You could say that Durreen Shahnaz, 32 is indebted to Grameen Bank.

If it weren't for her one-year stint with that bank in Bangladesh, she wouldn't be a successful CEO and founder of New York-based oneNest.com, a cyber marketplace where artisans of the world can display their wares and meet up with buyers.

The site takes its name from a quote by Rabindranath Tagore. It aspires to be the place "where the world meets in one nest".

Though launched in the Spring of 1999, the oneNest story has its beginnings in 1991. Shahnaz, as international development manager for Grameen Bank, trekked to remote villages to provide micro loans to poor women, who could start small businesses, including making beautiful handcrafted textiles and handicrafts.

But while the bank's micro loans did help women to use their skills, it did not help to market their products. "Women were defaulting on their loans because they were not able to sell their products, once a market got saturated," says Shahnaz.

Realising that the women needed an infrastructure to market their products to domestic and foreign markets. Shahnaz found her life's mission. All she had to do was wait for the right time.

"I always wanted to do something with my career, which would help the economic development cause. I had this great opportunity to get a western education and I wanted to give back," she says.

A year later, she was back in the United States, where she earned an MBA from Wharton and an MA in International Economics from John Hopkins. She had already got a double major in economics and government from Smith College and had worked at Morgan Stanley for two years before her stint at Grameen Bank.

Equipped with an MBA, Shahnaz was ready to garner the skills she would need at oneNest. She worked as a consultant at the World Bank and the Mitchell Madison Group and as a bond trader at Merrill Lynch before moving to Hearst Magazines International, managing their new magazines.

She rose quickly up the corporate ladder and was promoted to vice president of Asia operations, making her at 30, the youngest VP at Hearst.

Despite her soaring career graph, Shahnaz knew the time was right to launch her own business. All her career stops were stepping stones to her eventual dream-oneNest.com.

Her time with the World Bank exposed her to policy making and working with governments at the macro level. But she missed the human touch and raw emotions of dealing with people at the micro level. "I don't want to criticize the World Bank because they do have a role to play, but they have to figure out what it is. They have these beautiful offices and get into Land Rovers and go to villages. They are worlds apart from the real world."

Once she had decided to take the plunge, it didn't take her long to turn her dream into a reality. She approached her friend and former next-door neighbor in Bangladesh, Mushter Moin, who was managing editor of IBM's corporate website.

She also spoke with Victor Morgan, a friend and colleague from Mitchell Madison. Both the men were so inspired by her idea that they not only quit their jobs and joined as co-founders, but were also willing to work without pay until the venture received outside funding.

They also contributed $100,000 in seed money to help launch the beta website.

Before long, Shahnaz had brought together a diverse international group of professionals, all of them with faith in her that they were willing to work without pay until the business got funding.

Eventually, funding did come with a seed round of $1 million in November 1999, and oneNest's cyberbazaar was formally launched in February 2000.

At launch, the site featured more than 1300 products from every continent, including fine art, decorative items, home furnishings, clothing and jewelry. Almost two years later it has more than 80,000 products, from hundreds of countries including Bosnia, Bolivia, the Caribbean and India.

With a US market of $40 billion and a worldwide market of $300 billion waiting to exploited, oneNest had nothing to lose. Unlike other websites like eZiba.com, Novica and world2market.com which enable artisans in less developed countries to sell directly to consumers in the Western world, oneNest is the only site that helps artisans to sell in bulk directly to wholesalers.

"We're not an e-tailer. We are just an exchange. This is something I feel passionately about from my Grameen Bank days. I want to help people help themselves. I am not an advocate of giving something for free or buying it off them. It is all about empowerment, economic empowerment for men and women," says Shahnaz.

Since most artisans do not have computers and Internet access, oneNest works with humanitarian and non-profit organizations like Asia Society, CARE and PEOPLink.

By working with these organizations, oneNest has helped reduce the intermediaries in a transaction, helping the individual producers in the process to earn a higher share of the value of their products than they otherwise would.

