sohan lal’s rich harvest  the tvf edge
Price rs. 110. aPril 15, 2016
bansal’s
new
mantra
Mukesh Bansal
has his life
after Myntra
all planned out.
no, it doesn’t
include fashion.
yes, it has
everything to
do with passion
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editor’s note
A quintessential entrepreneur, the Myntra founder has decided to test himself all over again
Mukesh Bansal: Episode II
T
Best,
Sourav MajuMdar
Editor, Forbes India
sourav.majumdar@network18publishing.com
@TheSouravM
4 | FORBES INDIA APRIL 15, 2016
here are entrepreneurs who set up businesses,
achieve success and valuations and then choose to
continue on that journey on cruise control mode.
And then there is Mukesh Bansal, the 40-year-old
founder of India’s best-known online fashion retailer Myntra.
Bansal, whose company was acquired in 2014 by Flipkart in
order to create a behemoth and take on the might of Amazon
in India, has decided to shake things up for himself. Typical of
a quintessential entrepreneur who is never satisfied with what
he’s achieved, Bansal has decided to quit the Flipkart-Myntra
combine and head into new terrain. Not that he was short of
work after Myntra was acquired: Bansal became chairman of
the Myntra board and head of Flipkart’s commerce system; he
was recently given charge of Flipkart’s advertising business.
But that clearly wasn’t enough for him, and he has decided
to test his skills as an early-stage entrepreneur yet again.
Not many in Bansal’s position would do what he’s done:
Leave the relatively cushy confines of a successful business,
the $15-billion Flipkart, and move into uncharted waters.
But Bansal is not new to the unpredictable yet exciting world
of startups, having worked in four of them during his days
in San Francisco where he moved after quitting his job as a
Deloitte analyst in Chicago. As Bansal candidly tells Senior
Assistant Editor Debojyoti Ghosh: “I want to feel like an
early-stage entrepreneur again and see if I can do it one more
time.” Joining him in his latest gig—he says the new venture
will not be in the world of fashion like Myntra was, but a mix
of sport, fitness and health care—is Ankit Nagori, Flipkart’s
former chief business officer who also quit along with Bansal.
Armed with an entrepreneurial drive and the zest to
build a successful business yet again, Bansal has set out
on his new innings with confidence and the will to win.
His second outing, those who know him say, may turn out
to be even more interesting than his first, given his track
record in pivoting Myntra from a personalised gifting
company to a highly successful online fashion retailer.
This issue also has other interesting entrepreneurial stories,
notably that of Sohan Lal Commodity Management (page 26),
a company which, by sheer dint of innovation, has become
a major success in the complicated and tough world of agricommodity storage. The asset light model which Sohan Lal
has opted for also eliminates wastage, a huge problem in
Indian agriculture, by conducting random checks and timely
reporting through hand-held tablets. Not surprisingly, Sohan
Lal and its chief executive Sandeep Sabharwal are the toast
of investors. And a story of enterprise worth taking note of.
Welcome
to the
Cognitive
Era.
A new era of technology.
A new era of business.
A new era of thinking.
Contents
/ April 15, 2016
●
Volume 8 issue 8
ON THE COVER
42 | THE ETERNAL
ENTREPRENEUR
Myntra founder Mukesh Bansal
started from scratch to build India’s
biggest online fashion retail brand.
Now, he’s all set for a second innings
We value your feedback.
Write to us at: forbes.india@network18online.com
letters may be edited for brevity.
read us online at www.forbesindia.com
on the cover & this page:
photograph by mallikarjun Katakol
for Forbes india
digital Imaging by: sushil mhatre
Cognitive Business
Businesses that can think so people can outthink
IBM® is bringing the cognitive era to businesses by working with
over 70,000 developers and 350+ partner companies, who have
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April 15, 2016
26
Sandeep Sabharwal has cracked the code of agri-commodity storage. His firm, Sohan lal commodity Management, reports almost nil wastage
U PFRONT
38
EXIT INTERV IEW
22 | ‘I FEEL LESS RELEVANT
NOW THAN EVER BEFORE’
Outgoing Mindtree chairman Subroto Bagchi feels the next
rung of leaders will take the company ahead of the curve
INTERV IEW
24 | ‘THE PAYMENT BANK IS
AN INDIAN INNOVATION’
BCG’s partner and MD Saurabh Tripathi says payment
banks will challenge traditional ones
FEAT U R ES
ENTER PRISE
26 | CUSTODIANS OF THE HARVEST
26: Amit VermA 38: mexy xAVier; 54: JoshuA NAVAlKAr
Sandeep Sabharwal of Sohan Lal Commodity Management
has reaped rich by revamping his family business
Sandeep Murthy hunts down entrepreneurs with a passion
54
32 | THE STARTUP NANNY
Axilor Ventures helps new ventures turn
ideas into businesses
38 | CHASING UNICORNS
How Sandeep Murthy identifies potential billion-dollar firms
58 | BOOK A MEAL
Want to dine at a top restaurant? EazyDiner
helps you reserve a table in 30 seconds
INTERV IEW
36 | ‘TRAINING HAS TO BECOME
DEFINITE FOR TRUE IMPACT’
NIIT’s MD Vijay Thadani says his company is transforming
and helping other businesses transform
8 | FORBES INDIA APRIL 15, 2016
arunabh kumar’s The viral fever has around 15 lakh subscribers
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50 | ‘I BLAME ALL GOVTS FOR
THE SLOW PACE OF REFORMS’
84
P Chidambaram says India’s never had an unbroken period
of reforms since the economy opened up in 1991
M A R K ETING & A DV ERTISING
54 | A WEB OF EXPERIMENTS
With The Viral Fever, Arunabh Kumar has taken his love
for storytelling to the digital-savvy generation
FOR BES INDI A
L EA DERSHIP SERIES
62 | THE VALUE-LED APPROACH: TOUGH
BUT ESSENTIAL
Deepak Parekh and NR Narayana Murthy discuss the ways
of leaving behind a legacy of honesty and ethics
CROSS BOR DER
60 | BAD RECEPTION
Don’t expect a rebound for Qualcomm anytime soon
66 | THE GODFATHER OF DIGITAL
CARTOGRAPHY
Jack Dangermond’s mapping system Esri is still relevant
70 | THE ZENTREPRENEUR
The vibrant campus life is as integral to the learning process as the
lectures and projects at Indian Institutes of Management
Despite high valuations, Ron Rubin isn’t selling
Republic of Tea
92
30 U NDER 30
72 | ASIA’S BEST AND BRIGHTEST
A field guide to who is changing the face of the region
LIFE
R ECLINER
84 | CAMPUS CALLING
Snapshots from life on IIM campuses over 50 years
90 | ‘IF YOU OWNED A MODIGLIANI,
YOU’D RATHER SELL IT IN NEW YORK’
William Robinson of Christie’s says it’ll take time for India
to become a preferred place to sell international art
92 | THE ROAD CHIEF RIDES AGAIN
A father-daughter duo is rolling out a trailer after 80 years
feather-light and ultracool, the classic bowlus trailer is rolling again
96
A PPR A ISA L
94 | CAR: AUDI S5 SPORTBACK
The car that’ll have your back
FR EQU ENT FLY ER
95 | MY NEW YORK
84: Getty imAGes
For Regus Group’s Harsh Lambah,
no city has a buzz like the Big Apple
R EGU L A RS
14 | LETTERS
16 | LEADERBOARD
96 | NUGGETS
98 | THOUGHTS
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Cognitive Oncology is here.
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Readers Say
A billion steps
to prosperity
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Impressive show
Refer to ‘India Shrinks, For Now’ (Issue
dated March 31, 2016). The number of
Indian billionaires on the 2016 Forbes
World Billionaires List has reduced from
90 last year to 84 now. Is this because of
the stringent measures taken by the government to unearth black money and extract taxes from citizens? Or is it a good
sign, reflecting a reduction in the disparity between the rich and the poor? In any
case, the number of billionaires cannot
be an indicator of the country’s prosperity and economic development. Many
billionaires have accumulated wealth
from unproductive resources which do
not contribute to the nation’s wealth.
Till the time the per capita income of
a majority of people does not increase,
India cannot have all-round progress.
Mahesh Kapasi, on the web
Refer to ‘Facilitating Good Food’
(Issue dated February 19, 2016). I am
impressed with The Bombay Canteen
founder and COO Yash Bhanage’s
story of success and entrepreneurship,
but how is it possible to start a
business like this with very less money?
While we talk of startups and
businesses, we should get some help
to initiate [a business] and only then
can we give employment to others.
Awanish Goswami, on the web
Corrections & Clarifications
Issue dated March 31, 2016
On page 19 — In ‘The Man Who
Owns The World’, the printer’s devil
entered our issue and ‘ww’ years was
erroneously printed in the first line.
It should have read ‘30 years’. The
error is regretted.
SOHAN LAL’S RICH HARVEST THE TVF EDGE
PRICE RS. 100. APRIL 15, 2016
Podcast
BANSAL’S
NEW
MANTRA
www.forbesindia.com
ASIA’S
MUKESH BANSAL
HAS HIS LIFE
AFTER MYNTRA
ALL PLANNED OUT.
NO, IT DOESN’T
INCLUDE FASHION.
YES, IT HAS
EVERYTHING TO
DO WITH PASSION
bansal’s
new mantra
By Debojyoti Ghosh
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Stereotyping makes people more
likely to act badly
Even slight cues, like reading a negative
stereotype about your race or gender, can
have an impact
Working across genres can dilute your brand
Combining categories makes it harder for people to understand what
you are doing Dealing with demand shocks
Flexibility in the supply chain is more effective than
dropping prices
14 | forbes india april 15, 2016
The risks of fast news analytics
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High frequency news analytics services
give institutional traders an edge by
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LeaderBoard
aperture
US President Barack
Obama meets Cuban
President Raul Castro
in Havana during his
three-day visit to Cuba.
Obama’s is the first US
presidential visit to the
island nation in 88 years
Carlos Barria / reuters
Building
Bridges
LeaderBoard
14
The number of US schools
among the top 20 global
institutions with full-time
MBA programmes
chAnging rUleS of MBA
‘The World is not
US-Centric Anymore’
David A Thomas, dean of Georgetown University’s McDonough School
of Business, says all MBA programmes need to be relevant globally
in an increasingly
global, innovationled entrepreneurial
environment, business
schools have had to
transform their educational
programmes to keep up
with the times. David
A Thomas, dean of
Georgetown University’s
McDonough School of
Business, discusses this
transformation and the
challenges it poses for
Indian corporations.
Edited excerpts:
There are three principles
to create an effective global
business education. The
first is educational content.
Is what we’re teaching
global in its relevance? At
the McDonough School
of Business, that has led
to a total redesign of
our MBA curriculum.
The second is exposure:
Providing opportunities to
students to interact with
global business leaders,
to get outside their home
culture and language
and understand what it
means to be doing global
business. In many ways,
business looks the same
everywhere. So what’s
global? Understanding
that is important. The
Q How have you seen
Indian corporations
evolve over the years?
third is the quality of the
engagement that people
have with each other
across those differences.
Q How has the standard
management programme
developed with the
changing realities?
Most MBA programmes
rely heavily on case studies.
I have been teaching at
business schools for 30
years. When I first started
teaching, all the cases were
about American companies
doing business in the US.
In our school today, more
than half the cases have a
global dimension to them.
Just in terms of content, a
lot of them have changed.
Another adaptation for
American business schools
is that the competition
has increased as business
schools around the world
have gotten better. The
world is not US-centric
anymore. The competition
is no longer just between
the school in New York and
the one in [Washington]
DC. It’s about the IIMs,
Insead, London School
of Business, Hong Kong
University… the landscape
has changed, making it
more challenging for people
in my job, but also a lot
richer and more exciting.
Q With startup
ecosystems being
developed the world
over, people seem to
be getting into the
entrepreneurial cycle at
an earlier age. How have
you dealt with this?
In the last five years,
we have significantly
If you went back just 15
years, Indian corporations
were not seen as major
global corporate leaders.
They were seen as
outsourcers. Today,
there are Indian companies
that have the attitude to not
just be global players but
also global leaders. Take
TCS, M&M, HCL… these
are all leading their sectors
in a lot of ways. I have also
had the opportunity to
hear some Indian business
leaders talk. How they
speak about their ambitions
is different from how they
did 15 years ago. There’s
an attitudinal shift. An
increasing challenge
for them is going to be:
Can the system develop
human capital to feed their
ambitions quickly enough
to keep pace with their
opportunities? Another
challenge is that Indian
companies will have to
become global in their
orientation because they’ll
have global workforces.
-AngAd Singh ThAkUr
APRIL 15, 2016 FORBES INDIA | 17
Mexy xAvier; Top: ShAnnon STApleTon / reUTerS
Q What does it mean for
a university or college to
be truly global today?
increased our offering in
entrepreneurship—both
in terms of classes and
co-curricular activities.
We have an incubator
where students can apply
and if we think their idea
merits it, they can spend
the summer there. We’re
developing a fund to
provide seed capital for
students. For millennials,
we’ve had to redesign and
rethink many things in the
entrepreneurial space.
LeaderBoard
Simplifying the proceSS
A Remedy for
Cumbersome Claims
Bengaluru-based Remedinet’s systems make
paper work efficient for hospitals and insurers
if patients find it
difficult to get their claims
cleared and approved by
insurance companies,
hospitals too face their
own share of bottlenecks
while dealing with cashless
insurance claims.
Hospitals need approvals
from the insurance
company at three stages
of the cashless procedure:
A provisional approval
when a patient checks in,
a final approval when the
person is discharged, and
a settlement of the bill by
the insurance company.
Each of these stages comes
with its set of problems.
Enter Remedinet, a
five-year-old Bengalurubased company that aims to
make the process simpler
for the hospital and for the
third party administrator
(TPA) that processes claims
on behalf of the insurance
company. According to
Munish Daga, CEO of
Remedinet, “There are
5.5 million claims filed
annually across India.
Thirty percent of them
are cashless, i.e. processed
through hospitals.”
It is this segment of
claims—1.65 million of them
annually—that Remedinet
aims to dominate.
HCX Technologies
is Remedinet’s direct
competitor in this segment.
18 | FORBES INDIA APRIL 15, 2016
Remedinet has worked
with hospitals to set up
systems that allow claims
to be submitted from
the hospital to the TPA
in a digitised format.
There were typically no
set formats in which to
submit claims—some were
scanned and emailed,
others faxed. Consequently,
TPAs complained of
receiving documents in
illegible formats, thus
delaying the process.
Remedinet’s system
has made the process of
submitting claims more
efficient at Mumbai’s
Lilavati Hospital, for
instance. Once forms are
scanned and entered into
the system, a proprietary
software takes over and
automatically forwards
the claims to the TPA in
a format that is easy to
read. The system then
receives a response,
either with an approval or
with a request for more
information. Provisional
approvals are usually
received within hours of
a patient being admitted.
Patients are kept informed
through text messages.
Delays in final discharge
approvals from insurance
companies—which can
take up to one day—have
usually meant hospitals
cannot make beds available
Munish Daga, CEO of Remedinet
as soon as patients are
discharged. At Lilavati,
according to estimates,
the time taken for final
discharge approvals
has fallen by 20 to 25
percent since the hospital
installed Remedinet’s
systems in 2015.
But it is in getting the
bill settled by the insurance
company where Remedinet
has had the most impact.
Paresh Parmar, director of
finance at Lilavati Hospital,
says, “The average time
to settle claims has fallen
from 14 days in 2014 to six
days at present.” As a result,
cash management for the
hospital has become easier.
So far, Remedinet has
managed to establish itself
in 250 hospitals, most of
which are in southern
India; it is working on
gaining clients in the north
and west. In addition to
working with hospitals,
Remedinet processes
insurance claims for a
Tamil Nadu government
scheme that provides
health care for people
below the poverty line
and a scheme for police
officers in Maharashtra.
While Daga admits the
scale of operations is still
small—the company had
revenues of Rs 7 crore
last year—he expects it
to rise to Rs 30 crore to
Rs 40 crore in the next two
years, with margins of 60
to 70 percent. The business
also has the backing of
investors such as Rakesh
Jhunjhunwala, Nirvana
Venture Advisors and
Bessemer Venture Partners.
-Samar SrivaStava
3%
The volume of Swiss
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a 39 mm 18 carat
Everose gold case by
Rolex ($15,200)
4) Elite Chronograph
Classic with a 42 mm
stainless steel case by
Zenith ($7,600)
5) Clé de Cartier with
a 40 mm 18 carat pink
gold case by Cartier
($18,800) 6) Calatrava
Reference 5227G
with a 39 mm white
gold case by Patek
Philippe ($34,700)
5
2
6
4
3
APRIL 15, 2016 FORBES INDIA | 19
PhoTograPh by david arky; CreaTive STyle direCTor: JoSePh deaCeTiS; STyle aSSoCiaTe: Juan benSon; ToP: deniS balibouSe / reuTerS
Six timeless timepieces that make a statement every second
LeaderBoard
easing the exit process
A Way Out of
the Insolvency Maze
radius images / corbis
The Bankruptcy Bill proposes a time-bound
framework for sick entities to decide whether
they should be liquidated or revived
in september 2009,
when Ishita Swarup
launched her online
flash sales portal
99labels, the market
was exciting. She was
pioneering a new business
model in the nascent
ecommerce sector—
giving heavy discounts to
subscribed members.
But within four years,
the flash sales model lost
favour. “By the time we
went in for the third round
of funding in 2013, the
scenario became bearish.
We couldn’t raise any
fresh funds and had to stop
operations,” recalls Swarup,
48, who now runs 9rasa, a
Delhi-based Indo-Western
clothing label for women.
It took Swarup over
two years to wind up
operations, but 99labels still
exists officially on paper.
“The only way to wind up
20 | FORBES INDIA APRIL 15, 2016
completely was to declare
insolvency and a court
would have had to appoint
someone to look at my
business assets. I didn’t opt
for that because it is tedious
and I was advised against
it,” says Swarup, who
continues to file nil income
tax returns for the venture.
The bottlenecks to
declaring corporate
insolvency, like the ones
that Swarup feared, may
soon be a thing of the
past if the Insolvency
and Bankruptcy Code,
2015—or the Bankruptcy
Bill—which has been tabled
in Parliament, is passed.
“Currently, there is no
comprehensive law to deal
with insolvency in India,”
says Rajat Tandon, vice
president, 10,000 Startups,
a Nasscom initiative to scale
up the startup ecosystem
in India. “While bringing
about structural change,
the Bankruptcy Bill will
put India at par with other
developed nations. This is a
move the country needs so
that the inept can exit, more
jobs are saved and newer
businesses can prosper in a
structured environment.”
The Bankruptcy Bill
will herald a unified law to
deal with insolvency, along
with strict timelines for
doing so. “In India, various
bankruptcy provisions
are there in different
acts but we don’t have a
robust legislation,” says
Shaktikanta Das, economic
affairs secretary. “This was
a systematic vacuum in our
economy. The Bankruptcy
Bill is a big economic
reform, next [only] to GST.”
The Bankruptcy Law
Reform Committee
(BLRC), chaired by TK
Viswanathan, drafted
the bill and submitted its
report in November last
year. The proposed law
makes it mandatory for
sick companies to decide
their future course of
action in 180 days. Within
six months, and with a
one-time extension of 90
days in exceptional cases,
a company would have to
complete its insolvency
THE PROPOSED
LAW MAKES IT
MANDATORY FOR
SICK COMPANIES
TO DECIDE THEIR
FUTURE COURSE
OF ACTION IN
180 DAYS
resolution process and
decide if it wants to
revive operations or wind
up. In case 75 percent
of creditors don’t agree
on a revival plan, the
company automatically
goes into liquidation,
wherein its assets are
distributed to creditors.
