Natasha Varma '03 - HSC Review 2022

WORK GLOBAL,

Think Local Business advisor Natasha Varma ’03 has lived, worked and studied around the world, but starting a high-tech laundry service in Toronto may have been her most enlightening experience Portraits by Steph Martyniuk

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By Bruce McDougall

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F THERE’S ONE THING THAT Natasha Varma ’03 thrives on, it’s change.

Since she arrived in the fifth grade at HSC 25 years ago, her curiosity and initiative have led her through more twists and turns than many of us navigate in a lifetime. But she has always followed her own counsel.

Since she left HSC, Natasha has lived in Bahrain, New York, Toronto, Calgary, Paris and London, England. She has studied at New York University’s Stern School of Business and the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. She has worked in the fields of wealth management and financial advisory with Merrill Lynch and Ernst and Young as well as for the Canadian High Commission in London, and has helped businesses in Canada streamline their operations with enterprise software at SAP. SPRING 2022

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And for five years, until 2020, she ran her own business in Toronto, a concierge garment-care service called Vaundry, which she intended to expand throughout Canada until her inner voice advised her against it. That may have been the best education of all.

Still in her mid-thirties, Natasha keeps her eye on the future as she works in Toronto as an advisor and consultant to technology startups and entrepreneurs, either through her company, Reddy Impact, or through organizations like MaRS Discovery District, TechToronto and the Upside Foundation of Canada.

“After being a founder myself, I’m now helping small businesses to succeed,” she says. “I enjoy the fun of sharing my knowledge with people who don’t have my background.”

To each of her assignments, Natasha brings not only her experience, learning and expertise but also a wealth of accumulated wisdom. “My choices in life have challenged me to grow personally,” she says. “They’ve also challenged my thinking about success. Some of these lessons you can’t learn in school.”

The daughter of an entrepreneur, Natasha grew up in Bahrain, a country of two million people in the Persian Gulf. But her mother’s aunt lived in Hamilton, and her parents travelled there occasionally with Natasha and her younger sister, Namita.

“We’d drive by Hillfield Strathallan,” says Natasha, “and my mom’s uncle would joke with my parents. He’d say, ‘You have to move to Canada and send your kids there.’”

Little did he know that Natasha and her family would do exactly that in 1995. Arriving in Grade 5, she worked hard to adjust to her new environment.

“She was kind and warm and never had a bad word to say,” says her classmate, Arielle Stockdale ’03. “And she had a great sense of humour. We were always laughing.” But after five years, their friendship was abruptly severed when Natasha returned with her family to Bahrain. “I remember when she left,” says Arielle. “I was very sad.”

Natasha completed high school at Bahrain International School in Manama, exchanging with Arielle occasional 30

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photographs and letters. They communicated more regularly when Natasha returned to North America to earn a bachelor’s degree at NYU Stern in 2004, although she had little time to spare as she achieved A grades in economics, finance and French, spent the spring and summer of her sophomore year in Europe, interned at two investment banks and made the dean’s list before she graduated in 2008.

Returning to Bahrain, she worked for the next two years as a wealth management analyst for Merrill Lynch and a management consultant with Ernst & Young. But neither of those organizations captured her passion, so she went back to school in Toronto, enrolling at Rotman.

She was 25 when she graduated with her MBA, having spent a semester in London, and went to work for SAP, a German multinational. “I’d worked in finance and consulting,” she says, “but I always wanted to be part of something more innovative, creative and disruptive.”

With SAP’s account executives and tech teams, Natasha helped to manage the integration of the company’s enterprise software into customers’ operations, first in Toronto and then in Calgary. “But I began to feel that my career was being shaped by people other than myself,” she says, so she left SAP and returned to Toronto.

A day after she arrived in the city, Natasha walked from her downtown condominium to a nearby Starbucks, where she met by chance the man who would become her husband, Harsha Mohan.

In the days and weeks that followed, their relationship blossomed. Driving home after a trip to Montreal, Natasha looked at their laundry in the back seat and began to think about starting the business that would become Vaundry.

She had all she needed to do it: education, experience, background and determination. She also had Harsha’s encouragement and expertise in IT. “He said, ‘If you have the inclination, you should try,’” Natasha recalls.

Co-founded with Harsha, Vaundry offered customers in Toronto a pain-free, on-demand garment-care service.

Instead of hauling bundles of shirts, blouses and pants to a storefront dry cleaner, Vaundry’s customers could use an app on their phone to schedule a pickup by a trained driver. For the cost of the cleaning and an added service fee, the driver would take their laundry and return it, cleaned and pressed, as instructed.

“The company was based on the frustrations I’d had as a corporate employee,” Natasha says. “I wondered why dry cleaning had to be such a pain in the bum.”

A Vaundry vehicle at work in Toronto.

In 2016, as Vaundry’s distinctive blue vans became a familiar sight in Toronto, Natasha and Harsha decided to get married. In true Indian fashion, their wedding at the Millcroft Inn in Caledon, north of the city, lasted for three days.

“I wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” says Arielle, who travelled to the wedding from Nunavut, where she works as a policy analyst for the Nunavut Housing Corporation. “My parents went, too,” she says.

From the outset, Vaundry attracted positive reviews. Natasha was recognized as one of Canada’s most dynamic entrepreneurs. In 2019, she was highlighted in a special feature by RBC on tech entrepreneurs who were disrupting traditional businesses. She was also invited to speak on stages and podcasts both at home and abroad. But even before COVID-19 hit in 2020, she began to have a change of heart.

“My business was becoming a chore to me,” she says. “We had five-star reviews, but we also had to deal with a very archaic industry: vendors who just didn’t adapt to the changing customer landscape; contractors who did not care enough about customer service; and supplier capacity constraints exacerbated through the pandemic. It was draining.”

“Making customers happy became the centre of our focus,” she wrote on her blog on Medium. “But somehow I still didn’t feel happy.” As she discovered, “if you’re in the business of making people’s lives easier, your life will be hard.”

After a period of soul-searching, Natasha decided to sell the assets and close the business. “I always wanted to start a business like Uber,” she says, “but I discovered that it’s not having a million dollars in the bank, but the people around you, that count.”

Now, in addition to her consulting work, Natasha lectures to college students, writes articles on Medium and helps the founders of early-stage, high-growth Canadian companies to build social responsibility into their businesses through the Upside Foundation. Her clients range from a scientist who founded a health-care company to a middle-aged entrepreneur who has pledged one per cent of his software company to Upside.

“I’m on the precipice of whatever’s next,” she says. “But it will have to be something I’m interested in or I won’t do it. After all, life and business should be centred around the notion of joy. Why else do we do anything in life?”

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