Artisans who sell direct to wholesalers via the site keep 100 per cent of the wholesale price of their products (minus a small listing fee and commission). Those selling through intermediaries (exporters and nonprofit organizations) get less -- anywhere from 10 to 95 percent of the wholesale price. Those who wish to sell directly to consumers have the option of selling through ebay auctions in a process managed by oneNest.com.

Combining offline support with its online activities, oneNest.com organizes trade shows and fairs for wholesale buyers to get a first-hand feel of the goods offered on the site.

But while doing social good and alleviating poverty is high on Shahnaz's agenda, she is also pragmatic about running a financially viable company. She believes that her venture will have far greater leverage if it is a for-profit corporation rather than a non-profit like the Hunger site.

"If we are successful financially we won't be dependent on other people's money and will be able to help many more people more quickly," she maintains.

The company earns its money by charging sellers small fees to list and sell their products and charges wholesale buyers subscription fees to access the site's product catalogs. She expects the company to make a profit as early as 2002.

It has been a long and heady journey for this young Bangladeshi from her hometown of Dhaka to New York's Silicon Alley. She is also the only Bangladeshi woman to head a dotcom company. Shahnaz got the recognition she deserves when she was featured in a book, Dotcom Divas: E-business insights from the visionary women founders of 20 Net ventureswritten by Elizabeth Carlassaare. She was one of 20 Internet entrepreneurs selected from a larger pool of 200 "divas".

The youngest of four daughters in a family with no sons, Shahnaz was born at a time the family was hoping for a boy. She grew up with a fiercely independent streak, which was nurtured by her parents.

She went to a strict all-girls Catholic school and was educated in Bengali. Even in school she was always getting in trouble for questioning everything. Her high school years were easier, because her father moved to the Philippines where he represented the Indian subcontinent at the Asian Development Bank.

At the American-style school in the Philippines, Shahnaz was determined to improve her English and become editor of her school newspaper by her senior year.

"Every morning I'd memorize 20 new words," she recollects.

When it was time to apply to college, Shahanaz knew exactly where she wanted to study. Her parents protested but she would not change her mind. She would attend college in the United States and not a college in India like her other sisters.

Her parents finally agreed to let her go, provided it was a women's college. She went to Smith College and graduated with a double major in economics and government.

When it came to marriage, Shahnaz defied convention again. She fell in love and married an investment banker, a New Jersey native even as her parents were attempting to arrange her marriage.

Passionate about her concerns and interests, Shahnaz does nothing in half measures. An amateur photographer and award-winning Kathak dancer, she has also been learning Kuchipudi for the past four years.

Smart and resolute, Shahnaz has the mindset to take everything in her stride, even gender and race discrimination. She discovered that if being a woman CEO was difficult, being a non-white was a worse handicap.

"The venture capitalists and the financing world still feel comfortable if you're a man or if you're Caucasian. Being a woman from another part of the world with an accent is the worst of all combinations. But I don't dwell on it. This is my dream, my goal and I'm gong to make it happen no matter what," said Shahnaz.

So determined is she to let nothing get in her way to making oneNest.com a phenomenal success that she has learned to laugh away her so-called handicaps.

For instance, when people ask her what it takes to raise money, her laconic reply: "You need three things. You have to be a man, have an engineering undergraduate degree, like one from an IIT or an MBA from Stanford. Unfortunately, I am a woman, I don't have an engineering degree, I did Liberal Arts and I went to Wharton. So if I can make it, anybody can!"

Shahnaz's immediate business goals include creating versions of oneNest.com in other languages and expanding its services to wireless devices. These are important because many of the artisans oneNest seeks to serve are located in non-English speaking countries and in regions without wired inernet access.

Despite her success as an entrepreneur, Shahnaz's greatest pleasure comes in seeing the difference oneNest is making in a poor artisan's life, in seeing a beautiful hand-embroidered bedsheet in an upmarket department store and the confidence economic empowerment brings to men and women.