“The idea was that
businesses do sometimes
fail [and] you need to ease
the exit process. If revival
is possible, then create
a framework for it and
ensure that creditors are
able to recover their dues,”
says Aparna Ravi, senior
researcher, Centre for Law
and Policy Research, and a
member of the BLRC. The
Bankruptcy Bill also looks
to minimise the role of the
adjudicating authority to
remove judicial delays.
The bill proposes to
create three new entities—a
regulator (The Insolvency
and Bankruptcy Board
of India); a new class of
insolvency professionals,
who will now determine
the economic viability
of the debtors instead
of the official liquidator;
and information utilities
that would collect and
store information about
a person’s finances and
defaults. “Overall, it is
a much-needed piece
of reform. Its success,
however, will lie in the
implementation,” says Ravi.
If the Bankruptcy
Bill becomes a reality,
it would bring good
tidings to entrepreneurs
like Swarup. “I would
definitely use it,” she says.
-shutapa paul
30.3%
Fall in the nifty Psu Bank index
in the last year. in comparison,
the nifty Bank index fell just
13.7 percent in the same period
the language teacher
India,” said Von Ahn, one
of the key people behind
Captcha (Completely
Automated Public Turing
Test To Tell Computers
and Humans Apart).
Von Ahn’s latest
initiative is a $20 English
proficiency test that will
compete with the $170
Toefl (Test of English as a
Foreign Language), one of
the pre-requisites for higher
studies in the US. Some
departments of Carnegie
Mellon University, where
Von Ahn earned a PhD
in computer science, and
Harvard University are
already considering the
test. “In the next admission
cycle, we will work with the
top 12 universities in the
US, as they start accepting
either Toefl or our score.”
Duolingo Wants the Indian
Heartland to Learn English
free language-learning
platform Duolingo is
aiming to make Indians
proficient in English and
enhance their ability
to earn. Not only has it
launched a service to
teach English through
Hindi, it has also cut
down the size of its
app by over 60 percent,
to about 7 megabytes,
to ensure it works on
cheaper smartphones
with limited storage.
Duolingo, which
started as a translation
app and soon moved on
to educational ventures,
has put together an India
luis von ahn
team that will eventually
add at least four more of
the most widely-spoken
languages in the country.
Co-founder Luis von Ahn
told Forbes India, “India is
a huge potential market for
us. Knowledge of English is
fundamental to conducting
business; it can double
or triple your income.”
Von Ahn’s experiences
in India reminded him of
the tiny central American
nation of Guatemala, where
he was born. “When we
drive around in Delhi,
it seems a lot like our
country,” he said, referring
to the number of poor and
lower middle-class people,
who may possess low-end
smartphones, but are not
conversant in English. “We
assumed that if your phone
worked in English, then
you knew English. That was
the wrong assumption for
-harichandan arakali
nPa sPillover
Flexi-caps Show Greater Resilience
the massive pile of
NPAs in the books of staterun banks has weighed
heavily on their stocks.
The BSE Finance index,
that comprises banking
and NBFC stocks, fell 28
percent in the last one year.
Interestingly, flexicap funds—that invest in
small-, mid- and large-cap
companies—managed to
outperform large-cap funds,
despite a higher average
exposure to the financial
sector. The table compares
the funds with the highest
exposure to finance
stocks and their returns.
1-year return is computed from March 1, 2015 to Feb 29, 2016
All figures in %
- Pravin Palande
3-year return is computed from March 1, 2013 to Feb 29, 2016
Source: Morningstar India
1-year
return
3-year
return
Fund/Index
exposure to
FInancIal sector
Templeton India Growth
42.95
-16.89
10.07
Templeton India Equity Inc
Birla Sun Life India Reforms
ICICI Pru Indo Asia Equity
34.21
33.69
30.63
-16.25
-16.45
-17.62
8.73
11.72
13.10
DSP BlackRock India TIGER
average
29.92
34.28
-22.25
-17.89
10.50
10.82
S&P BSE 500 (Flexi-cap benchmark)
25.57
large-cap Funds
34.41
33.27
31.71
31.37
31.06
32.36
27.79
100.00
-19.63
8.72
-24.13
-26.96
-23.97
-15.44
-20.22
-22.15
-21.34
-28.00
8.33
6.13
8.25
11.71
13.45
9.57
7.35
6.63
JM Core 11
LIC Nomura MF Infrastructure
HDFC Top 200
SBI Magnum Equity
JM Multi Strategy
average
S&P BSE 100 (Large-cap benchmark)
S&P BSE Finance
APRIL 15, 2016 FORBES INDIA | 21
chantal heijnen; toP: getty images
Flexi-cap Funds
exit interview
suBroto Bagchi
‘I Feel Less Relevant
Now Than Ever Before’
As Subroto Bagchi’s tenure as executive chairman of Mindtree ends in April, he’s
optimistic that the next line of leaders will take the company to a higher level
I
n January, Mindtree announced
Executive Chairman Subroto
Bagchi’s exit from the company,
effective April 1, 2016. Bagchi,
who co-founded the $584 million IT
services firm in 1999, will continue
to be on its board as non-executive
director. He tells Forbes India that this
is the right time for him to step down
from an executive role and take up
social issues that are close to his heart.
Edited excerpts from an interview:
Bmaximage
Q When you became chairman in
2012, you said you had something
unfinished for Mindtree.
Could you finish that job?
An organisation is a living thing; to
be done would mean the end, almost.
In our earlier conversation, I had
stressed that the core theme was a
company for 2020 with four focus
areas: Attaining critical mass; building
sharp verticalisation and not leaving
everything to everybody; making the
company feel local to the area where
it operates; and building a leadership
pipeline that is well entrenched by
2020, so as to be able to think of 2025.
Today, I can safely say we are well
entrenched and well positioned. We
will soon be a billion-dollar company,
mostly through organic growth.
I’m also tremendously satisfied
with our leadership pipeline, not just
with Rostow (Ravanan) coming in as
the new CEO and managing director,
but also with the second and third
levels. In recent times, we’ve got
outstanding talent from outside. The
22 | FORBES INDIA APRIL 15, 2016
By DeBojyoti Ghosh
biggest satisfaction for a leader is to
realise that you are less relevant. I feel
less relevant now than ever before.
Q Are you content with the
Mindtree you are leaving behind?
I would say yes. There couldn’t have
been a better time. KK [Krishnakumar
Natarajan, the incumbent CEO
who has been named as the new
executive chairman effective April
1] and I had a glorious relationship.
Both of us were extremely lucky. We
had the support of an outstanding
board that shepherded and guided
us. It is not an easy task if you have
an executive chairman and a CEO
to run the business. There has to be
that understanding between them
to not step on each others’ toes. We
sometimes take this understanding
for granted, but it is not a trivial
thing. It’s one thing to be friends
and another to be co-founders. It is
one thing to be fellow professionals
and something else to share
power. Not just in any corporate
sense, I see even not-for-profit
organisations as well as governments
struggle with it. It’s not easy.
Q In just six years since it was set
up, Mindtree became a $100 million
(in terms of revenues) company. But
the goal of building it as a billiondollar company (in revenues) by
2014 couldn’t be achieved during
your tenure. Do you regret that?
I thought about it. But looking back,
if I were to do it all over again, I
will mostly do it the same way. A
year prior to 1999 (when we started
Mindtree), we [the co-founders] sat
down together and the three drivers
that came to our mind were: To build
a company that will do aspirational
work, a company that will create
shared wealth and a company with a
social conscience. To me, the totality
of these three are far more important
than whether we became/become
a billion-dollar company yesterday,
Subroto bagchi
Age: 58
Designation: executive chairman, mindtree
Career: worked at wipro, Lucent technologies,
co-founded mindtree in 1999; also held leadership roles, including being coo, at mindtree.
author of four business books
education: Ba in political science
interests: reading, writing, travelling
and teaching
today or tomorrow. Mindtree has
remained faithful to the three critical
parameters with which we started
the company. We consistently did
aspirational work and created wealth
for many. It is one of the most valued
companies in the stock market with
consistent returns generated in the
last so many years. It has beaten
indices so many times. Mindtree is
known for its good governance.
Q In 2013, Mindtree initiated an
internal transformation drive.
It got global consulting firm
Bain & Company to chalk out
a roadmap. Did that help?
Hugely. Some organisations
work very well with partners and
consultants and some don’t. It is
very difficult to point out what is it
in the DNA of an organisation that
enables it to make the most of either
a consultant’s recommendation
or a partner relationship. Looking
back, I think Bain was a defining
experience for us. It helped us to step
back and do a lot of introspection.
Q Co-founder Rostow Ravanan
has been named Mindtree CEO.
As a colleague, do you feel there
is any immediate task for him?
Ravanan has been in critical positions
within the company. He was the
CFO and is well aware of the issues
and priorities at Mindtree. There
have been a lot of conversations
over time; he is an individual who
has a larger economic view, not
just about IT and our enterprise,
but also on what businesses
should do to be more relevant.
Q What next for you?
I will continue to be on the Mindtree
board. In addition, I have accepted a
position on the board of the Indian
Oil Corporation (IOC). The IOC is an
unusual board; it meets every month
because of the sensitive nature of its
business and its implication to the
national economy. I’m also heading
the nomination committee of the
board, along with a couple of other
committees. Besides, there are areas
that my wife and I have chosen to
deeply involve ourselves with, such as
mental health. My father had a mental
health issue; it’s one of the reasons we
incubated the White Swan Foundation
inside the National Institute of Mental
Health and Neurosciences, Bengaluru.
The second area is blindness. My
mother was blind. In this field, we
have started engaging with several
organisations. We are getting involved
in areas of rural vision and research
for building predictive biomarkers and
saving pre-term babies from blindness.
The third area is geriatrics. We have
set up The Nightingales Trust—Bagchi
Centre for Active Ageing in Bengaluru.
We are currently in the second year
and are looking to expand. I will also
be connected with the academia and
hope to be able to write as well.
Q Is there any specific role
you would like to look into
in the startup space?
There are two things that I will
not do. I don’t see myself as a serial
entrepreneur and a for-profit angel
investor or a venture capitalist.
Second, I don’t see myself becoming a
talking head. Not for any other reason,
but I think there are enough good
people in the system already. There is
enough churn and activity happening.
I should focus on the underserved
areas and bridge the gap between
for-profit and not-for-profit.
APRIL 15, 2016 FORBES INDIA | 23
interview
saurabh tripathi
‘The Payment Bank is
an Indian Innovation’
The Boston Consulting Group’s Saurabh Tripathi says payment banks may not offer higher
interest rates on deposits, but will challenge traditional banks with better services
L
ast year, the Reserve Bank of
India (RBI) gave in-principle
approval to 11 applicants
to start payment banks.
These entities—including Airtel M
Commerce Services and Vodafone
M-Pesa—cannot lend but can accept
deposits, and will reach customers
through mobile phones rather than
traditional bank branches. According
to Saurabh Tripathi, partner and
managing director at The Boston
Consulting Group (with expertise
in banking and financial services),
this concept is going to change the
way we bank. Edited excerpts from
his interview to Forbes India:
Mexy xavier
Q How do you look at the
concept of payment banks?
The payment bank is an Indian
innovation. It is a response to the
problem of [financial] inclusion,
which we have not been able to
solve for so many years. There are
telecom companies with a much
larger customer base than traditional
banks. So allowing telcos to participate
in banking, in a manner where
systemic risk is taken care of, is a very
innovative solution. Instead of making
telcos and banks work together,
they [the RBI] have allowed telcos
to work out solutions on their own.
There are also non-telecom players,
like Cholamandalam Investment
and Finance and Sun Pharma’s Dilip
Shanghvi, who have received RBI’s
in-principle nod to run payment
banks. I see a lot of innovative
24 | FORBES INDIA APRIL 15, 2016
By Pravin Palande
options in the form of unbundling
of banking. We have seen banks
basically doing everything—they
give loans and take deposits, they
also do payment service and advise.
Now, the best of services can happen
for clients as banks unbundle.
Payments can be at the centre of the
relationship and payment banks can
bring a non-banking financial company
(NBFC) or a mutual fund (MF) as a
partner, and create an offering that
replicates a bank. NBFCs are good at
lending, payment banks have expertise
in doing payments and an MF manages
money well. We can create a seamless
combination that is good for the
customer and for the bank as well.
Q Can payment banks be
competitors for traditional banks?
There is no question about it. The
logic was that these banks will go
after financial inclusion, but I think
customers were already banking
digitally and these are the people
who will now try to use the services
of the payment banks. When we did
a survey of customers, about their
willingness to use payment banks,
half of the digital banking customers
were keen to try them out. They
are keen to see if these new banks
will offer better services than what
they are presently experiencing.
But I don’t think the customers
[of traditional banks] will shift to
payment banks as they will get
higher interest rates on deposits with
traditional banks. But many would
like to try them out if payments
are simplified. If payment banks
come out with offerings that are
intuitive and seamless and make
my life easy, then I’ll go for it.
Q What should payment banks do
about deposit rates in this context?
They might want to raise them a bit
but payment banks do not have much
scope to offer high rates. Sensible
payment banks will compete to
offer better services and not higher
interest rates [on deposits].
Q What is the business model
for payment banks?
First of all, since payment banks are
good at handling payments, customers
will use them for that. Customers
will leave the float with them. Some
money can be made on the float.
Payment banks will have to partner
with NBFCs or MFs so that any funds
above Rs 1 lakh can be transferred
to them. They can do a lot of things
I’m bullish not
because there will be
huge profits but
because of the
innovation that we
can expect to see
based on partnerships to make income
on commissions from the customer.
There is no lending operation,
so there is no cost of lending and
there are no bad debts for these
banks as they have to maintain a
very lean operating model. Telcom
companies are going to leverage their
infrastructure. Your prepaid SIM
card is like a bank account. These
companies will try to capitalise on that.
Q Will payment banks eventually
enter mainstream banking?
When we say banking, people feel
it is lending. I think it is a foothold
for a lot of telecom players to create
business, which will also determine
how large they can become.
Q You seem to be bullish
on payment banks.
I’m bullish not because there will
be huge profits but because of the
innovation that we can expect to see.
If payment banks take it seriously,
they can create innovative products
that are different from traditional
banking products. Across the world,
we are noticing a lot of innovation in
the business of banking where services
are very intuitive and customers
can make payments and manage
their wealth. All this is happening
through mobile phones. I’m hoping
that payment banks will spur that
innovation in the country. They will
come up with new products. Let us
look at robot advisory. Through the
use of analytics you will be told which
fund will save or bring you money.
Payment banks will do it [innovate],
so normal banks will also have to do
it. But as a whole, the general level of
customer experience will be high.
Q How do payment banks attract
non-digital customers?
It depends on what kind of a
business model these banks adopt.
We [BCG] found out that 51 percent
of the current digital banking
customers and 33 percent of nondigital banking customers were
keen to try out payment banks.
If a quarter of these non-digital
banking customers move to payment
banks, then they can get around 15
percent of the funds [deposits]. And
if we go ahead with this assumption
that 25 percent of digital banking
customers will move to payment
banks—which translates to about 5
percent of total banking customers—
it will account for 25 percent of
total bank balances [deposits]. This
means that 5 to 10 percent of the
funds can move from the banking
industry to payment banking.
But we also have to look at the
supply side. What kind of ambitions
these banks have becomes an
important question. I suspect that nontelco payment banks will come with
low ambition. PayTM is aiming to have
50 crore customers by 2020; that is
more than any bank in the country.
APRIL 15, 2016 FORBES INDIA | 25
EntErpriSE
Sohan LaL
Custodians
of the Harvest
By almost eliminating wastage, Sohan
Lal Commodity Management has cracked
the code of agri-commodity storage.
Its model can help India modernise its
post-harvest management practices
By Samar SrivaStava
A
n hour north of Delhi
along National Highway
1, a warehouse leased by
Sohan Lal Commodity
Management is filled to capacity
with sacks of grains and pulses.
The bags, neatly marked and
assayed, are stacked high in the
5,000 square feet storage facility at
Sonepat. Here, quality checks are
conducted frequently, the grains
are aired and, most importantly,
steps are taken to ensure that no
moisture seeps into the bags.
Through the course of routine
quality checks, bags are punctured
and samples taken. Reports made on
handheld tablets are immediately
sent to Sohan Lal’s head office in
Delhi. The manager tells us that
random audit checks keep the staff
on their toes and the possibility of
grains missing or getting spoilt is nil.
It is this certainty of quality, and
efficiency of management that has
catapulted Sohan Lal to the top league
of commodity management in India.
Even without owning warehouses
(the company leases its storage
26 | FORBES INDIA APRIL 15, 2016
APRIL 15, 2016 FORBES INDIA | 27
photographS: amit VErma
Sandeep Sabharwal,
chief executive of
Sohan Lal Commodity
management
EntErpriSE
Sohan LaL
facilities), it is excelling at agrilogistics. The Sonepat warehouse,
for instance, is miles ahead in terms
of management compared to similar
facilities run by the state-owned
Central Warehousing Corporation or
the Food Corporation of India, where
reports of grains being eaten by rats
or rotting in the open are common.
Over the last three years, the
ministry of agriculture reported an
average grain production of 242
million tonnes in India. But more
than 10 percent of this was lost due to
bad storage practices. “If agriculture
in India has to improve, this 10
percent wastage has to be reduced
dramatically,” says Nikhil Khattau,
managing director at private equity
(PE) firm Mayfield Advisors Pvt
Ltd, which invested an undisclosed
amount in Sohan Lal in 2011.
The government traced the
problem of post-harvest grain loss
to inadequate storage facilities. In
2013, the Union Budget tried to
address the issue by launching the
Gramin Bhandaran Yojana, where
the central government pledged to
provide 25 percent of the cost of
building or renovating rural godowns.
That, according to Sandeep
Sabharwal, 44, chief executive of
Sohan Lal Commodity Management,
was a wrong approach. Since 2004,
he’d been pursuing a different track
and was convinced that the problem
had more to do with improper
management than inadequate
storage facilities. And, so far, his
bet has resulted in the creation of
a Rs 1,800-crore company that has
the potential to grow manifold.
I
n 1995, when Sabharwal—a
freshly-minted MBA graduate
from the Fore School of
Management, Delhi—joined Sohan
Lal, it was just a dal mill in the
capital city owned by his family.
He soon realised that the business
created little value addition and
could not grow beyond a point—he
had to find new avenues to expand.
28 | FORBES INDIA APRIL 15, 2016
Sabharwal was aware that
inefficient storage practices had long
been the bane of Indian agriculture.
Farmers couldn’t get government
agencies to procure their entire
produce, the agencies had problems
managing it and stock keeping
was archaic; buyers wouldn’t trust
the quality of the produce and
in the absence of an assured and
adequate supply, they were loath
to plan business activities. At the
SOHAN LAL HAS
SO FAR LEASED
1,061 WAREHOUSES
AND 20 COLD
STORAGES IN 16
STATES ACROSS
THE COUNTRY
same time, private warehouses
were easily available for lease
across most parts of the country.
If Sohan Lal could set in place
systems and practices to preserve the
quality of harvested agri-commodities,
it would have a huge market to tap. In
2004, Sabharwal made a small start
by leasing a warehouse in Lawrence
Road, Delhi, and started issuing
bar-coded receipts to farmers.
