Radhika Gupta likes to introduce herself by her rejections. Born with a condition that affected her neck, bullied as a child, turned down by seven employers early in her career — it is not the résumé you expect from someone who now leads one of India's well-known mutual fund houses.
That is exactly the point. As chief executive of Edelweiss Mutual Fund, and later as a judge on India's version of Shark Tank, she became a rare thing in Indian finance: a leader who talks openly about failure, self-doubt and belonging, in an industry that usually prizes a poker face.
She calls herself the girl with the broken neck who was rejected seven times. Then she ran the whole firm.
Her rise matters beyond the numbers. In a field where women remain scarce at the top, she has become a role model precisely because she refuses to hide the hard parts — the anxiety, the imposter feeling, the years of being underestimated.
On LinkedIn she writes the way she speaks: direct, warm, a little defiant. Her message to anyone who has ever been told they don't fit is simple and stubborn — the rejections are not the end of your story. Sometimes they are the beginning of it.