“Finance to tech was a move that was never planned,” she tells Fortune. “When this role came about, I sat on it for about five to six months, trying to make up my mind on whether to start in a new area after so many years, and after retiring.”
Bhattacharya had just wrapped up a five-year tenure as the first female head of the SBI, one of India’s largest banks, capping a career that spanned 40 years.
Yet she changed her mind after a trip to San Francisco and a meeting with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who also handed her a copy of his book, Trailblazer. Two stories stood out to her. First was Salesforce’s decision to lobby San Francisco’s city government to increase taxes to tackle the city’s homeless problem; “I have known a large number of companies. I have never known any one of them lobbying to pay more taxes,” she muses.
The second, perhaps more relevant, point was Benioff’s decision to have annual equal pay audits—which seek to eliminate gender wage gaps. “Marc was told not to do that audit because it might mean hefty payouts. He still went ahead and did it,” she recounts. “That made a big impression on me, because I thought a company that does things like that would be one from which I could learn a lot, in terms of the values that it espoused.”