“From day one, I knew we had to
make sure our company’s receipts
were as good as legal tender. If
our receipt said a particular grain
of a particular variety was in a
particular warehouse, it had to
be there. That was the basis on
which our business would be built,”
says Sabharwal. This system has
proved to be so trustworthy that
a bar-coded receipt from Sohan
Lal is now accepted by banks as
surety when farmers approach
them for finance. Companies like
the US-based agri-giant Cargill
and French conglomerate Louis
Dreyfus have also contracted Sohan
Lal for storing agri-commodities.
Unlike other agri-logistics
companies, Sohan Lal does not
procure goods from farmers. All it
does is provide storage space and, in
exchange for a fee, it assures clients
that the produce will not be stolen
or damaged. As a result, the working
capital in this business model is low
and also asset light. The business
is not very capital intensive.
The company has, however,
required capital to expand rapidly
across India. For this, it has conducted
seven rounds of financing from
various investors and Sabharwal has
diluted his stake to 24.95 percent in
the process. The rapid dilution, in the
last five years, has raised eyebrows in
the industry but as Sandeep Singhal,
managing director of Nexus Venture
Partners, explains, “He [Sabharwal]
would rather have a smaller share of
a larger pie.” Nexus Venture Partners
was the first PE company to invest
in Sohan Lal when it injected Rs 10
crore for an undisclosed stake in 2010.
The funding has helped Sohan
Lal to lease 1,061 warehouses and 20
cold storages with a total capacity of
over 2.57 million tonnes spread over
14.28 million square feet in 16 states.
The firm has also achieved expertise
in handling 366 commodities.
As the scope of Sohan Lal’s
operations grew, Sabharwal was
always alert to the possibility of
fraud. He knew that if the goods,
the receipts for which were issued,
were not available at the warehouse,
his credibility would be at stake.
One mishap would create a serious
dent in the confidence of clients.
With this in mind, Sabharwal went
about standardising procedures.
“Warehouses, depending on the
quantity of produce they hold, are
audited every 30-60 days,” says Karan
Sabharwal says storage
facilities and checks have
enabled him to reduce
grain wastage in the
warehouses to 1 percent
APRIL 15, 2016 FORBES INDIA | 29
EntErpriSE
Sohan LaL
random quality checks at
warehouses ensure that
no moisture seeps into the
bags containing grains
Sachdeva, head of internal audit at
Sohan Lal. He heads a team of a dozen
auditors who make surprise visits
at warehouses. Through hand-held
devices, they take photos, assay the
quality of the produce and ensure
grains are given enough light, air
and fumigation for preservation.
Samples are also regularly sent to
a laboratory in Delhi for testing.
It was on account of these stringent
quality checks and the consequent
low wastage that large banks began
to accept Sohan Lal’s receipts to
sanction loans. They knew their
collateral was safe with the company.
(Granting loans to farmers also
helped banks to meet their lending
targets to the priority sector.)
Now that farmers could hold on
to their produce in exchange for a
small storage fee, as they awaited
higher prices, they had to raise money
from banks or non-banking financial
companies (NBFC) to tide over their
short-term spending needs. Quick
to spot the opportunity, Sohan Lal
acquired the Chennai-based NBFC
30 | FORBES INDIA APRIL 15, 2016
BP Jain in March 2014 and renamed
it Kissandhan. Today, the agrifinancing arm of Sohan Lal has an
outstanding loan book of Rs 493 crore.
The fortunes of farmers, too, have
moved in step with the company’s.
In the past, farmers would be forced
to sell their produce even when
prices were low. They would have
to accept whatever price they got.
Businesses have also benefitted.
Earlier, they couldn’t plan their
activities as they had to wait till
the end of the harvest season to
acquire the produce. “It [Sohan Lal’s
business model] has allowed some
companies to run a just-in-time
business,” says Mayfield’s Khattau.
The storage facilities Sohan
Lal leases are networked and
can be monitored in real time,
enabling the company to manage
them remotely. This, Sabharwal
claims, has enabled him to reduce
grain wastage in the warehouses
he manages to just 1 percent.
Sabharwal’s next big bet is the
Myanmar market where the company
recently received a licence to store
grains. He also plans to provide a
link between rice producers there
and importers in India. The African
market is also under his lens.
In the next decade, Sohan Lal
plans to go both wider and deeper
into India. He sees this as a Rs
10,000-crore opportunity that is
waiting to be tapped. He’s also
clear that the company will never
become a procurer or trader of agriproducts. Keeping it asset-light and
scaling up rapidly is his mantra.
Back at the Sonepat warehouse,
sacks of wheat that arrived over
three months ago are still preserved.
Farmers are waiting for prices to
peak in March. The grains, once
sold, will be sent to flour mills
within a 15-kilometre radius to be
crushed and made into aata (flour).
Agri-companies are happy as
they don’t have to procure all their
produce in January and store it.
And farmers get a better price while
being assured their grains won’t
rot. It’s a win-win for everyone.
enterprise
axilor ventures
The Startup Nanny
Through its incubation and funding programmes, Axilor Ventures is
overseeing the growth of entrepreneurial ideas into feasible ventures
By DeBojyoti Ghosh
L
ast year, when Ganapathy
Venugopal, co-founder
and CEO of startup
incubator Axilor Ventures,
was screening applications for his
Accelerator Programme, an applicant’s
answer to a question on customer
acquisition caught his attention.
In application forms like these,
startups are questioned on strategies
to build customer base. Answers range
from running Facebook campaigns
to standard marketing approaches.
This particular applicant, who
was in his 20s, had written: ‘Will
acquire customer, first by burning
angel money and then by burning
venture capital [VC] money.’
“We have a seven-stage selection
process and this applicant was
knocked out in the later stages,
but I would have given him a
very high score for his honesty,”
recalls Ganapathy (40), who
has previously served as head of
strategy and planning at Infosys.
What struck him was the ease
with which the young entrepreneur
dismissed the pain of raising funds.
“Are we giving the right message
to budding entrepreneurs in terms
of easy access to investor cash?”
asks Ganapathy, whose mind
keeps going back to the words
of a friend: “Capital cannot be a
substitute for customer insights.”
Ganapathy feels customer insight is
a core requirement and startups must
be taught this discipline. It is with the
aim of inculcating this discipline that
Axilor—started by Infosys co-founders
S Gopalakrishnan and SD Shibulal,
32 | FORBES INDIA APRIL 15, 2016
former Infosys board member
Srinath Batni, Harvard Business
School professor Tarun Khanna and
Ganapathy—began in November 2014.
“Axilor was created to increase
the success rate for startups in their
initial 24 months. This period is
critical for fledgling businesses as
this is when they face their toughest
challenges. Several startups don’t
make it beyond this period. By
providing the right mentorship and
preventing the most predictable
mistakes, we want to improve their
success rate,” says Shibulal.
The Bengaluru-based incubator
runs entrepreneur-in-residence
programmes (which give office
space to startups), funds earlystage ventures and has, so far,
taken in two batches into its
Accelerator Programme. The first
batch, in March 2015, had five
startups while the second batch
in September had six. The third
batch is set to start by March-end
2016 and Axilor is looking at a mix
of 12 startups across ecommerce,
health care and clean technology.
“ARE WE GIVING
THE RIGHT
MESSAGE TO
BUDDING ENTREPRENEURS ABOUT
EASY ACCESS TO
INVESTOR CASH?”
The 100-day Accelerator
Programme incubates startups during
their first 24 months, transforming
the startup idea into a pilot project.
During this period, entrepreneurs
seek market validation, customer
insights, and an understanding of
the pain points that the enterprise is
trying to solve. Post that, they work on
building a beta app or pilot website for
feedback from potential customers,
based on which the final product or
service is built in about 30 days.
“Since we typically deal with
enterprises early in their life cycle, we
can’t consider some of the criteria that
later-stage investors use, like revenue,
customer base and traction. So we try
to get some sense of the opportunities
and understanding of the people they
want to address and a preparatory
insight on the entry of competitors,”
says Udhay Shankar, head, Accelerator
Programme, Axilor Ventures.
Each startup in the Accelerator
Programme gets a grant of Rs 1.5 lakh
(funded by Axilor Ventures)—there
is no equity dilution—in addition to
benefits such as a free work space
and membership to The Indus
Entrepreneurs (TiE), a global notfor-profit organisation promoting
entrepreneurship, and Tracxn, a
database for startups and private
companies. The startups also get
access to cloud storage and software
from Microsoft, Google and IBM.
While the Axilor team does not
insist on an evolved business model
for the Accelerator Programme, it
does stress on market validation.
Going from ‘I think this is a great
photographs: Bmaximage
Ganapathy Venugopal,
co-founder and Ceo,
Axilor Ventures
APRIL 15, 2016 FORBES INDIA | 33
enterprise
axilor ventures
idea’ to ‘why someone else also
thinks it is a great idea’ is the
key focus of the programme.
Axilor, however, is clear that
ideas don’t create value, execution
does. “How interesting an idea is, is
only one of the selection parameters.
In early stages, it is just a series
of experiments and most startups
morph their idea or pivot them
along the way. Often we find that a
‘me-too’ idea can be made valuable
by a team that can do things much
better, whereas a unique idea in
the absence of proprietary insights
does not progress much,” says
Ganapathy, who quit Infosys in May
2014, following which he spent two
months understanding the startup
landscape in India and the US by
meeting VCs, incubators, academic
institutions and entrepreneurs. In
mid-2014 Shibulal retired from
Infosys, while Batni stepped down
from the company’s board; in October
2014, Gopalakrishnan retired.
Remaining true to their
entrepreneurial roots, the Infosys
team was looking at institutional
ways to nurture the next generation
of startups. As for Khanna, who had
helped friends and ex-students start
new ventures, an opportunity to
build value at scale was his goal.
Axilor was founded with the aim
to boost entrepreneurship through
an institutional platform. As cofounder Batni says, the platform is
based on the same tenets that made
Infosys successful: A strong focus
on systems, process orientation,
continuous improvement and
scalability. Startups that have
benefitted from the project include
Peersome and Awesummly (See box).
A
part from the Accelerator
Programme, Axilor runs two
other initiatives. The Scale-Up
Programme comes with a seed funding
of Rs 25 lakh, in return for equity of up
to 12 percent, and helps entrepreneurs
take their business from pilot to
launch stage. The Early-Stage Funding
programme supports startups from
launch to scale, backed by funding
of Rs 1 crore to Rs 3 crore. (For these
two programmes Axilor’s founders
co-invest through their individual
funds.) In Early-Stage Funding,
Axilor’s stake doesn’t exceed 15 to
20 percent, depending on the sector,
business model and the startup’s stage
of development. Early-stage startups
are also allowed to raise funds from
other investors. Sellerworx Online
Services and MUrgency were groomed
by Axilor under this programme.
Recently, Axilor reaped the
benefits of incubating the only startup
under its Scale-Up Programme:
Bengaluru-based PlaceofOrigin,
an online marketplace for gourmet
foods incubated in 2014 by former
bankers Ashish Nichani (32) and
Sudarsan Metla (27). This February,
Sequoia-backed Craftsvilla, an
online marketplace for ethnic
products, acquired PlaceofOrigin in
an all-equity deal for an undisclosed
valuation, marking Axilor’s debut
exit. But Ganapathy calls it a oneoff case and it is still “early days”
to read too much into the exit.
THE AXILOR CLASSROOM
Early-stagE funding
programmE
1. sEllErworx onlinE sErvicEs
Co-Founders: Ganesa Murthi (41),
Venkat Potluri (36)
Founded in February 2014, Bengalurubased Sellerworx Online Services
helps small businesses manage their
operations and supply chains across
online marketplaces such as Flipkart,
Snapdeal and Amazon; its cloud-based
platform integrates data related to
inventory, pricing and payment.
Co-founder and COO Ganesa
Murthi admits that, besides the
funding (undisclosed), Axilor’s
guidance helped understand the
business-to-business (B2B) space in
ecommerce. “Both Venkat [Potluri]
34 | FORBES INDIA APRIL 15, 2016
and I had prior experiences in
the business-to-consumer (B2C)
space. There is a complete mindset
change when you approach the B2B
market, which is not easy, unless
someone guides you,” he says.
2. murgEncy
Founder: shaffi Mather (45) and Cofounder: sweta Mangal (40)
Much like taxi-hailing app Uber or
Ola, MUrgency’s cloud-based mobile
application connects people in need of
medical emergency services with the
nearest available responders—doctors,
ambulance service, community
health workers, nurses, paramedics,
volunteers, friends and family.
Founder-CEO Shaffi Mather says
backing from Axilor has lent a lot
of credibility and push to the earlystage venture. “Axilor’s support from
the very beginning made several
things easier for us. It helps to pitch
our vision and thesis to investors
across the world,” says Mather. Last
year in April, MUrgency raised an
undisclosed amount from Axilor.
accElErator
programmE
1. pEErsomE
Co-founders: sayanta Ghosh (24),
Laxmi Pavani (22)
In the first week of the Accelerator
Programme, startups are asked to
identify as many competitors as
possible. The founders of Bengalurubased Peersome, an online marketplace
the Awesummly team: (From left) Ankit Dhawan, Nitin Mishra, and Deepak Mishra
“This deal [with Craftsvilla]
didn’t happen because of lack of
opportunity to raise money. We saw
an opportunity to grow the business
and didn’t want to delay it,” says
Nichani, adding that PlaceofOrigin
will be run as an independent brand
under the Craftsvilla umbrella. Both
Nichani and Metla will continue to be
part of Craftsvilla’s core management
team. “We see this deal as a good
outcome because from an idea the
for self-drive car rentals, gained from
this experience. Former Flipkart
employees Sayanta Ghosh and
Laxmi Pavani launched Peersome in
September 2015. It has 12 car-rental
operators from Bengaluru on their
platform, and 150 cars. Their bike
rental service is in beta mode and will
be launched soon. Co-founder Pavani
wants Peersome to be a one-stop
platform for users to compare prices
and services across all other car- and
bike-rental services, similar to redBus.
English-speaking countries, including
the US, the UK, India and Australia.
Their tech engine scans over 200
websites in each country to assimilate
content. The Bengaluru-based startup,
launched in July 2015, generates
more than 15,000 summarised
articles per day across categories
such as news, politics, science,
entertainment, sports and trends.
Nitin Mishra, founder-CEO, says
that being part of Axilor’s programme
benefitted Awesummly in many ways:
“Discipline is our biggest learning
from Axilor. If we had worked
alone, we would have only looked
into the technical aspects of the
business and overlooked the other
key areas such as sales, marketing,
customer insight and legal advice.”
2. awEsummly
Founders: Nitin Mishra (27), Deepak
Mishra (28), Ankit Dhawan (23)
Making use of algorithms, Awesummly
summarises news articles in less
than 60 words in real time across 10
startup has been able to build a
business that is of value to a larger
player and they [PlaceofOrigin] could
bridge a significant gap in the other
entity [Craftsvilla],” says Ganapathy.
Though various IITs and
IIMs run their own incubator
programmes, Axilor’s attention to
metrics differentiates it from other
players. “There are a lot of incubators
and accelerators, but we feel that
relatively few are paying attention
to gathering metrics, and thinking
systematically about the incubation
and acceleration process. It is hard to
start ventures in many sectors of our
economy—agriculture, health care
and educational-technology to name
a few—compared to ecommerce and
mobile apps. So we aim to broad-base
innovation as well,” says Khanna.
Ravi Gururaj, angel investor and
chairman of the Nasscom Product
Council, feels that Axilor has the
potential to play an important role
in the country’s startup ecosystem.
“By delivering a special combination
of enterprise expertise, superb
entrepreneurial and operating
experience among partners and
world-class facilities, Axilor offers
a much longer-staged programme
methodology and funding options
at all stages and a very founderfriendly approach,” he says.
However, Ganapathy is aware
of the challenges: Lack of diversity
in ideas among startups, absence
of mentors and a dearth of angel
investors. The absence of institutional
bridges that connect the lab to
market is also a major deterrent.
According to Ganapathy, selection
is the only lever in a business like
this and it is critical to attract a
diverse set of entrepreneurs.
Axilor is making a conscious
effort to go beyond Bengaluru this
year, identifying Ahmedabad, Jaipur,
Nagpur, Kochi, Coimbatore and
Madurai as possible destinations.
“Smaller cities don’t have access
to the same kind of ecosystem
that Bengaluru has,” he adds.
APRIL 15, 2016 FORBES INDIA | 35
interview
vijay thadani
‘Training Has to Become
Definite for True Impact’
As startups blossom and technology changes the way businesses are run,
NIIT’s MD Vijay Thadani says his talent development firm is transforming
itself and its clients by creating multi-skilled programmers
mexy xavier
By Deepti ChauDhary
N
IIT Ltd, a global
leader in skills and
talent development, is
sharpening its focus on
the digital services space to offer
better solutions and benefits to its
clients and to ensure sustainable
36 | FORBES INDIA APRIL 15, 2016
margin expansion for itself. At present,
digital services contribute about 15
percent of the company’s revenues.
For the fiscal year 2015, NIIT posted
consolidated revenues of Rs 957.4
crore and a net loss of Rs 138.5 crore.
In an interview to Forbes India,
Vijay Thadani, vice chairman and
managing director of NIIT, says
the plan is to exit less attractive
businesses and focus on assetlight, growth-oriented ones.
The company recently unveiled
a first-of-its-kind programme
called StackRoute to address the
versatile talent requirements of the
rapidly growing startup sector. It
is also changing the way its centres
look and operate to cater to the
millennial learners. Edited excerpts:
Q Why is there so much
emphasis on digital services?
Social media is changing the way we
lead our lives. Mobile technology
is transforming our lives. This is
generating new types of data and
much of this information is in
text, video and pictures; there are
tools which are becoming valid
to analyse. Big data, analytics and
cloud computing are putting all this
together in a decipherable language.
I call it SMACS (social, mobility,
analytics, cloud and cyber security).
SMACS, when put together in a
way that affects an organisation,
is a whole new domain of digital
services. When we say NIIT is
transforming, we are actually helping
organisations transform. When this
type of disruption takes place in
digital services, two things happen
—your current set of people need
to be re-skilled, and while that is
happening, organisations are realising
that a nimble firm can do this much
faster. Therefore, there is a boom in
startups. A startup will create one
little product which will go and fit into
the digital services play of somebody.
NIIT is always anticipating the
needs of the industry and society.
Q How are you addressing this new
need? How is NIIT transforming?
We created this new curriculum
which we call StackRoute. It is an
expression of a new NIIT. StackRoute
aims to create multi-skilled and
multi-disciplinary programmers who
can become key members of highperformance teams in top-notch
product engineering companies and
startups. It is just one component,
an expression of how boldly the
organisation is trying to transform
itself to meet this new need. It’s not
just a new programme, it’s a new NIIT
because of the way our new centres
have been created. These look very
different. A StackRoute centre is a
new concept; in some ways, it looks
a little more disorganised than our
traditional old centres… it looks more
like a coffee shop rather than a centre.
Remember that digital as a need is a
new need. But the learner is also new.
We now have a millennial learner,
whose attention span is small, who
wants instant results… hence learning
styles are different. They have already
read the lessons you are going to
teach them in class the previous
night on Facebook. It’s also a new
business model because as a part of
“OUR STACKROUTE
CENTRE IS A NEW
CONCEPT; IT
LOOKS MORE LIKE
A COFFEE SHOP
THAN A CENTRE.”
this programme, not only is a person
getting a certificate but he’s also
building a new intellectual property.
