John Harthorne

On International Women’s Day, I want to share something personal.

I recently spent time in India with my sister, Samriddhi Bhattacharyya - our first real hangout in person after a couple of years. As we celebrated her appointment as the Senior Director and Head of National Enterprise at Iron Mountain, along with some recent milestones at Navier, I found myself reflecting on a concept from calculus that has quietly shaped how I see the world.

In mathematics, a single point on a graph rarely tells the full story.
The variable that actually matters is the gradient - the slope.

The intercept tells you where someone started.
The gradient tells you how steep the climb was.

The longer I’ve lived, the more I’ve come to believe that many of the most interesting human stories are really stories about gradients.

When I interview someone, I don’t just look at where they stand today - I look at where they started and the trajectory they carved through the terrain in front of them. That tells you far more about potential.

My sister and I didn’t grow up with wealth or powerful networks. We grew up in Kolkata, India, with a chaotic childhood where very little was expected of us. In a world that often measures success by who you know or which “club” you belong to, our path wasn’t supposed to lead here.

For many women, the slope isn’t just steep - it can feel almost vertical.
Yet history moves forward through these extraordinary gradients.

-- Marie Curie, who rose from poverty in Poland to win two Nobel Prizes.
-- Katherine Johnson, whose calculations helped send humans to the Moon from a room she was once told she didn’t belong in.
-- Grace Hopper and Amelia Earhart, who reshaped the foundations of programming and aviation.

We see similar stories unfolding today in women like Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, who started Biocon in a garage when banks refused to lend to her; Falguni Nayar, who built a multi-billion-dollar global brand in her 50s; Cristina Junqueira, who helped redefine fintech with Nubank; and Jennifer Doudna, whose work on CRISPR gene editing fundamentally changed modern biology.

Different industries. Different eras. But the same pattern: a refusal to accept the intercept they were given.

Happy International Women’s Day to the women who are quietly changing the equation of what is possible - and to those who refuse to leave the arena, no matter how steep the climb. 🚀