MSc in Corporate Finance & Banking) in 2015, quickly moved away from corporate finance to take on a multifaceted adventure in entrepreneurship based on experimentation, an appetite for risk and above all tech and communities. Four years ago she co-founded a non-profit organization, Women in AI, which aims to attract women to the artificial intelligence sector. In October 2020 she created the Thousand Eyes On Me platform, which focuses on personal development and empowerment for gender minorities. Diversity, inclusion and the environment: these are the topics Moojan is passionate about and make her a source of hope for the world going forward. 

What are your current responsibilities and how is your work structured?

I’m CEO and Head of Product at Thousand Eyes On Me. I manage a team of five in New York, India, France and Spain, but am also in charge of recruitment, press relations and fundraising. I run the Thousand Voices podcast series, in which I interview mostly female managers from around the world and ask them about their career.

At Women in AI, I look after the Women in AI Awards, the latest edition of which just took place in Australia in March. The awards go to entrepreneurial and innovative women working in artificial intelligence. I also manage the staff teams who organise our annual global summit. 

Originally you seemed destined for a career in banking and corporate finance. What made you want to turn towards entrepreneurship and tech?

A combination of chance and curiosity caused me to shift from finance to tech. For a year and a half I worked on major structured financing projects for airports. It was very interesting, but I felt a bit like a tiny ant working as part of a colossal structure. In banking, even in senior positions, effecting change was very difficult, and the journey was very long towards having any kind of real impact. And so I set up my first start-up after my final internship at Crédit Agricole. I had to learn everything myself as I had never taken any classes on entrepreneurship. I was accepted into an incubator, which changed everything about my career path. I met loads of entrepreneurs and developed my network. My background in engineering and my willingness to learn enabled me to get a position as Product Owner in a start-up doing web development and mobile apps. I later helped organise a hackathon in artificial intelligence and had a revelation. It was a bit later, while researching the latest tech trends, that I co-founded Women in AI. Tech is an area that is changing every day, it’s fascinating to see how much it can change our lives. 

Your engineering background is now real value added in the world of tech. It allows you to see how things are integrated into one another …

Many people ask me if you need to have a background in AI to become an expert or even work in the sector. I tell them you don’t. People shouldn’t limit themselves just because they haven’t done the right studies or don’t have any experience. You can do it if you really want to, you just have to find a way in. But it can be really useful if you know how to use technology and communicate with developers. My background has given me a broader vision and allowed me to take on subjects that I don’t necessarily know anything about, and always be in a position to learn. I chose industrial engineering to have an overview of how things work, I didn’t specialise in a specific area. I wanted to attend a business school to develop the managerial side of things. When I became an entrepreneur, I immediately sensed that I could make decisions and change the course of events, that I could come up with new solutions. That also brings us back to the principle of empowerment at Women in AI and Thousand Eyes On Me.  

Would you say your commitment to women is a vocation?

When I arrived at EDHEC in 2012, I would never have imagined working on feminism or empowerment. I really didn’t think that women or minorities needed specific initiatives or programmes. While working in tech, I realised there was a big problem. I come from a country where women don’t have the same rights as men, and I came to France with the vision that we are all equal, but I understood over the course of my experiences here that that’s not the case, if only in terms of salaries in firms. It was a series of small things that encouraged me to take on this battle. My secret power is the power of communities: mobilising and bringing people together in support of a cause that has an impact. A group creates strength, energy. Women in AI is now present in 140 different countries with 30,000 subscribers, so it’s something that is still inspiring people four years later! 

Have you seen changes in mentalities through Women in AI and the #MeToo movement?

On a global scale, #MeToo has changed mentalities, particularly when it comes to women’s rights, even in work environments. Companies are beginning to take an interest. Big budgets are now being allocated to staff training, the European Commission has adopted new laws on minimum quotas in companies … At the beginning, when I spoke about the importance of diversity in tech, men used to say to me that there was no need for such initiatives, that nobody had ever prevented women from entering the world of tech. I struggled to explain that groundwork was needed and that a welcoming corporate culture was necessary for more diversity, as it’s not just about recruitment. Now I no longer need to convince them: they understand the problem. So that’s quite a positive thing, but France unfortunately remains a bit “defensive” compared to Nordic countries, for example, who play a leading role. But we’ll get there, we’re moving in the right direction! 

Are you seeing changes on these issues in Iran?