At the end of the programme,
you will also have a product.
Q Is it true that you are
turning away from domestic
government projects?
That statement is for a particular
type of service. It’s a scheme of the
government called ICT@Schools.
Under this scheme, there is a
government school and in this school,
you come and invest in technology
and provide teachers. The government
pays you for the technology, teachers
as well as content in monthly fees
because at that time, the government
does not have the funds to invest in
technology. This is the business model
that we are moving away from. That
was an asset-intensive business model.
Q How is your order book
looking at the moment?
It is growing very well. In fact, our
managed training services, which is
our solution for corporate entities,
has done exceedingly well and has a
60 percent growth rate. Organisations
are saying training is strategic for
their survival. Training has to become
definite for its true impact; it has to
be more measurable to become more
efficient. These are the areas where we
have built our expertise over the last
34 years. In the quarter ended March
31, 2015, fresh orders of $89 million
(Rs 600 crore) were secured leading
to $295 million worth of orders
executable over the next 12 months.
Q How will margins in
your business improve?
We are taking many steps to improve
our margins. The assumption that
there is a cap on margins in education
is not correct. In the conventional
model of education, there is a fixed
operating cost and a variable cost. In
case of fixed operating cost, when
you are below the breakeven point,
margins are low. But when you
cross that, margins have a hockeystick growth… the growth can be
exceptional. In the case of NIIT, let’s
say 40 percent cost is fixed. So, if I
operate with less than 40 percent
utilisation, there is hardly any margin,
but if I go above 40 percent utilisation,
every rupee I earn is my margin.
Our margins were challenged due to
global headwinds. Going forward,
our new developments are very asset
light, so we should be able to improve
margins faster. Brick and mortar
is asset heavy. Technology is more
cost effective and needs less space
while delivering the same results.
That will be our new focus.
APRIL 15, 2016 FORBES INDIA | 37
enterpriSe
Sandeep Murthy
Chasing Unicorns
Sandeep Murthy of Lightbox Ventures, who
has led investments into three billion-dollar
companies, hunts down entrepreneurs with
a passion. Everything else comes second
By AngAd Singh ThAkur
W
hen Aileen Lee,
venture capitalist
and founder of
Cowboy Ventures,
coined the term ‘unicorn’ for billiondollar startups, the implication was
clear: Like the mythical creature,
these companies, too, were rare.
In 2013, when Lee wrote a post for
the online publisher of technology
industry news TechCrunch, there
were just 39 unicorns globally.
Not any more. Unicorns have
transcended geography and have
sprouted across multiple locations,
most notably in China and India. As
of March 2016, says CB Insights, a
database that tracks venture capital
investments into private companies,
there are 155 unicorn companies,
and seven (excluding InMobi,
which is incorporated in Singapore)
among them are Indian. The latest
home-grown entrant to this list is
online marketplace ShopClues.
The rising number of unicorns
may have democratised the billiondollar benchmark for startups,
but it’s still not easy to sniff the
unicorn potential in young ventures
and sift the wheat from the chaff.
Unless you are Sandeep Murthy.
In June 2005, when Murthy arrived
in India as the sole representative
of Sherpalo Ventures (he was also
representing the Silicon Valley-based
VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield &
Byers [KPCB]), his plan was to lead
an investment into an online travel
38 | FORBES INDIA APRIL 15, 2016
company called Cleartrip, which
hadn’t yet gone live. What he was
going to do beyond that wasn’t clear.
“I came here with a Blackberry and
laptop thinking, ‘Let’s see where it
goes’,” says Murthy, 39, seated in the
Mumbai office of Lightbox Ventures,
the early stage venture capital firm of
which he is a founding partner. The
company was set up when Sherpalo
and KPCB exited India in 2014.
Murthy started the firm along with
partners Jeremy Wenokur, Prashant
Mehta, Sid Talwar and Sunny Rao.
They began with the acquisition of
a portion of Sherpalo’s and KPCB’s
India portfolio. The firm has gone on
to invest in companies like the online
food delivery platform Faasos and
refurbished goods retailer GreenDust.
Murthy’s knack for businesses,
though, predated his arrival in India.
In 2000, when he was 24, Murthy
and a friend started a tech company
in Silicon Valley. “It was Spotify a
few years too early,” recalls Murthy,
an MBA from Wharton School and
a former investment banker with
Credit Suisse. The idea was to create
a “digital living room” by letting
people upload their music collection
on the internet, so that it could be
accessed from anywhere, he says.
The venture lasted all of 18
months. “We had 50 employees
and signed 8-10 partnerships. But
we couldn’t get content at rates
that would work.” Murthy found
himself out of work for the next six
months. “I was 25, unemployed,
overqualified and depressed.” So,
when a company that did online
auctions for the food industry
offered him a job, he lapped it up.
Later, he joined online travel giant
Mexy xavier
Sandeep Murthy has led
investments into info Edge,
inMobi and Shopclues, that
are now billion-dollar firms
IAC, which owns Expedia and Hotels.
com among other ventures, and
tried to get it to invest in Cleartrip,
but the deal didn’t materialise.
But Murthy was gung-ho on
Cleartrip and when Ram Shriram,
one of the first investors in Google,
agreed to invest, Murthy quit IAC and
moved on to Shriram’s Sherpalo. This
paved the way for his arrival in India.
In a little over a decade since he
arrived, Murthy has managed to lead
investments in three companies—Info
Edge, InMobi and ShopClues—that
are now billion-dollar firms.
He made plenty of mistakes along
the way as well, floundering with his
investments in the Future Group’s
APRIL 15, 2016 FORBES INDIA | 39
enterpriSe
Sandeep Murthy
online portal FutureBazaar, for
instance. He admits his understanding
of the Indian retail space at that point
was flawed. But Murthy’s penchant
to spot unicorns in the fickle world of
business valuations sets him apart.
Is there a common thread
running through these billiondollar companies? “All their
founders have double Es in their
names,” he says with a guffaw.
“And an intensity and drive that
is focussed around something
much larger than personal gain.”
THE ART OF EXPERIMENTING
In 2005, when Murthy first met
Sanjeev Bikhchandani, 52, the founder
of Info Edge, the latter had already
turned a small classifieds business
into one of India’s largest internet
companies: Naukri.com. “He had
built a classifieds job listings business
in a very different way. In the US,
it was completely online, while
Sanjeev, at that time, had about 800
sales people,” says Murthy. “I did
not expect a tech company to have
800 sales people and still generate
a 20 percent profit margin.” Those
were still early days for Murthy, and
in Info Edge he saw a business that
had been built with “brute-force
execution”. “The entire ethos of
entrepreneurship is experiment, fail,
learn, repeat. The question is how
quickly can you do all of these and
repeat. I think that Info Edge had
done a great job at navigating that.”
Bikhchandani, for instance, would
ensure that very little money was
spent on marketing a new product in
the initial stage. The company would
launch the product and tweak it over
the next couple of years till it finally
got it right. “You’ve got to experiment;
you’ve got to keep trying to see if
something works, that’s when the big
bucks come in,” says Bikhchandani.
Meanwhile, he was already
preparing for an initial public offering
(IPO). But what the company was
looking for was access to technological
expertise. “We were attracted by the
40 | FORBES INDIA APRIL 15, 2016
fact that Sherpalo and KPCB would
incorporate a new network to add
value in a way that investors in India
could not, be it through their network
in the [Silicon] Valley or in the user
interface space,” says Bikhchandani,
who started Info Edge from his home.
In early 2000, when he was trying
to raise money from an investor, he
was asked what’s so special about
his company. “I told him that we
were profitable. He replied: ‘If you’re
making profits you have a vision
problem’,” he recalls. The vision
didn’t change. The company went
public soon after the investment
by KPCB and Sherpalo. And the
rest, as they say, is history.
“THE ETHOS
OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP IS
EXPERIMENT, FAIL,
LEARN, REPEAT.
THE QUESTION IS
HOW QUICKLY CAN
YOU DO THESE.”
MENTOR NOT ENTREPRENEUR
When it comes to unicorns, popular
wisdom seems to suggest that they
should act less like startups and more
like the large corporations that they
have become. The co-founder of the
second billion-dollar firm that Murthy
led an investment into disagrees.
“Being a startup to me has never
been about years in the industry,
revenue, reach or scale. To me,
startup is a state of being where,
in spite of your growth, you do not
let your values vanish. It is a place
where policies do not hamper
creativity,” says Naveen Tewari, 38,
co-founder of mobile advertising
and discovery platform InMobi.
The mobile advertising behemoth
had its beginnings as mKhoj, an
SMS-based hyperlocal search
network. Although they had
met Murthy for mKhoj in 2006,
he had then redirected them to
Bikhchandani since they were
foraying into a field that he had
expertise in. Nothing materialised.
In 2008, they met again. This time
their pitch was different. They were
going to create a mobile ad platform.
“It [the pitch] wasn’t great,” says
Murthy. “But what was interesting
was that they had identified how
they wanted to build it and they were
very clear that tech was going to be
an important aspect of how they
would differentiate their business.”
It was understood that since
they found the market interesting,
at some point in time, so would
Google. Murthy led a $6-million
funding round into the company.
“After about a year, 95 percent
of the company was product and
technology,” he says. The gamble to
focus almost all resources on product
development has helped InMobi
face competition from the likes of
Google. The company today has 1.4
billion users across 140 countries.
The beginning wasn’t easy.
“Being the first in mobile space,
we had no predecessors to look up
to, especially in India. Meanwhile,
Sandeep [Murthy] helped us a
lot by being a great sounding
board,” says Tewari. “He became
a part of the team,” he adds.
It’s an approach that Murthy has
thought long and hard about. He
flatly refutes the hypothesis that
investors can act as mentors. “If an
investor can run a company, then
he should be doing it instead of the
entrepreneur,” he says. However,
there is place for a different type
of relationship. “If you’re an
entrepreneur, it’s a lonely existence.
So what you want is someone whom
you believe shares your vision and
will be in that process with you.”
To emphasise the importance of
this approach, he cites the example
of InMobi’s initial decision to expand
to South Africa. The company’s
expansion followed a realisation that
monetisation in the Indian market
was slower than other regions in the
world. “I distinctly remember us
having this discussion. And Abhay
[Singhal, co-founder, InMobi] got
on a plane and went there. He had
never been there before. But he
knew he could get in touch with
some advertisers in South Africa. We
decided that we were going to be an
ad network for the rest of the world.”
It was their understanding and
engagement that, Murthy believes,
enabled this kind of decision-making
without being marred by mistrust.
“The InMobi experience further
reaffirmed the idea that your initial
ideas can change; you have some
amazing people, you have to work
closely with them so that you
can move with them,” he says.
STRATEGIC THINKING
InMobi and Info Edge are companies
that began at very different stages
in the evolution of India’s online
ecosystem. “What we took out of Info
Edge was that in India, execution had
to be done a little bit differently,” says
Murthy. In InMobi’s case, though,
what stood out for Murthy was
simply the intensity with which the
company was created and operated.
A similar intensity was on display
when Murthy met Sandeep Aggarwal,
42, a former internet analyst at Collins
Stewart, in June 2011. Aggarwal was
then in talks to raise an angel round
of funding for the company that is
now ShopClues. Over the phone,
Murthy invited him for a meeting in
Mumbai. “On the phone we quipped
that we should meet for a beer,”
recalls Murthy. Aggarwal flew in
from California and showed up at the
offices with a computer and a case
of beer. “He and Sanjay [Sethi, CEO
and co-founder, ShopClues] came
with every possible spreadsheet,
covering every aspect of the business.
And we had the beer as well.”
Although KPCB and Sherpalo did
Sanjeev Bikhchandani, founder, info Edge. Sandeep Murthy says the online classifieds company
was built with “brute-force execution”
not invest in the company, Murthy,
along with his soon-to-be partners
at Lightbox Ventures, decided to
invest in the angel round of funding.
ShopClues, says Aggarwal, was the
first pure-play online marketplace
in India, while the other companies
were based on an inventory model
and later shifted to becoming a
marketplace. “Most investors
didn’t understand the difference,
although they act smart now.” This
was before Flipkart and Snapdeal
had moved to a marketplace model,
Murthy points out. “No one else saw
the opportunity then,” he says.
Murthy and his partners evidently
did. He was also characteristically
supportive with his advice and
perspective. “I think it’s beautiful
that someone gives you money and
also thinks for you. I found him to
be a great strategic thinker and I
connected with him at a personal
level as well,” says Aggarwal. He left
his position as CEO of ShopClues
after his arrest in the US in July
2013 on insider trading charges in
an unrelated case. He pleaded guilty
and entered a plea bargain with
US prosecutors in November that
year. Putting this setback behind
him, he has since launched another
startup called Droom, an online
marketplace for automobiles.
In 2015, Droom raised $16 million
in a series-A funding round led
by Lightbox Ventures. “If you ask
Aggarwal, he’ll tell you Droom will
be a $10-billion company,” says
Murthy. “It’s a manifestation of the
same drive that led to the creation
of ShopClues.” Because, for Murthy,
it all starts with passion.
APRIL 15, 2016 FORBES INDIA | 41
mallikarjun katakol for forbes india
Mukesh Bansal,
founder and
former CEO
of Myntra
42 | FORBES INDIA APRIL 15, 2016
cover story  mukesH bansal
thE EtErnal
EntrEprEnEur
After building India’s biggest online fashion retail brand,
Myntra founder Mukesh Bansal is ready for his next
innings—and he has a few surprises in store
By DEBOjyOti GhOsh
t
erm it what you will—the
irresistibility of enterprise,
the novelty of newness—and
Mukesh Bansal, 40, the founder
and former CEO of Myntra,
India’s largest online fashion retailer, will
cop to it as the reason for resigning from
the Flipkart-Myntra combine on February
11 this year. “I want to feel like an earlystage entrepreneur again and go through
the experience and see if I can do it one
more time,” he says. But what he will not
even remotely allude to as a factor for his
decision is conflict. It was an amicable exit,
insist all the parties involved—the folks
at the ecommerce giant, venture capital
firms—rubbishing rumours of a fallout (see
box). After all, he is set to stay on as an
independent advisor to Myntra and Flipkart.
The reasons notwithstanding, Bansal’s
decision to step down as head of the
commerce platform and advertising business
at Flipkart, and as chairman of Myntra,
effective March 31, 2016, was a major
shake-up in the company as well as for the
industry. After all, post the acquisition of
Myntra in May 2014, Bansal had become
part of the top leadership team at Flipkart
apart from his role at Myntra which
continues to retain its own brand identity.
“It has been an intense nine years since I
started Myntra. It was a roller-coaster ride
with a lot of ups and downs. But I realised
that Myntra has a strong leadership team to
take the business forward. And that gave me
the luxury to think beyond Myntra. It was
APRIL 15, 2016
FORBES INDIA | 43
cover story  mukesH bansal
thE risE Of inDian ECOMMErCE’s fashiOn MOGul
1997
Graduated
from iitkanpur with
a btech
degree in
computer
science
1997-1999
Worked as
systems
analyst with
deloitte in
chicago
1999-2006
Worked with four
startups (eWanted.
com, centrata,
nextag, and newscale)
in the ecommerce
and enterprise
software space in san
francisco’s bay area
2006
towards the
end of the year,
he returned to
india with an eye
on the internet
economy, which
hadn’t taken
off till then
2007
started
myntra as a
personalised
gifting startup
along with
ashutosh
lawania and
vineet saxena
2008
idG ventures
india, kalaari
capital and
accel Partners
invest $5 million
in a series
a funding
Mukesh Bansal
the desire to do something more in a
different space,” Bansal told Forbes
India in his first interview since these
developments took place. We had
met on March 10 at the Myntra office,
off Hosur Road in Bengaluru. “I had
been thinking about it for a while,
but it is only early this year that I
decided to go ahead [with the exit].”
And he has already laid the
groundwork for his next venture, he
says. Far from the world of fashion,
Bansal’s new project will be focussed
on sports, fitness and health care,
with technology inevitably being
at the core of the venture. A mixed
channel strategy of online-offline
may also be considered—a shift from
Myntra, which brought mass fashion
to our fingertips solely through
internet and mobile commerce.
While the business plan is still
a work-in-progress, he does share
some aspects of the initial concept
of the venture with Forbes India.
The intention is to create something
which will be markedly different
from the current crop of players
in the health care space, such as
Practo, Portea Medical and others.
“Currently, there is no integrated
platform addressing all the health
care needs of an individual. Broadly,
we are exploring how to create an
integrated platform for personalised
end-to-end health care management
such as maintaining medical records,
diagnostics, prescription, doctor
appointments, health insurance,
etc, in a cost effective manner.”
He has similar ideas for the sports
and fitness aspects as well: A platform
44 | FORBES INDIA APRIL 15, 2016
that engages all sports lovers—from
children and amateur players to
professional athletes, including linking
them to facilities and providing them
with the right guidance and coaching.
The new venture will start as one
company launching separate brands
for the sports, fitness and health care
parts of the business. “It can be spun
off into multiple companies later,”
says Bansal. Since the project is in
its ideation stage, it is too early to
talk about the business plan, he adds,
but he is clearly bullish about what’s
next. Reason: As Bansal points out,
sports and fitness together make
for a very small market currently,
about $10 billion in India; this is
expected to touch $40 billion in the
next five years. Health care, on the
other hand, is about a $100-billion
market and projected to reach $300
billion in the next five years. India
spends only 4 percent of its GDP on
health care, with most of the market
being left to the unorganised sector.
The opportunities are self-evident.
Currently consumed by studying
market realities and potential for
“I want to
feel lIke an
early-stage
entrepreneur
agaIn and see If
I can do It one
more tIme.”
this next big adventure, Bansal has
enlisted a new partner-in-crime
—Ankit Nagori, the chief business
officer at Flipkart—who also
announced his exit from the company
in February along with Bansal.
Nagori joins the unnamed
business as a co-founder. An IITGuwahati graduate in industrial
design, Nagori, 30, joined Flipkart
in 2010 as a manager and has since
been involved in scaling up and
launching newer categories such as
movies, music and games for India’s
largest ecommerce company.
The venture will be based
in Bengaluru, and self-funded,
reportedly to the tune of $5 million.
Nagori is excited about teaming
up with Bansal. Working together
for the last two years at Flipkart
helped them understand each
other better. “In my last stint, I was
reporting to him [Bansal] at Flipkart.
The focus on quality and talent
philosophy in Mukesh caught my
attention. He always believed that
good businesses are built by good
teams. I feel this quality of Mukesh
has also helped Flipkart revamp its
talent philosophy,” says Nagori.
Bansal explains it like this: “When
you are trying to do a difficult task,
beyond competence and hard work,
I feel loyalty is the most important
thing to bind the team together and
enable you to do much bigger things.”
And it will prove critical in
building their new business,
especially at this stage when the
ecommerce sector has evolved
considerably—greater competition,
2010
tiger Global
management
led a $15 million
series b round
of funding with
existing investors
in the company
also participating
2011
changed
myntra’s
business
model and
relaunched it
with a focus
on fashion
2012
by the yearend myntra
had emerged
as the largest
online
fashion
etailer
a different set of challenges—from
when Bansal first started out.
The bug biT early
Growing up in Haridwar in Uttar
Pradesh, where his father worked
for Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited
(Bhel), Bansal had a modest middleclass upbringing. He studied at Vidya
Mandir Senior Secondary School,
and in 1993, left for IIT-Kanpur to
do a BTech in computer science. “It
was a completely new environment
for me. I was surrounded by the
best students from the country, and
faculty too. The amount of exposure
I received from my time there
was tremendous,” says Bansal.
The entrepreneurial bug bit him
in his early days at IIT. “From my
second year onwards, I spent a lot of
time in the library and got hooked on
to books about entrepreneurship. I
read Lee Iacocca, Sam Walton’s Made
in America, and about the late Sony
founder, Akio Morita. By the third
year, I had decided I would build my
career around entrepreneurship.”
His plan was to pursue an MBA
and start his own venture. But after
graduating from IIT in 1997, he got a
job with consulting firm Deloitte as a
systems analyst, and left for Chicago.
“I thought that maybe I would first
go to the US, work for some time
and then do an MBA and come
back and start my own venture.”
Bansal spent almost two years at
Deloitte, but couldn’t find his groove
in the corporate environment. This
was around the time the dotcom
boom was in full swing in the San
2014
sold
myntra to
flipkart for
about $375
million
2014
Post
acquisition,
he was the
ceo of myntra
and head of
fashion at
parent
flipkart
2015
moved out from
his ceo role
and became
chairman of
the board of
myntra and head
of flipkart’s
commerce
platform
Francisco Bay Area. Drawn to it,
in 1999, he quit his job at Deloitte
and drove down there—with a
friend, and without a job.
While in the Bay Area, Bansal and
his friend tried to start a venture of
their own, a job portal, but they gave
up after persisting with it for a few
months. That period did, however,
strengthen Bansal’s resolve to work
only for early-stage companies.
Between 1999 and 2007, he worked
for four early-stage companies in the
Bay Area, of which two startups were
in the ecommerce space and two in
the enterprise software business.
He never ended up doing an
MBA. But he was learning at a
different kind of school. Those eight
years gave him a ringside view to
being an entrepreneur, and all the
successes and failures of earlystage businesses. While two of the
four places he worked at folded
(eWanted.com, an online community
and auction marketplace, and
Centrata, a software company), the
other two saw success. NexTag, an
online price comparison site, where
Bansal was a software engineer,
was sold for about $1.3 billion in
2006; newScale, an enterprise
software company, was acquired by
Cisco in 2011. The company had a
modest exit of about $200 million.
Bansal was a director (product
management) in the company.
It is with a mix of nostalgia and
gratitude that Bansal reflects on his
time spent in the US. He credits his
strong understanding of business
fundamentals and building a high
2016
in january,
he was given
additional
responsibility
to handle
flipkart’s
advertising
business
2016
in february,
he announced
his exit from
flipkart and
myntra. but he
continues to be
an independent
advisor to both
entities
performing team to his learning stints
with the startups. “Much of the work
culture at Myntra was influenced
from my experience of working with
the startups. I met a lot of interesting
people and worked closely with the
founders, learning from their differing
business styles. Startups go through
ups and downs, and I’ve lived the
good and bad decisions they took. It
was very interesting to see how they
handled themselves in difficult times.”
Bansal also witnessed, and
imbibed, the culture of equality
and transparency at a workplace.
He says, “I believe in freedom and
autonomy. I never liked hierarchy
in an organisation and was biased
towards a flat structure. We decided
early that we would not have any
cabins in the Myntra office. We
all work at our workstations.”
Pooja Gupta, former senior vice
president and HR head at Myntra,
concurs: “I think founding cultures
have something very special about
them. Mukesh was very clear from the
start and only put in place processes
that were absolutely required. He
wanted to keep it nimble where
people could collaborate more
easily. Myntra didn’t even have
a leave policy when I had joined.
Mukesh was all for employees
taking all the leave they wanted, as
long as they were accountable and
productive.” Gupta worked closely
with Bansal between 2010 and 2015.
Bansal did, however, face the
occasional pangs of self-doubt and
the need to keep up with the ‘Joneses’
while abroad. The security of a PSUAPRIL 15, 2016
FORBES INDIA | 45
cover story  mukesH bansal
sponsored middle-class upbringing
was in direct conflict with the riskloving capitalism of the Bay Area.
“When you work for startups, you
don’t have a well defined career path.
Your growth within the organisation
is not well planned. That time, my
friends and batchmates from IIT
who were working with [the likes
of] Microsoft and Oracle were all
growing in their careers. I didn’t have
a career progression like them.”
The comparisons were fleeting,
though. Bansal was deeply invested
in his dream of becoming an
entrepreneur. “I knew it wouldn’t
be an easy task and will be a path
filled with risk and uncertainty.
There would be many failures,
things may or may not work, but it
is my conviction that drove me. I
am very independent minded.”
learning aT The
mynTra school
Whatever Bansal does next will be
informed by his Myntra experience—
one which began in February 2007,
when he moved back to India and
started the company. He began by
reaching out to potential co-founders,
finally partnering with Ashutosh
Lawania and Vineet Saxena, his
juniors from IIT-Kanpur. Initially
seed-funded by Bansal himself,
Myntra’s original focus was on
personalised gift items such as
T-shirts, mugs, pens and caps.
Not many people were convinced
about the idea, says Bansal. “The
very first investor we met helpfully
suggested we shut down and go
back to our jobs. She said, ‘All of
you have good degrees, why do
you want to do this? Stay in the
corporate sector, where you will do
very well’.” Needless to say, she did
not become an investor in Myntra.
Prudently, and expectedly, their
beginnings were humble. Operating
out of an independent house in
Bengaluru’s HSR Layout, Bansal lived
above the office on the top floor. It
was a small outfit—they played cricket
in the evenings, in the lane outside
the house. On one occasion, while
playing cricket, their first client, a
mukesh’s exiT was ‘ineviTable’
Industry experts aren’t surprised by his decision to move on even as Mukesh Bansal
rubbishes the notion of resenting Binny Bansal’s ascension to CEO
O
n February 11,
Mukesh Bansal
announced his exit
from Flipkart. Post that,
there was speculation that
the rise of Flipkart’s cofounder Binny Bansal, 32, to
the post of company CEO
was a trigger for Mukesh,
who also nursed ambitions
of heading the company.
Sources pointed out
that it was “inevitable”
that Mukesh would exit
at some stage. After all,
having tasted the power of
creating entrepreneurial
value, it is hard to get
as enthused for a small
percentage of shareholding
of someone else’s company.
“Whatever was written
about me was all media
speculation. I was very
supportive of Binny [Bansal]
being the CEO. I think he
will do a phenomenal job.
46 | FORBES INDIA APRIL 15, 2016
He is very focussed and
highly energised and has
the backing of a great team.
I’m glad that he is running
the business. I never chased
any title or role so far. I
started from scratch, so for
me designation, title was
never a consideration,”
says Bansal, adding that
both Sachin, 34, and Binny
were very surprised with
his decision. “However,
after a few interactions
they understood my intent.
By and large, they have
been very supportive.”
Industry analysts offer
this perspective: So far
India’s nascent startup
ecosystem has had a slew
of examples where the
promoters of acquired
companies have exited
post the merger. Phanindra
Sama of redBus (which
got acquired by online
travel services group Ibibo)
and Raghunandan G of
TaxiForSure (which was
acquired by Taxi aggregator
Ola) and more recently
Sahad PV of VCCircle,
a digital news platform
(which was acquired by
media and publishing
firm News Corp) are
classic cases in point.
“It is a fact that for a
successful founder, it is
very difficult to work as
an executive, even if it
happens to be as head of
a much larger entity. For
any founder and more so
for a hugely successful one
with a stupendous exit and
money in the bank, the
itch will always be to start
something else which is
bigger and outdo himself,”
says Harminder Sahni,
founder and managing
director of Wazir Advisors,
a retail consulting firm.
Most M&A agreements
have clauses that ensure
that the acquired
company’s promoters stay
in the merged entity for a
stipulated period of time
for seamless consolidation
and that when they move
out they would not start a
competing business. This
could well be the case with
Mukesh, says a source.
Subrata Mitra, partner
at Accel Partners, one
of the early investors at
both Myntra and Flipkart,
calls it “a tough decision
for everyone, including
Mukesh”. “But, we have to
deal with it in a mature way.
Once the three (Mukesh,
Sachin and Binny) of them
decided that this was the
best thing to do, we took
it as it was,” says Mitra.
—Debojyoti Ghosh
josHua navalkar
ankit nagori
was chief
business officer
at flipkart
biking club, showed up to collect their
order of 40 customised T-shirts. They
picked up the T-shirts, but not before
joining the Myntra team—then of
mere 7-8 people—for some cricket.
The period 2007-10 was one of
experimentation for Myntra. They
wanted to grow their base, and
revenue, so they also ventured into
corporate customised gifting. But
by 2010, they realised the market
for personalised gifting was very
small indeed. We could have built a
Rs 50 crore business in that space,
at best, recalls Bansal. By then the
company, and its investors, had
started evaluating various alternatives
for the Myntra business model.
It was a time of turmoil. The
business wasn’t performing to
expectations, and there was an
increasingly pressing need to move
towards a more robust, scalable
model. Even his parents didn’t fully
understand what he was doing, laughs
Bansal, though they were proud of
his success. “They were surprised,
especially about the personalisation
business. They had no clue as to why I
was trying to sell T-shirts and mugs.”
By the end of 2010, Bansal had
evaluated many categories, and
settled on fashion as an alternative
In less than a
decade of hIs
journey, Bansal
has gaIned the
reputatIon of
BeIng a leader
wIth foresIght
business focus. At the time, fashion
was about a $50 billion category
in India which has now grown to
almost $80 billion. The business
also offered very good margins and
immense scope for growth, given the
unorganised nature of the market.
It wasn’t an easy decision, though.
“To build something painstakingly
for four years and then to shut it
down—it is a tough transition.”
But by early 2011, Myntra had
evolved its business model, and
launched its new fashion focus. No
one was sure if it would work. Vani
Kola, managing director, Kalaari
Capital, one of the early investors
in the firm, says, “We didn’t have
much of an idea about the fashion
and lifestyle space. For instance, how
does one go and negotiate with global
brands such as Puma, Nike, etc, to
retail with us, and build the business?
APRIL 15, 2016
FORBES INDIA | 47
cover story  mukesH bansal
It was Mukesh who turned the tide
with his absolute clarity. He was very
sure this was where the future was.”
Investors saw that and, not
surprisingly, according to Bengalurubased Tracxn, a database for startups
and private companies, Myntra
(now part of Flipkart) is the most
funded company in the country’s
online fashion space with a total
funding of $159 million raised so far.
In less than a decade of his
entrepreneurial journey, Bansal has
gained the reputation of being a leader
with foresight. His ability to take risks,
bold decisions and conviction in what
he does is widely acknowledged by
peers, investors and competitors alike.
“As an entrepreneur, Mukesh did
a great job. He could spot an
opportunity in fashion and start a
business. Myntra was the first
player to create a fashion brand
online. That credit should go to him
for finding the space and being one
of the first few to identify
the potential of fashion business
online and take action,” says
Praveen Sinha, co-founder, Jabong.
“He ensured that the competition
cannot sleep or lag, even as we kept
him on his toes. I think, it was a
good sport we had as competitors,”
adds Sinha, who exited from New
Delhi-based Jabong late last year.
“I would have loved to work with
him as a collaborator, instead
of being competitors that we
were. If we have met earlier, that
might have even happened.”
Getty imaGes
making friends
wiTh flipkarT
Though it didn’t happen with Sinha,
Bansal did make his competitors
his collaborators. In 2014, he met
and began interacting with Sachin
and Binny Bansal, co-founders of
Flipkart. It was around the time
Amazon was aggressively marketing
itself in India. Bansal worked out the
probability of success for his company
if Myntra stayed independent visà-vis if Myntra and Flipkart were
48 | FORBES INDIA APRIL 15, 2016
to join hands. Together, the three
Bansals were convinced that the
combined forces of Myntra and
Flipkart would be more effective
against a formidable global player.
It helped also that the two
companies shared common
investors—Accel Partners and Tiger
Global Management. This had
paved the way for many meetings
between the founders from as early
as 2008, allowing them to get to
know each other reasonably well
through social gatherings, events,
investor meets and the like.
That set the tone for what
was to follow. “It was an aligned
viewpoint between both sets of
founders,” says Ashutosh Lawania,
co-founder, Myntra. “Flipkart would
be bringing many things to the table
to accelerate Myntra’s growth,
and that would also help Flipkart
fight competition.” Bansal concurs:
“Sachin, Binny and I arrived at the
decision. This wasn’t an investor-led
acquisition. They believed in both
the companies, and in our common
vision. We had a strong cultural fit.”
Bansal credits the success of the
$375 million deal to their collaborative
working style. “For the last oneand-a-half years, we met every week
for dinner and discussed business,
strategy and would brainstorm on
key areas. Our roles were very clearly
defined. Everyone had their own
strengths.” Sachin was tasked with
technology, big picture thinking,
and building the business’ longterm vision. Binny took charge of
Bansal plans to
create somethIng
whIch Is dIfferent
from what the
current players
In the health
care space offer
operations and driving quality.
Bansal focussed on team building,
and fostering a productive, inclusive
work culture within the organisation.
For the investors, the synergy
between the founders was a key
factor in agreeing to the deal.
“Mukesh, Sachin and Binny were all
talking the same language the day
after the deal. In fact, in one board
meeting, I jokingly commented
that he (Mukesh) was more aligned
with Flipkart’s strategy than some
of the founders! When we were
making changes for 2015, it was
Mukesh leading the charge for
their commerce platform,” Subrata
Mitra of Accel Partners recalls.
It is a testament to the
synergistic success of the Bansals
that post the Myntra acquisition,
Flipkart’s valuation went up five
times—in its last round of funding in
July 2015, Flipkart had been valued
at $15 billion. At present, the MyntraFlipkart combined entity commands
a market share of more
than 50 percent of India’s
online fashion space.
In May last year, Myntra became
the first Indian ecommerce player
to opt for an app-only strategy,
in The fiTness of Things
Mukesh Bansal
(left) with flipkart
co-founder
sachin Bansal
and discontinued its website.
But in February this year, it
went back to its mobile website.
Multiple media reports indicate
that the app-only bet didn’t play
out well for Myntra, resulting in
a loss in both sales and traffic.
But even his failure was a
pointer to his entrepreneurial
skills. Sudhir Sethi, founder and
chairman of IDG Ventures India
Advisors, points out that for a
promoter, it is important
to broaden his mindset.
“He (Mukesh Bansal) knows
his business inside out. He has an
understanding of the fashion market,
and the internet-mobile market
as well. The fact that he took the
risk, by going completely mobile,
is a step that many entrepreneurs
would not have taken.”
Sinha of Jabong agrees: “Mukesh
as a leader could take bold decisions.
It doesn’t matter if it was a right
or wrong move. The decision to
go app-only is one such step.”
What was striking to the
industry was “Mukesh’s passion for
breaking new ground,” says Sethi.
His other passion, we find, is for
fitness—of the mind and body.
A private person, Bansal doesn’t have a
large social network, but a small group
of close friends spread across the US,
Delhi and Bengaluru. His two younger
sisters are also in technology, one
with Google in the US, and another at
HCL in Noida. A family man, Bansal
enjoys spending his time with his wife
and two children, a daughter aged
11 and a son aged 6. He requested
us to not mention their names—a
telling testament of how zealously
he guards his family and privacy.
His idea of relaxation is simple:
To sit in a corner, curled up with a
book. (That habit hasn’t changed
since his days at IIT.) “I read a lot, at
least one book a week. I love reading
about history, science, biographies.
My favourite books are Guns, Germs,
and Steel by Jared Diamond, A Short
History of Nearly Everything by Bill
Bryson and Good to Great by Jim
Collins.” The rest of his time goes
on fitness, spending close to two
hours at the gym every day. “I’m up
by 5 am and hit the gym by 6. I do
everything: Weights, cardio, crossfit, yoga, and running.” (This also
explains the idea for the new venture
being based on an intersection of
health care, sports and fitness.)
Bansal has also assumed an investor
avatar and influenced early-stage
entrepreneurs, one of whom is also
a friend based in Bengaluru. “He
(Bansal) was the first person who
told me that instead of working for
a company, I should start my own
venture,” says Mukesh Singh, founder
of ZopNow, an online grocery store.
Bansal is an early investor in the
startup. So far, he has funded six
startups (mostly in the consumer
internet space) as an angel investor,
including fashion marketplace
for women, Voonik, ZopNow and
FlipClass, an online marketplace
for home tutors. All three ventures
are based out of Bengaluru.
His entrepreneurial journey,
still not even a decade old, has also
transformed him on a personal level.
In particular, his fashion sensibilities,
says Singh, a batchmate of Bansal’s
from IIT-Kanpur. In the context of
their shared middle-class upbringing,
Bansal’s fashion evolution stands
out for Singh. “Mukesh came from
fairly modest means in a small town.
To come from a place like that, and
to be running the country’s largest
online fashion business today, is no
mean feat. In this whole process,
the way he transformed himself is
also commendable. There is a huge
change in his personality and the
way he carries himself. Today, he
uses his clothes to make a statement,
something the earlier Mukesh I knew
couldn’t have done,” says Singh.
Bansal too is cognisant of his
renewed relationship with fashion.
“Through the Myntra journey, my
association with fashion has also
evolved. Today I understand fashion
more deeply, [I have] my own sense
of style. I pay more attention to
what I wear. Today, I’m much more
confident about experimenting with
my fashion choices. Any sartorial
statement I make tends towards
the classic and understated—I
like things clean and crisp.”
Bansal, evidently, isn’t about
embracing only what comes easy. He
is willing to tough it out, and give a
difficult situation a second shot. This
was his hallmark, even in college,
remembers his classmate Singh. “If I
go back to our college days at IITKanpur, he didn’t score too well in
his first semester. But in the second
semester, he was the department
topper,” he points out. Singh extends
that to Bansal’s Myntra experience.
“Personalised gifting wasn’t doing
exceptionally well. The way he
pivoted from that model to a
company which was selling top
retail brands required a lot of
understanding about the space and
courage to do that. He always made
his second attempts count much
better than anyone else I know.”
That can only bode well for
what’s coming next for Bansal.
APRIL 15, 2016
FORBES INDIA | 49
interview
p Chidambaram
‘I Blame All Govts for the
Slow Pace of Reforms’
Former union minister P Chidambaram rues the fact that
India did not have an unbroken period of reforms since the
economy opened up in 1991. He says the government must
stoop if it has to conquer
anindito mukherjee / reuterS
By N MadhavaN & Sourav MajuMdar
50 | FORBES INDIA APRIL 15, 2016
P
Chidambaram, who has
had the longest tenure as
India’s finance minister,
now exercises his role
as an opposition leader through
his weekly columns in The Indian
Express. His latest book, Standing
Guard, is a compilation of the
columns published in the newspaper
in 2015 and captures the state of the
country as he saw it. Chidambaram,
who was in Mumbai recently to
launch his book, spoke to Forbes
India about its content and his views
on the performance of the BJP-led
National Democratic Alliance (NDA)
government. Edited excerpts:
Q In your book, you have
said that the biggest failure
of the “pro-business” NDA
government is the “moribund
state of the private sector”...
The NDA government is regarded
as a pro-business government. The
BJP is regarded as a pro-trading
community party. Big businesses
overtly supported them in the
elections and gave them big money
for their campaign. Yet, today, if
you talk to businessmen, they will
tell you that they are disappointed.
Every businessman has told me
that if he is investing a rupee in his
business, he will first try to invest
that money outside the country.
That is why the chief economic
advisor confesses in his analysis
that two of the four engines of
growth—private investment and
exports—have virtually stopped.
Somewhere, the government
seems to have lost the plot in
understanding what businesses need.