I met quite a few entrepreneurs at the Silk Road Start-up forum, which I organised there for two years running. Although there is little room for manoeuvre to talk about women’s rights, we are also seeing a movement gathering pace across society in Iran. Companies are running marketing campaigns and little by little recruiting more women. In Iran 70% of engineers are women. So the problem is not one of accessing these professions as such, but rather accessing senior posts, because even if you have the diplomas you have to stay at home to look after the children. But it’s a very tech-oriented country, with a mobile phone penetration rate of 120%: each individual has more than one phone. That allows them to be very connected to the rest of the world and know what’s going on, so we are seeing a positive impact all the same. 

And now that there is greater awareness, what’s next in the fight for the rights of women and minorities? 

That’s a crucial question. In the world of tech, companies are now allocating budgets to diversity and inclusion programmes because they must do so. That’s all very well, but the most important aspect is having a long-term vision, and that requires investment to understand why they should do so. We need to be able to rely on the commitment of staff and executive committees. In order for corporate cultures and the impact on society to change, more women must be recruited. It is true that quotas drive diversity, but we shouldn’t think that we’re all done once a box has been ticked. It is also essential to recruit more people with this new mentality if we are to change companies’ strategies. In both secondary and higher education, it is high time to make teaching about diversity systematic.

Through Women in AI and Thousand Eyes On Me, are you preparing people for the way companies are nowadays and telling them how to stand out on the market?

That’s exactly what we do at Women in AI. Thousand Eyes On Me is nurturing the workforce of the future. For if we really want an inclusive society, we need employees to feel equal and fulfilled. Before recruiting people with more diverse profiles, we need to educate them before they arrive on the labour market. For example, no more than 20% of people working in artificial intelligence worldwide are women. In France it’s 15%, so to reach 50% we need to start educating the women who will be recruited in the future. At Women in AI, on the one hand we are preparing women to acclimatise to the AI sector with classes, and on the other we are encouraging women who are already experts in AI to take on executive posts in companies to inspire the upcoming generation. Thousand Eyes On Me encourages women to take on decision-making roles in companies in management positions. We’re talking about a lot of women, but diversity is not only about gender and male–female binarity. It’s also about LGBT groups, other religions, other cultures, age groups, etc. When we first set up Women in AI, we were less well informed about LGBT issues. Now we are more aware and we need to keep up to date. It’s not exactly the same battle, but it’s similar. People from minority groups perhaps suffer more from discrimination. If a woman is a Muslim and has dark skin, you find that every time she “matches” one more criterion, her chances of being given a high level of responsibility in a company are slimmer. Innovation doesn’t come about with people from the same sex and the same background. Diversity creates real wealth.

You’re fighting for diversity and inclusion, but also for the environment with Greentech Alliance. What is the common ground between these battles? 

Diversity and inclusion mean identical access for all to education and power in society; environmental issues have been omnipresent since COP21 in Paris. For me the common ground between these two areas is access to resources around the world. If we inhabit a planet lacking in natural resources, we’ll encroach on the rights of somebody else simply because we have the power and technology to do so. The same is true of diversity and inclusion in the world of tech: if I’m white and from a well-off background with intellectual and cultural resources, everything is easier for me from the outset. Someone who comes to my country won’t have the same chances as me in life. What really counts is fair access to opportunities in the long term. To avoid killing off the planet, we shouldn’t be thinking about the next 5 years, but the next 20, 30 or 100. And the timeframe is even longer when it comes to diversity. The World Economic Forum estimates that we need a little over 200 years to achieve gender equality! To effect radical change, we need initiatives like ours and joint action from governments and contributors to society like companies. We only have 10 years to avoid temperatures rising on Earth. If every country in the world decides to act, we can do it. I think my role, and that of many others like me in organizations, is to mobilise people, to convince them to take decisions aligned with one another and move in this direction. 

How can tech help save the planet? Are you encouraging women to turn towards green tech? 

At GreenTech Alliance, which I’ve joined as a consultant, the idea is to create an alliance of all the companies and individuals who support the environmental cause. Tech really can solve our environmental problems, but it can be an angel or a demon. We’ve consumed many resources on Earth by developing technologies. But we can also come up with technologies capable of changing the planet for the better. We can generate satellite images of the ocean bed, where 80% of the plastic in the world is to be found. We can artificially recreate coral in laboratories and put it back into the ocean. I believe in technology as a force to help us rise to these environmental challenges. Technology can help us (re)create our environment – it must be our ally. Human beings always want more, but I see that from an optimistic viewpoint: it’s just as good to create new things as to explore unknown territories!