Q Would you subscribe to the view
that this government is taking
small steps, like transparency in
allocation of natural resources or
the Ujwal Discom Assurance Yojana
(UDAY scheme), which will lead to
a bigger picture at some point?
APRIL 15, 2016 FORBES INDIA | 51
interview p Chidambaram
I don’t deny it. The UDAY scheme
is nothing but phase-II of a similar
scheme launched by the UPA.
Only six states signed up then. If
more states are signing up today, I
congratulate the government. Take,
for example, natural resources. The
decision to auction coal blocks was
taken by the UPA government, but
it was not implemented and we
paid a price for that. The decision
to auction is a welcome one, but
the follow through is poor. As I
learn, of the 42 coal mines that
were eventually auctioned, only
two are operational today.
Getty imaGeS
Q You are a big votary of fiscal
discipline and in your book you
talk of how Greece has become
a failed nation (economically)
by ignoring it. Do you think the
3.5 percent fiscal deficit target
for 2016-17 is achievable?
The 3.5 percent target is eminently
achievable. In fact, the 3.9 percent
for 2015-16 was easily achievable
too. Why did they make it appear to
be a Herculean effort is something I
do not know. I have complimented
the finance minister for accepting
the views of those who argued
for adhering to the fiscal deficit
target of 3.5 percent. For 2017-18,
he must reach three percent. But
I have pointed out that the fiscal
math is puzzling. How they have
achieved this 3.5 percent is not very
satisfactory. There is a huge extra
budgetary resource (EBR), which is
borrowing, in the ministry of
railways and ministry of road
transport. Something like Rs
59,000 crore is being borrowed
by the ministry of railways and
Rs 59,000 crore by the ministry
of road transport. Analysts are
going to add this Rs 1.18 lakh crore
to the fiscal deficit. Therefore,
while I compliment the finance
minister for adhering to the fiscal
deficit of 3.5 percent, I will urge
him to look into the manner in
which it has been achieved.
52 | FORBES INDIA APRIL 15, 2016
Q You take a lot of pains in the
book to explain how the economy
began to turn around in the last
year of the UPA government’s
tenure and debunk the BJP theory
that it inherited a broken economy.
I was part of the UPA government.
Whether as a finance minister or not,
I am collectively responsible [for the
government’s decisions]. Between
“WHEN THERE IS
A SLOWDOWN,
NPAs WILL RISE.
WITH WILFUL
DEFAULTERS THE
GOVT SHOULD
TAKE ACTION.”
2008-end and 2011, we went into a
fiscal expansionary mode. That is
what the textbooks said. The answer
to a recession is to spend more, which
is what the government did. But
the consequences were 14 percent
inflation, 6.5 percent fiscal deficit
and $88 billion current account
deficit. When I came back to the
finance ministry [after a three-year
stint as home minister], my job,
as I saw it and the prime minister
concurred, was to put the economy
back on track, which we did. By the
time we left office, the economy was
growing at 6.6 percent, according
to the Central Statistical Office. The
fiscal deficit had been contained
sharply in the last two years [of
the UPA government] and current
account deficit was brought down
from $88 billion to not more than
$40 billion. But since we were doing
means a strong India...
Chidambaram with
Finance Minister
arun jaitley
(Laughs). The prime minister thought
so. Even [the current external affairs
minister] Sushma Swaraj thought
so. They said when we come to
power, the rupee will be 40 to a
dollar. Now, thankfully, they do not
speak about it. Imagine what will
happen if the rupee is 40 to a dollar.
Q What are the key things
that you would like the
NDA government to do?
There are three major problems.
One is lack of aggregate demand,
lack of private investment and 14
months of negative exports. These
are the three areas which the prime
minister, the finance minister and
the entire economic team must
address. The global slowdown has
affected all countries. Nevertheless,
China’s exports are still positive
and so are South Korea’s and
Japan’s. Why is India’s export
showing a negative growth?
a rear-guard action, people felt that
we had lost control of the economy.
Q Could this rear-guard action
have been avoided if you had not
shifted to the home ministry?
Let me say once again that I am
collectively responsible for all the
decisions even if I had not taken
them as finance minister. I think
that the first fiscal stimulus was
necessary, the second was perhaps
avoidable and the third was totally
unnecessary. If we had reined in
the fiscal expansionary approach in
end-2010, we would not have allowed
inflation and the fiscal deficit to
breach all limits. But this is hindsight
and in hindsight, everybody is wise.
Q In your book, you talk of
a section of people in India
who think a strong rupee
Q We are approaching the
25th anniversary of the 1991
liberalisation of the Indian
economy. Are you satisfied
with the pace of reforms?
No. I blame all governments for
this. Once we opened up in 1991,
we should have had an unbroken
period of 25 years of opening up of
the economy. That did not happen.
We have had broken periods. Even
the PV Narasimha Rao government
slowed down in its last two years.
The United Front government
lasted for too short a period—less
than two years—and I did what I
could. In the next [AB Vajpayee]
government, Yashwant Sinha pushed
some reforms, but I think two years
of drought slowed him down. He
also had to move out and make way
for Jaswant Singh. In the Vajpayee
government, there were no reforms
in the last three years. During UPA-I,
we had a reasonably unbroken period
of reforms, but the global financial
crisis set us back by three years. In
a sense, we have been unlucky. We
have not had an unbroken period of
25 years of going ahead with reforms.
Q Where could we have
reformed more?
We have to address the financial
sector. There is a blueprint—
Financial Sector Legislative Reforms
Commission. The Direct Taxes
Code which I drafted and left
behind is ready. The government
should improve it and pass it. The
government has to stoop to conquer.
They have to yield, accommodate
views and pass the GST Bill which
they are stubbornly refusing to do.
The whole area of regulatory reforms
is crying for attention. Our regulatory
architecture is so fragmented…
which is why a chit fund scam falls
between two stools. I had to amend
the Sebi Act to find an authority to
take action. There is so much that can
be done, but you must be bold. If you
have 282 seats from your own party
in the Lok Sabha and 335, including
your allies, I think this is a once-ina-30-year-opportunity. You must
seize it and bring about reforms.
Q What suits India best—big bang
reforms or incremental reforms?
I would do big bang reforms if I
have a majority. If I do not have the
numbers in Parliament, I will do
incremental reforms so that I am
not thrown out of the government.
Q Are we sitting on a ticking
time bomb when it comes
to rising bad debts?
Whenever there is an economic
slowdown, non-performing assets
(NPAs) will rise. This is true with
every country in the world. The
wisdom lies in dividing the NPAs
into two categories—wilful defaults
and victims of economic downturn.
In the case of wilful defaults, the
government should take firm action.
You can’t have a one-size-fits-all
policy to deal with NPAs. You will kill
both lending and entrepreneurship.
APRIL 15, 2016 FORBES INDIA | 53
Marketing & advertising
the viral Fever
A Web of Experiments
An IIT-graduate
created a successful
business by
balancing method
and madness. But
Arunabh Kumar
and his The Viral
Fever now have
to contend with
competition from
big production
houses and
boutique creative
firms alike
Joshua navalkar
By Shruti VenkateSh
Arunabh Kumar, founder
and CEO of The Viral
Fever Media Labs
54 | FORBES INDIA APRIL 15, 2016
A
s a student back in 2004,
Arunabh Kumar found the
absence of Indian content
on IMDb (Internet Movie
Database) ratings disappointing.
Like many others, Kumar, who was
studying mechanical engineering at
IIT-Kharagpur, would use IMDb’s Top
250 shows (TV and web) as a filter
for what to watch. But there were
never any Indian shows in the mix.
Kumar made a mental note to
change things, and it took less than
a decade for him to get there: Today,
there are only two Indian shows in
IMDb Top 250 shows, and both are
from his online content creation
company, The Viral Fever Media
Labs, or TVF, which was founded
in 2011: Pitchers (No. 22, entered in
2015) and Permanent Roommates
(No. 174, entered in 2014). They
are also the first YouTube shows to
make it to this list, says Kumar.
“I observed that there seems to be a
big population and demand for better
and progressive content which nobody
is catering to. So I thought why not try
and make something for them,” says
Kumar, 33, CEO of TVF Media Labs.
In 2016, the company raised
$10 million (around Rs 66 crore)
from investment firm Tiger Global
Management, thus increasing its
valuation from Rs 200 crore in
December 2015 to Rs 270 crore; in
FY2015 it had revenues of Rs 4 crore.
“I met Lee [Fixel, co-head of Tiger
Global’s private equity and venture
capital investing] in September last
year. But it was important for us to
figure out our drawing board. I did
six months of homework before going
ahead with the funding,” he says.
The money will be used to improve
their app, production process and
create more content. This is the first
external infusion of funds into TVF,
which was bootstrapped by Kumar
till this point. Their strategy was to
first master the art of writing a good
script, explains Kumar, and then
get more cash to be able to make
more than two shows in a year.
They seem to be heading in that
direction. Season two of Permanent
Roommates, in association with
Ola, was launched on February 14.
TVF also collaborated with global
dating giant Tinder to create a
branded content video Eat, Pray...
Swipe | Tinder Qtiyapa! The video,
published on January 31, has got
more than 14 lakh views as on
March 18. This is apart from shows
like Barely Speaking with Arnub,
Qtiyapa and Chai Sutta Chronicles.
TVF has 15 lakh subscribers, over
130 videos on its YouTube channel,
and garners an average viewership
TVF HAS 15 LAKH
SUBSCRIBERS,
OVER 130 VIDEOS
ON YOUTUBE, & A
VIEWERSHIP OF 12
LAKH PER VIDEO
of 12 lakh per video. The company
has also created five divisions—
TVF Branded Entertainment, TVF
Production Labs, TVF Live, TVF TV
Production and TVF ONE Online
Network for Entertainment, which
offer services like branded content
for the internet, production services,
live events, television shows and web
series. To reach a wider audience,
TVF launched its own app, TVF Play,
which lets viewers watch all their
content in mobile-friendly resolution.
This evolution, says Kumar,
“is a simple case of good
product-market fit”.
But it isn’t quite simple. The boy
from Muzaffarpur, Bihar, has the
world in his sights. Take, for instance,
the recognition he received when he
represented India at Google’s first
ever Global Creators Summit and the
fourth edition of Brandcast, both in
New York in 2015, alongside stalwart
organisations like Vice, Universal
Studios and Buzzfeed. TVF was the
only Indian company to be invited to
the annual initiative, which discusses
current trends in online content and
identifies key drivers for growth.
“There is tremendous opportunity
and there will be more and
more co-opting synergies and
partnerships between brands,
creators and platforms,” says Neeraj
Roy, managing director and chief
executive officer at Hungama
Digital Media Entertainment Pvt.
Ltd, a digital services agency.
Media investment company Group
M’s report titled This Year Next
Year 2016 says digital advertising is
expected to grow by 47.5 percent in
2016 to Rs 7,300 crore from Rs 4,950
crore last year. The boom in digital
media will only help TVF as branded
content, combined with an engaging
storyline, will be the way forward for
most brands this year, say experts
from the advertising industry. And
Kumar, who figured this out in 2011,
seems to have had a headstart. “The
change has happened and people
need to catch up with it,” he says.
T
he genesis of TVF is
embedded in Kumar’s love
for storytelling. He found his
way to it through a circuitous route.
He interned with David, a subsidiary
of advertising agency O&M, when he
was at IIT. After graduating in 2006,
he worked as a research consultant on
a US Air Force Project from Mumbai.
In the same year, he quit this job to
work as an assistant director on Farah
Khan’s Hindi film Om Shanti Om.
After dabbling with multiple roles
in the media industry—making short
films, documentaries and music
videos—Kumar began freelancing for
Josy Paul, chairman and chief creative
officer of the India office of BBDO, a
APRIL 15, 2016 FORBES INDIA | 55
Marketing & advertising
New York-based advertising agency,
in 2009. It was here that he was
introduced to the concept of creating
branded content, i.e. video content
centred around a brand, usually
for consumption on the internet.
Kumar’s mentor, or “tor-mentor”
as Paul refers to himself, says, “What
I find interesting about Arunabh is
his ability to connect with a younger
India. Given his experience and
where he comes from, he understands
the journey of the country’s youth
because he went through it.”
Eventually, Kumar founded TVF
Media Labs to explore things on his
own—which appropriately had the
motto ‘Lights, Camera, Experiment!’—
and Gillette and Colgate Plax were
some of his first clients. The company
has worked with over 45 brands,
including Flipkart, CommonFloor,
Shiksha.com, Procter & Gamble and
FreeCharge to create branded content.
In parallel, the intention to create
more meaningful TV shows for the
Indian youth translated into ideas
like Engineer’s Diary, a spoof on the
life of college students. He pitched
the concept to channels like MTV
and Channel V. “They liked the
ideas, but refused to air them saying
the Indian youth is not prepared
for this type of content,” he says.
An indignant Kumar decided to go
solo. “I had learnt online processing
in college and knew that YouTube is
a good platform to reach millions of
consumers,” he says. In February 2012,
he put together a site, TVFPLAY.com,
created a YouTube channel called
TheViralFeverVideos, and decided
to upload content he had planned
for TV. The money he had made
from branded content was invested
into creating videos for the web.
The first video, Rowdies, got 10
lakh views in 10 days. “The YouTube
team tells us that the online internet
paradigm in this country is divided
into pre- and post-Rowdies. Before
Rowdies, no original content had ever
gone viral in this country,” claims
Kumar. The success streak continued
56 | FORBES INDIA APRIL 15, 2016
the viral Fever
with Gaana Waala Song (2012), which
was a covert promotional video
campaign for Dharma Productions’
film Student of the Year, and Gangs
of Social Media, a parody of the
film Gangs of Wasseypur (2013).
“Arunabh has cracked the code
of speaking in a language the youth
understands and that makes his
work a success,” says Paul.
By 2014, TVF had also built a strong
team of over 80 people with offices
in Mumbai, Delhi and Bengaluru. A
standard instruction for all employees
is to not get carried away with either
success or failure. “One word which
defines TVF is progress. We never talk
about yesterday in our office,” he says.
“The one thing that I picked
ONLINE CONTENT
CREATION FIRMS
SCOOPWHOOP
AND POCKET
ACES STARTED
EXPERIMENTING
IN 2015
up from him is the ability to
not be disillusioned by praises
or disappointed by failures and
keep working towards something
better,” says Biswapati Sarkar, who
plays the role of anchor in Barely
Speaking with Arnub, which has had
guests like Shah Rukh Khan, Arnab
Goswami, Ranveer Singh and Delhi
Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal.
Notwithstanding the success of
these shows, the bigger dream for
Kumar was to create long-form
content for the web. Essentially,
transform TVF into an online
TV channel by streamlining and
bolstering the content mix.
In 2014, Kingfisher approached
TVF to create a web series with
beer at its core. “The youth today
spend more time watching content
online than watching TV, perhaps
because most current TV shows don’t
appeal to them,” says Samar Singh
Sheikhawat, senior vice president,
marketing, United Breweries Ltd.
After a couple of ideation sessions
with TVF, they zeroed in on the world
of startups, which is in the middle of
a revolution, and made a five-episode
web series, Pitchers. It’s a story of four
young men who leave their jobs for a
startup venture. In fact, the idea for
Pitchers had come to Kumar in 2012,
when he was sitting in Quickies, a
small bar in Bengaluru, but he had to
wait for the right time and resources
to develop this. The name of the
series is a hat-tip to entrepreneurs
who ‘pitch’ their ideas and discuss
strategies over ‘pitchers’ of beer.
“Their approach to story telling
and quality of content helps them
engage closely with millions of
digital-savvy youth,” says Sudarshan
Gangrade, vice president, marketing,
at Ola; the taxi aggregator has
associated with TVF on the second
season of Permanent Roommates.
T
hat was the good news.
Now the bad one. The
competitive landscape has
changed since Kumar started. His
USP—differentiated web content
for the youth—is no longer unique.
Online content creation companies
ScoopWhoop and Pocket Aces
started experimenting with web
series too in 2015. Also, albeit in a
different genre than TVF, comedy
collectives like East India Company
(EIC) and All India Bakchod
(AIB) have become synonymous
with edgy spoofs and satire.
“2014 was the year when a whole
lot of creators across genres like
comedy, beauty and food started to
emerge. Also, more smartphones were
getting sold, connectivity improved
and internet penetration increased,”
says Satya Raghavan, head of content
operations, YouTube India, Google.
Identifying the opportunity,
one of Bollywood’s biggest
production houses, Yash Raj
Films, too jumped onto the
bandwagon last year with
Y-Films, a subsidiary. Their
output, so far, includes Man’s
World, a satire on the battle
of the sexes, and Bang Baaja
Baaraat (BBB), a spoof on
Indian-style weddings, and
more recently, Love Shots,
six individual short films on
romance and relationships.
“It was a logical extension
for us to take our storytelling
equity built over decades
and stretch it to the web. It
also allows us to experiment
with genres, formats, test
fresh stories, talent, both
in front of the camera, and
behind,” says Ashish Patil,
business and creative head,
vice president, Youth Films,
Brand Partnerships, Talent
Management, Yash Raj Films.
Till recently, Patil adds,
their YouTube channel,
ashish Patil of yash raj Films
Y-Films, had just 18,000
houses can’t put a lot of money behind
subscribers, as the production house
a web series and hope it becomes
had not uploaded fresh content for
a hit. Here, you are as powerful as
more than four years. However, since
your content and the community
launching in September 2015, Patil
you have built,” claims Kumar. This,
claims the channel has got more
he believes, is his strong suit.
than 2.2 crore views, the subscriber
“I think TVF is really leading the
count has gone up 14 times and most
charge of this new form of content.
videos have watch-time retention
We are going to see a lot more web
of more than 90 percent, courtesy
series come up on the platform
their original digital content.
this year from a lot more creators,”
“It is no more candid camera
says Raghavan of YouTube India.
or vox pop. When we came in, we
brought in a certain cinematic vision
and production quality, which this
f Kumar’s idea was “to disrupt
medium deserves,” says Patil.
the consumption ecosystem,” he
The challenge for TVF, then, is
seems to have made a start. The
evident. But Kumar is unperturbed.
success, though, comes with caveats.
“More creators entering this space
“Today, because of so much clutter,
just gives validation to what we
original content will not be discovered
have been doing. And when people
and go viral. Content discovery is the
like YRF follow in our footsteps,
biggest problem,” says Kumar. In the
it is flattering,” he laughs.
‘Popular on YouTube’ section, original
He adds that the web is a
content remains as rare as in 2012 and
transparent medium, and is not
that is something which scares him.
distribution heavy. “Bigger production
To leverage their early mover
I
advantage, TVF has started
partnering with other, newer
content creators. The first of
such collaborations was with
Pocket Aces in December 2015.
TVF released an 11-episode
series called Not Fit on their
website. “The traction and
viewership of TVF provides
an opportunity to partner
with creators who fit the
TVF lens. At the same time,
we are very careful and
stingy about collaborating,
because it has to pass through
TVF’s filters,” he says.
The other cautionary
note from Kumar is on the
content creation process.
No matter how well one
designs a chair, he says, it
should be comfortable to sit
on. Similarly, while creating
content, one needs to respect
the method and the madness.
“If you don’t balance this,
you will fall off,” he warns.
The ‘me-too’ phenomenon
of trying to emulate successful
models is also confusing to him. “It
is not a business of commodities.
It is a cultural and intangible
product. You need to invest time
in it. And no amount of money
will take care of that,” he says.
This year, Kumar aims to give TVF
a proper corporate structure, which
it can do now, courtesy the fund
infusion. “We never had an HR head,
an accountant or even a peon. This
year, we want to get all these systems
in place,” he says. The new office
in Andheri, in suburban Mumbai,
which TVF moved into in January
this year, is a step in that direction.
But for the future, even though
digital is his touchstone, Kumar
admits he is unable to resist the
lure of the feature film. “That’s
where the ultimate power is—in
a theatrical release,” he says.
“When we say we will make an
Avengers in five years, we don’t
joke. We will actually make it.”
APRIL 15, 2016 FORBES INDIA | 57
EntErprisE
EazyDinEr
Book A Meal
Want to dine at a top restaurant? EazyDiner
helps you reserve a table in 30 seconds
By AngAd Singh ThAkur
F
or Deepak Shahdadpuri,
founder and managing
director of investment firm
DSG Consumer Partners,
organising lunch or dinner meetings
was a tedious task. Even though
the restaurant services industry
progressed by leaps and bounds since
he returned from Singapore in 2007,
the long-winding process of booking a
58 | FORBES INDIA APRIL 15, 2016
table over phone through his secretary
would often get his goat. As food tech
platforms mushroomed, he wished
there would also be an efficient table
reservation platform. “I assumed
someone would start and I thought it
would probably be Zomato,” he says.
It didn’t (not until 2015, when it
acquired US-based table reservation
platform NexTable and subsequently
launched Zomato Book). And,
“when you tried through a couple
of startups that claimed to offer the
service, you would often be asked
to email or call back to confirm”.
In early 2013, Shahdadpuri
struck up a conversation with Rohit
Dasgupta, deputy general manager of
the Oberoi Trident in Gurgaon. Over
the next few months, journalist and
food writer Vir Sanghvi, who was a
frequenter at the hotel, also joined in
the discussions. In June 2014, the sale
of OpenTable, the US-based online
reservation platform, to hotel booking
conglomerate, Priceline Group, for
a whopping $2.6 billion, reaffirmed
their convictions about a market for
a restaurant reservation platform in
India. On July 7, 2014, EazyDiner,
a techonology-enabled concierge
for booking tables, was born.
Explains Dasgupta, now the
chief operating officer (COO) of
the company: “We are an instant
table reservation platform. Thanks
to our allocated inventory in every
restaurant, you get a confirmation
in 30 seconds once you book
through an app.” The business
model is based on a commission
that restaurants pay on every
booking that the platform enables.
EazyDiner also offers a concierge
option in which you can book a table
Team Eazydiner (from left): Manish kutaula,
ruchika dhamija, rohit dasgupta, Sue reitz,
Sachin Pabreja and Shruti kaul
over phone. It is an old-fashioned way
of easing consumers into the habit
of making reservations. “If you want
to introduce a consumer behaviour
change, you need to make the change
comfortable,” says Dasgupta.
This is crucial as Sanghvi says,
“People in India are not used to
making reservations.” What makes it
worse, he says, is the fact that there
are only a handful of restaurants
in a city that need you to make
a reservation for. By offering an
inducement in the form of a discount
or a free beverage, the platform
incentivises the habit of booking a
table. These incentives come from the
restaurants themselves, for one simple
but oft-ignored reason: Restaurants
would prefer it if you called first.
“Reservations always help from
a planning point of view,” says Yash
Bhanage, COO and co-founder of
The Bombay Canteen in Mumbai.
“They help you plan your kitchen as
well as your service staff,” he adds.
Besides the concierge service, the
app uses predetermined inventory
from restaurants to enable instant
bookings. This is what, the founders
claim, differentiates them from
not only fly-by-night food tech
services, but also competitors like
Dineout (with 2,500 restaurants
on its platform). While, with 1,000
restaurants, EazyDiner is yet to catch
up with Dineout in terms of tie-ups, it
helps that EazyDiner’s founders are
industry insiders with a network that
runs deep in the hospitality sector.
Apart from Dasgupta and Sanghvi
RESTAURANTS
WOULD PREFER
IT IF YOU BOOKED
FIRST. EAZYDINER
EASES DINERS
INTO THE HABIT
(lead critic), the founding team
at EazyDiner consists of Sachin
Pabreja and Shruti Kaul, both of
whom have extensive experience in
the hospitality sector. Sue Reitz, an
industry veteran, is the managing
director. The startup also boasts
an enviable ‘advisory board’ with
some of Indian hospitality’s most
recognisable names, including Oberoi
Group’s joint MD and CEO Vikram
Oberoi, as well as Dinesh Nair, cochairman & managing director of the
Leela Palaces, Hotels and Resorts.
Dasgupta says the team’s
background has allowed it to partner
with restaurants in a way that makes
them feel comfortable. Says Riyaaz
Amlani of Impresario, also the
president of the National Restaurant
Association of India, “It’s an
interesting startup and I think it’s also
run primarily by restaurateurs and
hoteliers rather than just tech people.”
The results of this integration
are now beginning to show. This
February, 20,000 diners used
EazyDiner as opposed to 357 about a
year ago. Last August, the company
raised $3 million in a series-A round
from DSG Consumer Partners and
Saama Capital. With this, EazyDiner
hopes to expand its operations from
four cities—Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru
and Pune—to 12 by the end of this year.
Perhaps the most noticeable feature
of the platform is a crisp, informative
expert review of restaurants. The
fact that they are written by a team
of journalists led by Sanghvi lends
credibility. “The idea was to do the
equivalent of a journalistic website
on food. These were the kind of
articles that would be found in a
magazine that would try to explain
what food was, how to order wine,
and try to offer tips,” says Sanghvi.
As more and more Indians eat out,
EazyDiner is making a concerted
effort to create a better environment
for diners. Besides getting diners
to book a table, that is.
APRIL 15, 2016 FORBES INDIA | 59
CROSS BORDER
QualCOmm
Bad Reception
Qualcomm is coming off a miserable year.
Don’t expect a miraculous rebound anytime soon
phOtOgRaph By ROBERt gallaghER fOR fORBES; StEvE mOllEnkOpf wEaRS a ShiRt
By JOhn w. nORDStROm anD Suit By hiCkEy fREEman. CREativE StylE DiRECtOR: JOSEph
DEaCEtiS; gROOming: gERinE COROnaDO
S
teve Mollenkopf had one of
those years in 2015 you don’t
want to relive anytime soon.
The CEO of Qualcomm,
the San Diego semiconductor firm
with technology in most high-end
smartphones, lost Samsung as a
customer for the year, had difficulty
collecting licensing royalties from
China’s emerging smartphone giants,
dealt with rumours that its top-ofthe-line chips were overheating
and narrowly escaped an effort
to break up the company from
activist hedge fund Jana Partners.
Revenue for the year fell 5 percent
to $25.3 billion, and net income
dropped 34 percent to $5.3 billion.
Since Mollenkopf took over as CEO
two years ago from Paul Jacobs, the
son of Qualcomm co-founder Irwin
Jacobs, the stock is down nearly
32 percent—erasing more than $42
billion in value—with most of that
loss happening over the last year.
“The company is 31 years old, and
I’ve been here for 21 of those years,”
says Mollenkopf, leaning back in
his office chair on a typical sunny
day in San Diego late last year. “For
the first 29 of those years, there’s
been almost infinite growth in the
handset business. That market has
really dominated our business.”
Except now the market isn’t
growing like it used to. Industry
volumes rose 13 percent last year,
down from 24 percent in 2014. All
the high-end Android phonemakers
(read: Qualcomm’s biggest customers)
such as Samsung, LG, Sony and
HTC faced severe slowdowns,
60 | FORBES INDIA APRIL 15, 2016
By aaron tilley
Steve Mollenkopf took
over the top job at
Qualcomm just as the
smartphone market
hit the growth wall
and the only company making a
substantial profit in smartphones is
Apple, which buys less expensive
components from Qualcomm.
Ups and downs are part of
Qualcomm’s history. Every time
wireless technology has made a
generational leap—from analog to
digital, and then from 3G to LTE—
Qualcomm rode the lucrative updraft
because its patents covered much of
the key intellectual property behind
each new stage of cellular technology.
Mollenkopf oversaw crucial aspects
of many of these transitions. He
led its chip business during the 4G
launch and was president and COO
when the company rolled out its
Snapdragon processors. “People
were saying Qualcomm was a onetrick pony,” Mollenkopf says. “I
think we proved them wrong.” But
after each transition played out,
Qualcomm often lost momentum.
The next big transition, from LTE
to fifth-generation wireless (5G),
won’t be under way until 2020.
Qualcomm appears to be winning
some Samsung business back in
certain markets with the next version
of Snapdragon, but the damage
has been done. In abandoning
Qualcomm, Samsung proved it was
perfectly capable of building its
own high-end smartphone chip for
Western markets. “Qualcomm has
the best mobile chips in the world,
but the gap with the competition is
getting narrower,” says Bernstein
Research analyst Stacy Rasgon.
Mollenkopf, referred to by
his colleagues as “cerebral” and
“professorial”, has been taking
some steps to get Qualcomm off
the smartphone roller coaster.
He’s focusing his executives on
attacking new markets: Anand
Chandrasekher for servers, Patrick
Little for automotive and Raj
Talluri for drones and internetconnected devices, such as lightbulbs,
thermostats and watches. The mobile
chip division also received its own
reshuffle: Mollenkopf got rid of the
confusing co-president structure by
promoting Cristiano Amon as sole
president late last year—and demoted
Murthy Renduchintala, who was
promptly snatched up by Intel for
a major new executive position.
Ten years ago Qualcomm’s CEO
could count on his fingers and toes
the customers that mattered—maybe
a couple dozen cellphone makers
and telecom networking companies.
These days Mollenkopf has to talk
with CEOs in every major consumerproduct category. “We have the
technology that these companies
need. We just have to figure out how
SINCE
MOLLENKOPF
TOOK OVER AS
CEO TWO YEARS
AGO THE STOCK
IS DOWN NEARLY
32 PERCENT
to fan out to 15 different industries
trying to take advantage of that,”
Mollenkopf says. “Not unlike with
the military, you need a huge army
to go after land forces, and you need
submarines and ships to focus on
new markets. That’s essentially what
I’m doing with the company.”
In 2014, selling chips outside
the handset industry, Qualcomm
grossed about $1 billion, or 5 percent
of its semiconductor products
business (which generates roughly
two-thirds of its total revenue).
Mollenkopf expects that share will
rise to 10 percent this year, or $1.7
billion. The auto segment has begun
bearing fruit with the announcement
that 2017 Audi vehicles will come
equipped with Qualcomm chips to
power their infotainment systems.
But none of these new markets can
deliver smartphone-like volumes. The
car industry sold 80 million vehicles
globally in 2014, compared with
1.5 billion phones sold. Consumer
drones was a 400,000-unit industry
in 2015, according to CEA Research.
Bernstein’s Rasgon still worries
that the executive team is in
denial. Management has guided
its earnings estimates below Wall
Street consensus in 11 of the last 12
quarters. The overall semiconductor
industry is slowing and consolidating,
and most of Qualcomm’s peers have
turned quickly to buying their way
to growth. The chip industry had
$145 billion in M&A deals in 2015,
up from $46 billion the year before,
according to Dealogic. Some of
the biggest included a $40 billion
merger of NXP and Freescale,
Avago Technologies’ $38 billion
purchase of Broadcom, and Intel’s
$16.7 billion acquisition of Altera.
Qualcomm? It paid $2.4 billion
in August for CSR, a market leader
in Bluetooth radio chips for cars.
“Qualcomm’s head has been in the
sand until recently about the nature
of the situation,” Rasgon says. “Steve
and the entire management delayed
the recognition of structural shifts
in the market. They got fat, dumb
and happy.” With the company
share price at $45, Rasgon still
isn’t sure it has hit rock bottom.
Qualcomm is getting more
serious about dealmaking, hiring
Brian Modoff from Deutsche Bank
Securities to run M&A, reporting
directly to Mollenkopf. But Modoff
is likely to find there aren’t a lot
of juicy takeover targets left.
“Our culture is one of change
and exploration,” Mollenkopf says.
“In our 30-year history, these are
probably among the hardest problems
we’ve had to solve. That being said, I
think we’ve gotten through them.”
APRIL 15, 2016 FORBES INDIA | 61
Forbes IndIa leadershIp serIes
Value-drIVen leadershIp
The Value-led Approach:
Tough but Essential
Deepak Parekh and NR Narayana Murthy
talk about their organisational principles
N
o longer is valuebased organisational
behaviour an interesting
philosophical choice. It
is a requisite for survival, say Ken
Blanchard and Michael O’Connor in
their book Managing by Values. In fact,
every industry statesman will affirm
that leadership centred around values
is inevitable for the building of a legacy.
By Gunjan jain
However, it is no easy task
to establish and run businesses
along strictly ethical lines, given
the uncertain socio-political and
economic times we live in. Also,
there is no fixed prescription
for value-driven leadership.
This column features two of the
most respected names in business—
Deepak Parekh, the veteran of
financial services who steadily
and surely raised HDFC Ltd to the
foremost levels of banking in India;
and NR Narayana Murthy, founder
of Infosys and father of the Indian IT
sector. Both were pioneers in their
respective businesses when they
started off more than three decades
ago and leave behind legacies that are
the stuff of academic case studies.
‘IT IS ESSENTIAL TO BUILD AN ORGANISATION
WITH THE AIM OF CREATING A LEGACY’
Deepak Parekh
Chairman, HDFC
Q Your grandfather and father
were both bankers. What are the
value-driven leadership traits that
you have inherited? Have these
values stood you in good stead?
I learnt the important trait of
humility. One needs to stay
approachable and accessible to one’s
people. I have imbibed the principle
of putting faith in people. To grow
professionally and personally, it is
critical to trust everyone at least once,
as trust is the basic courtesy you can
extend towards another human being.
For example, when HDFC
ventured into other areas of
financial services such as banking
and insurance, we selected capable
62 | FORBES INDIA APRIL 15, 2016
people to run these subsidiaries.
We provided them with the
broad guidelines but also gave
them a free hand. The nonobstructive approach empowered
the managers to independently
take decisions, be accountable and
also ensure that the brand name of
HDFC stays intact. Today, these
subsidiaries are doing well and have
created value for stakeholders.
Q What are the core values in
building a reputable organisation?
It is essential to build an organisation
with the aim of creating a legacy. It
is a painstaking effort created over
many years. It is not about a single
individual or a visionary leader in
isolation. The legacy needs to reflect
the ethos of the institution and of
the people who are able to replicate
that ethos in their sphere of work.
An organisation needs to be built on
the principles of fairness, kindness,
efficiency and effectiveness.
For an organisation to grow,
one needs to make sure that
the employees grow with it.
For instance, although HDFC
employees do not have the best pay
scales, all of them are rewarded
with stock options. When the
company does well, it reflects in
the net worth of the employees.
Q What are the challenges
leaders face in adhering to
their values because of the
‘clean business approach’?
How would an entrepreneur
tackle such a situation?
I am well aware that by taking the
clean path, an organisation is often
Deepak Parekh believes an organisation must be built on fairness, kindness, efficiency and effectiveness
companies that have demonstrated
an impeccable record of prospering
without the need to grease palms.
Investors today rate companies on
ethical practices and governance
standards. Hence, the only way to
prosper in the long term is to have
zero tolerance for corruption.
Q Could you tell us an anecdote
when your core values were
severely put to test and how
you overcame the situation?
One incident that comes to my mind
is the handling of the Satyam crisis,
which took place in 2009. Working
on Satyam was undisputedly one
of the hardest and most daunting
challenges, but all the governmentappointed directors, including
myself, unanimously agreed that
this experience was by far the most
APRIL 15, 2016 FORBES INDIA | 63
photographs: getty Images
tested in its resolve to stand by its
moral fortitude. Good ethics are easy
when fortune smiles. But character
is tested when pressure mounts and
uncertainty prevails. Warren Buffett
has aptly said, “When the tide runs
out, you can see who is swimming
naked.” It is indeed possible to
abide by an ethical approach and
the rewards do bear fruit in the long
run. There are several examples of
Forbes IndIa leadershIp serIes
Value-drIVen leadershIp
rewarding. We realised that many
Satyam employees had suddenly
become the hapless victims of
unfortunate circumstances. We
were driven by an inner conscience,
backed by considerations that were
non-monetary. India is considered
to be the back office of the world
and hence the crisis at Satyam
had the potential to dampen the
entire IT industry. Motivated by a
nation’s cause, we were able to effect
awareness about how vigilance,
integrity and regulation pay to uphold
corporate governance values and
ethics in doing business. Moreover,
the crux of this experience was that
we took quick decisions and solved
the crisis within three months.
Q What are the most important
qualities in a business leader? And
how can these qualities or values
be codified in an organisation?
It is imperative to have moral
courage by sticking to your
beliefs; a leader needs to pursue
a course of action even in the
face of overwhelming criticism
and great adversity. This kind of
courage is always in short supply.
Authenticity is a key trait required
in a leader. Other qualities can be
picked up based on experience and
situations. As a leader, it is unlikely
that you will be able to inspire, arouse,
excite or motivate people unless you
can show what you stand for and
reveal that you are willing to learn.
Be fair to colleagues and friends.
The ability to judge well is often
linked to an ability to mix with,
and learn from, other people.
In an organisation, the value
system has to percolate down to all
the employees. This can only come
about by demonstration, which
starts at the top. Therefore, the
senior management must make it a
point to interact with all employees,
thereby constantly reinforcing the
organisational culture. How leaders
behave will always reflect in how
the rest of the employees behave.
64 | FORBES INDIA APRIL 15, 2016
‘THE SOFTEST PILLOW IS
A CLEAR CONSCIENCE’
NR Narayana Murthy
Founder, Infosys
Q What is the value system you
infused into Infosys, which has
powered its sustainable growth?
When we founded Infosys we said
we want to be the most-respected
company in India; later, when we
got listed on the stock exchanges,
we said we want to be one of the
most respected companies in the
world. We also realised that seeking
respect from stakeholders is the
best way to increase your revenues,
your profitability and attract the best
employees and the best investors;
and we also said being respectable in
the eyes of society is very important
“BECAUSE WE
[INFOSYS] STUCK
TO OUR VALUES,
MORE CUSTOMERS,
GOOD EMPLOYEES
AND GOOD
INVESTORS CAME.”
in everything we do). I believe
that CLIFE has had a tremendous
impact on our employees.
Q How did you imbibe these
values in the company?
nR narayana
Murthy says
leaders of an
entrepreneurial
team must lead
by example
because society contributes customers,
employees, investors, bureaucrats,
politicians and vendor partners.
Later, around 1995, we said we
want to define our value system as
a short acronym so that every one
of our employees can remember
it easily, can articulate its value
easily, and also practice it. So we
came up with ‘CLIFE’ (C: Customer
focus; L: Leadership by example;
I: Integrity and transparency; F:
Fairness in everything we do with
every other person; and E: Excellence
We believe that the best way to help
our young people accept our value
system is by the leaders practising
these values and, thereby, leading by
example. That’s why I am a follower
of Mahatma Gandhi, who said: “You
must be the change you want to see
in the world.” For example, focus on
customer, integrity, transparency,
fairness in every transaction
with everybody, and excellence
in execution; that’s the first step.
Second thing we did was to create
an acronym that is catchy and that
is easy for people to remember and
practice. We conducted a workshop
with employees and we arrived at
these values. These became part of
the induction programme that we
have for all entrants. We also have
the concept of a value champion
in the company. We honour the
value champion once a year.
Q Could you share an anecdote
when your ethics were being tested
but you chose to stand firm?
In February 1984, when we imported
our first computer system, the customs
officer in Bangalore (now Bengaluru)
refused to accept the concession duty
certificate given by the Department
of Electronics, Government of India.
Obviously, he wanted us to pay a
bribe. And so, instead of 25 percent
duty, he made us pay 150 percent duty,
an extra Rs 20-30 lakh. And it took
us 10 to 12 years to get it back from
the department. From then onwards
we had no trouble with customs
people because they understood
that we will not give them a bribe.
Q How did these experiences
strengthen your resolve to be
committed to your values?
I always believed that the softest
pillow is a clear conscience and when
you have a clear conscience you have
a sense of achievement, of confidence,
of moral satisfaction. Therefore,
everybody becomes that much more
enthusiastic and energetic to work
harder, to add greater value for our
stakeholders. It creates a positive
spiral and that is very important for
us to be more successful. Therefore,
that’s how our resolve was reinforced;
because we stuck to our values, more
and more customers came, more
and more good employees came and
more and more good investors came.
Q For any team that is about to
start a business, what are the
parameters it should check before
closing in on the core team?
I was fortunate that all the people I
chose were working with me, and I
had assessed them for a year or so. I
knew they were decent and honest;
they were hard working. I also knew
they were ready to make sacrifices
in the short- and medium term. So
it was somewhat easy for me.
But, when entrepreneurs want to
bring people they don’t know, I
would say those people will have
to hold a detailed discussion and
perhaps think of certain situations
and then see how each of them would
react. Second, if team members
fail to live up to their values, they
should be asked to leave. Thirdly,
the leader of an entrepreneurial
team must lead by example.
Gunjan Jain is an author, with her first
book She Walks She Leads due
for release in April 2016.
APRIL 15, 2016 FORBES INDIA | 65
CRoss boRDeR
esRi
The Godfather
of Digital Cartography
It’s been five decades since Jack Dangermond started Esri,
and we’re still discovering ways that his maps can reshape the world
RobeRt GallaGheR FoR FoRbes
By miguel helft
66 | FORBES INDIA aprIl 15, 2016
O
n the last Friday in January,
Los Angeles Mayor Eric
Garcetti gathered in front
of a group of reporters and
government officials to unveil his city’s
latest tech initiative: GeoHub, a digital
mapping portal aimed at reinventing
how LA delivers services. Maps, of
course, are vital tools of municipal
business everywhere, be it in planning,
transportation, public safety, public
works, economic development
A man Bill gates calls
“one of a kind”: Jack
Dangermond, co-founder
of mapping-software
giant esri, in his office in
Redlands, California
and more. But for the first time a
major city had built a real-time
digital dashboard that would allow
anyone—city workers, the public,
NGOs, startups, the media—to access
and mash up those maps. Garcetti
described how after an earthquake
a firefighter equipped with an iPad
might immediately be able to find
fire hydrants, sewer lines, electrical
equipment, building infrastructure
and the location of other emergency
responders. Similarly, an NGO
providing homeless services might
see how encampment locations are
affected by police activity or liquor
store openings. GeoHub, Garcetti
said, would help to “improve the
quality of life” in Los Angeles. He
then moved aside to make way
for the man who built GeoHub:
Jack Dangermond, a lanky whitehaired 70-year-old billionaire who
is the unlikeliest of tech moguls.
These days Google Maps has
become part of modern life, getting
you from here to there efficiently,
pinpointing the location of your Uber.
But long before Google was born—
even before its founders were born—it
was Dangermond who essentially
invented the digital map. Esri, the
company he founded with his wife,
Laura, in 1969, has toiled in relative
obscurity to become one of the more
improbable powerhouses in tech,
having survived wrenching shifts in
computing that destroyed scores of
its fellow tech pioneers. Dangermond
deftly adapted Esri software over
the years, from minicomputers to
workstations and then to PCs, the
internet, the cloud and mobile devices.
Esri, which is still privately held by
the Dangermonds, had $1.1 billion in
sales in 2014, and Forbes estimates its
value at $3 billion. “He kind of created
the industry,” says John Hanke, who
for six years led Google’s mapping
efforts. Products like Google Earth,
Google Maps and Google Street
View, Hanke says, “were built on
the shoulders of what he created.”
Hanke would know. As he
cemented Google dominance in
maps, he helped to create what many
thought was the biggest existential
threat Esri ever faced. But as Google
aimed its maps mostly at consumers,
Esri was able to hold on to its revenue
base among power users in business,
government and other organisations.
Google is great for directions or
locating your home on Zillow. But
if you are, say, the Bavarian police
charged with securing the G7 Summit
near Munich and need a detailed
real-time dashboard that can pinpoint
every delegation, police officer,
emergency vehicle, first responder,
protest site, road closure, mountain
trail and access point to the summit’s
venue, you’ll use Esri. Last year
Google pulled the plug on a halfhearted push into enterprise maps and
began moving its customers to Esri.
Esri owns more than half of the
market for so-called GIS (short for
“geographic information systems”)
software, and its technology is used
around the world by some 350,000
businesses, government agencies
and NGOs, which collectively create
150 million new maps every day.
Customers include the White House,
FEMA and the US Geological Survey;
virtually every city and county in the
US and scores of them overseas; oil
and gas firms; retailers and utilities;
and environmental groups. UPS used
Esri’s maps as part of an initiative to
make its routing more efficient, which
is helping to save more than $300
million annually. Walgreens is using
Esri technology to choose locations for
new stores, track the flu and decide
where its beauty products should
expand next. And NGOs, including the
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,
have used Esri to help lead campaigns
against malaria and ebola in Africa.
“One of the areas of technology that
has gone further than I ever expected
is mapping,” Microsoft co-founder
aprIl 15, 2016 FORBES INDIA | 67
CRoss boRDeR esRi
Bill Gates told Forbes in an email.
“And we have Jack Dangermond to
thank, in large part, for his pioneering
efforts of almost 50 years.” Gates
added: “He’s one of a kind.”
In many ways Esri is the original
tech “unicorn”, but its ascent to
the billion-dollar club is virtually
unrecognisable by today’s norms.
Dangermond never took outside
financing, and other than a $5,000
loan from his mother in the early
days, Esri never borrowed money.
It has been profitable since day one.
“Venture capital can be attractive,
but it comes at an enormous cost,”
Dangermond says during an interview
in his office. “You have to buy into
someone else’s vision.” Over the
years Dangermond has rebuffed
acquisition offers and believes the
choice to remain private has paid
off handsomely and allowed him
to avoid the short-term pressures
of the stock market. While the
company has let go of employees,
it never had cost-cutting layoffs.
Dangermond was raised in
Redlands, California, a town of
roughly 25,000 at the time, about 60
miles east of Los Angeles. His father
was a gardener who had emigrated
from Holland, and his mother was a
maid. They started a plant nursery,
partly to earn enough to send their
five kids to college. Dangermond
met his future wife, Laura, in high
school, and the two went together
to Cal Poly, where Dangermond
studied environmental science and
landscape architecture. After they
married, Dangermond went to the
University of Minnesota to study
urban design and in 1968 to Harvard,
in part for the opportunity to work
in a lab that combined computer
graphics and spatial analysis and
whose members had developed some
of the first mapping software. “I had
some notion of applying computer
mapping to my profession,” he says,
“but frankly I was just very excited
by the technology and curious
how it could be made useful.”
68 | FORBES INDIA aprIl 15, 2016
The Dangermonds moved back
to Redlands and started what was
then called the Environmental
Systems Research Institute. It
began as a consulting firm inspired
by the Harvard lab, and comprised
the Dangermonds, a part-time
programmer, a data specialist and a
secretary. As the sizes of his contracts
grew, Dangermond started building
generic tools with capabilities to allow
his clients to do their own mapping
and analytics. Esri shipped its first
product in 1982. “Our whole business
changed,” Dangermond says. That
product, ArcGIS, is still Esri’s flagship.
Today 2,300 of its 3,500
employees work at the Redlands
campus, much of it landscaped by
the Dangermonds. With no other
significant tech company in the
“THERE’S BEEN
AN EXPLOSION
OF PEOPLE
WHO THINK IN
GEOSPATIAL
TERMS.”
area, its culture is definitely quirky.
Employees are paid hourly, which
Dangermond says most employees
like, as it gives them flexibility. Some
employees, who spoke on condition
of anonymity, bristled at that notion.
Many employees have been there
for decades, but some say workers
who don’t fit in get spit out quickly.
There are few of the perks of Silicon
Valley: Even Dangermond pays for
his own meals at the cafeteria.
The best place to understand Esri’s
global impact is not in Redlands
but in San Diego, where it holds its
customer conference every summer.
Last year’s gathering was in July, and
as Dangermond took the stage at a
packed San Diego Convention Center,
it was clear this was his event: He was
keynote speaker, host and emcee. The
audience of 16,000—roughly triple
the crowd that assembles for Apple’s
World Wide Developer Conference
or Google’s I/O event—hailed from
Sweden, South Korea, Idaho, Indiana,
Botswana and Brazil, all of them there
to hear a man they uniformly consider
a legend. Dangermond invited
guests onstage to evangelise about
the power of Esri’s software to fight
disease, streamline decision making
and respond to natural disasters. The
year’s theme was “applying geography
everywhere”, and time and again
Dangermond told his rapt audience
some version of “We are entering a
period of geographic enlightenment.”
Heady stuff, to be sure, but its
meaning is more prosaic. Maps, once
the domain of specialists, are being
democratised in the cloud-connected
era, and Esri’s software is starting
to spread far more widely inside
organisations. Walgreens has been
using Esri since 2000 to decide where
to open new stores but in the past few
years has released its custom-built
WalMap to employees so they can
check on store-by-store sales, market
share and competitor locations.
Walgreens increased the number of
internal users of its mapping apps
tenfold in the past few years, says
Jillian Elder, director of enterprise
location intelligence. At Stanford
University, researchers in virtually
every field are increasingly using
Esri tools to, for example, predict
the impact of global warming on
butterflies in Madagascar or study
the incidence of certain cancers near
Superfund sites. “There’s been an
explosion of people who think of their
research in geospatial terms,” says
Julie Sweetkind-Singer, Stanford’s
assistant director of Geospatial,
Cartographic and Scientific Data &
Services. Examples like that have
Dangermond bullish that a lot more
people are seeing things his way. He
describes the opportunity succinctly:
“Over the next five to 10 years we can
grow this an order of magnitude.”
Cross borDer
Jason Myers for forbes
The republiC of Tea
eschewing debt,
ron rubin says,
allowed him to
grow during
recession
The Zentrepreneur
With American tea consumption soaring, Ron Rubin’s company,
The Republic of Tea, could be worth $125 million. He says he’s not selling
By Stacy Perman
S
itting amid a slew of colourful
tea canisters, Ron Rubin,
executive chairman of The
Republic of Tea, hits the
delete button on his computer. Then
Rubin hits it again and again, going
through his regular ritual of dismissing
the many emails he receives from
private equity firms and investment
banks, most expressing interest in
70 | FORBES INDIA APRIL 15, 2016
acquiring his specialty tea company.
“My answer is no answer,” he says.
It’s easy to see why many find
the company alluring. American
tea consumption is taking off, with
domestic sales jumping from $2 billion
in 1990 to nearly $11 billion in 2014,
according to the Tea Association of
the USA. In 2012, Starbucks acquired
Teavana, which had revenues of $168.1
million and 300-plus salons, for $620
million. “We believe the tea category is
ripe for reinvention and rapid growth,”
said Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz at
the time. And last summer, Montrealbased DavidsTea went public with
revenues of $142 million. On its first
day of trading, the stock rose 42 percent
above its offering price, giving the
company a valuation of $634 million.
Rubin has been told other specialty
tea companies are selling for more
than five times revenue, so The
Republic of Tea, which topped $25
million in revenue in 2015, could
be worth as much as $125 million.
But he says he’s not interested in
selling. An effusive 66-year-old, he
recently doubled down on keeping
his company independent, executing
a plan to turn over the reins to his
son Todd, 35. “I wanted this not only
to remain a family business but also
a generational business,” says Ron,
who has started a new venture, a
Sonoma winery, and adds that he
considers himself a “zentrepreneur”,
explaining, “An entrepreneur
creates a business; a zentrepreneur
creates a business and a life.”
Rubin purchased The Republic
of Tea in 1994, when it was just two
years old, from a group of owners,
including Mel and Patricia Ziegler,
who had also founded (and sold)
Banana Republic. Under Rubin,
Republic promoted the complex and
artisanal characteristics of tea as if it
were wine. Combing the tea-growing
regions of the world for high-quality
leaves, the company helped create a
designer niche, introducing more than
300 then-exotic brews like Ginger
Peach, Milk Oolong and Double Green
Matcha. He also imbued the company
with his idiosyncratic corporate
sensibility. Both the corporate
headquarters in Novato, California,
and its warehouse, packing and
distribution facility in a nondescript
industrial stretch of Nashville,
Illinois, were designed by a feng
shui master and filled with soothing
colours, curved walls, fountains and
meditative spaces. Within those
curved walls, employees are known
as ministers, retail partners as
embassies and consumers as citizens.
When Rubin acquired The Republic
of Tea, his biggest customer was the
Nature Company, a national retailer
that represented more than 30 percent
of his business. Less than a year later,
the retailer dropped the account. After
that he sought to diversify clients,
and he has refrained from building
The Republic of Tea salons and from
going after mass supermarkets like
Walmart or Kroger or offering privatelabel sales. And he has no interest in
expanding internationally. “I imagine
there is millions of dollars of revenue
in all that,” he says. Instead, he has
stayed in the specialty universe and
focussed on the company’s customer
base of 10,000 domestic channels,
including Whole Foods. “We want to
do more business with the customers
we have versus going out and
getting more customers,” he says.
RON RUBIN HAS
NO INTEREST
IN EXPANDING
GLOBALLY. HE
HAS STAYED IN
THE SPECIALTY
UNIVERSE
Rubin’s scepticism of growth
is rooted in his aversion to debt, a
lesson he took from working in his
father’s wine and liquor distribution
business in Mount Vernon, Illinois.
When Rubin bought The Republic of
Tea 22 years ago, he borrowed seven
figures—he won’t disclose the exact
amount—but he proudly recites that it
took him “six years, three months and
15 days” to pay off the loan: “I decided
then that I wanted to remain debtfree and expand within the resources
that come in from our sales.”
Not taking on debt, Rubin says,
has allowed him to sleep better.
And during the Great Recession,
when other firms laid off workers
and froze product development,
he hired additional regional
managers, increased warehouse
space and continued to develop
new offerings. As a result, he says,
“we maintained our growth”.
Rubin has always hoped his
company would remain family-owned
and private. While Todd grew up
in the business, he initially chose
to pursue architecture. Then, nine
years ago, when the job as East Coast
regional sales manager opened up, he
emailed his father about the position.
“I was sitting in my chair,” says Ron,
“and it just about knocked me off.”
Ron insisted that Todd interview,
take aptitude tests and start in sales.
“My dad told me I had to learn the
business first,” says Todd, “and to do
that I had to learn sales and listen to
our customers.” Early on, Todd had
some misgivings. He was landing
in a company without any business
experience, in some cases leading
employees who were twice his age
and whom he had known since
childhood. But his concerns eased
over time as he managed two of the
firm’s biggest clients: Panera Bread
and Whole Foods. He also brought in
new clients such as Williams-Sonoma
before moving into marketing and
management at the firm’s California
headquarters, where he began to
assist with strategic planning.
Last May, the Rubins concluded
the time had come. With the help
of Robert Lefton, a St Louis-based
consultant, they completed a
36-month succession plan ten months
early. “What I see a lot of times
is that a business elevates the son
or daughter too fast,” says Lefton.
“Oftentimes they feel it’s demeaning
for a child to sell, so they make them a
VP and put them in the area they like
the most. Ron doesn’t think that way.”
While Todd is eager to make his
own mark, he says he has no interest
in upending his father’s vision,
which means remaining debt-free
and continuing to hit delete when
those acquisition inquiries arrive.
APRIL 15, 2016 FORBES INDIA | 71
Media
& Marketing
Gloria Ai, 29 China
Founder & host, iAsk Media
Samyak Chakrabarty, 27 India
Cofounder & managing director,
Social Quotient
Sylvia Chan, Ryan Tan, 28, 27
Singapore
Cofounders, Night Owl Cinematics
Chan Yi Wen, 25 Singapore
Cofounder, Bolt Media
Grace Chen, 27 China
Founder & CEO, Jiecao
Harry Dewhirst 28 Singapore
Director & president, BlisMedia
Blair Ding, 24 China
Cofounder & CEO, Jeehom Media
Yoshinori Fukushima, 28 Japan
Cofounder & CEO, Gunosy
Advait Gupt & Akshat Gupt, 29,
25 India
Cofounders, Supari Studios
Ian Ishida, 26 Japan
Founder & CEO, Trippiece
Lee Seung-yoon, 25 South Korea
Cofounder & CEO, Byline/Radish
Li Yan, 25 China
CEO, WeMedia Group
Liu Chengcheng, 27 China
Founder & CEO, 36Kr
Muniba Mazari, 28 Pakistan
Anchor, PTV
Sattvik Mishra, 28 India
Cofounder & CEO,
ScoopWhoop Media
Ayataro Nakagawa, 27 Japan
Founder & CEO, Peroli
EditEd by Rana WEhbE
and John Koppisch
Introducing 300 of the
region’s brightest young
stars—all under 30 years
old. Our correspondents
have been on the hunt for
precocious entrepreneurs,
tomorrow’s most promising leaders and other talents who are challenging
convention. They found
hundreds of candidates
from every corner of AsiaPacific. We grouped them
into ten categories, and
then outside judges made
the final selection of 30
people for each. The result is a field guide to who
is changing the face of
the region, both now and
for decades to come.
72 | FORBES INDIA APRIL 15, 2016
Tim Pointer, 27 New Zealand
Cofounder & managing director,
Uprise Digital
Suchita Salwan, 25 India
Founder & CEO, Little Black Book
Delhi
Rika Shiiki, 18 Japan
President, AMF (Appreciation,
Modesty and Full-power)
Kunikazu Suzuki, 27 Japan
Founder, Japan Political Press
Jianhao Tan, 22 Singapore
Founder & director, The
Jianhaotan
Tran Duc Viet, 24 Vietnam
YouTuber, JVevermind
Lindy Tsang, 29 Hong Kong
YouTuber, Bubzbeauty
Vuki Vujasinovic 29 Australia
Founder & managing director,
Sling & Stone
Wang Ziru, 27 China
Founder, Zealer
Xie Tiandi, 29 China
Cofounder & general manager,
Leiphone
Michelle Yuan, 27 Hong Kong
Founder & CEO,
Asia Wedding Network
Alex Zhang, 23 China
Founder, Xiaoshijie
Margaret Zhang, 22 Australia
Blogger & founder, Shine By Three
JudgEs:
Tom Doctoroff, CEO APAC,
J Walter Thompson
Steven Gan, editor-in-chief,
Malaysiakini
Kate Waterhouse, fashion and
lifestyle blogger
Chris Chan, 28,
Brian Yu, 27, Derek
Chan, 29
FouNDeRS, 9GAG HoNG KoNG
VIrgIle BerTrAnd FOr FOrBes
When some University of Hong Kong students
couldn’t find a platform where they could share
jokes, they decided to start their own. They launched
9GAG in 2008, and now the social media website
boasts 26 million followers on Instagram, 29 million
fans on Facebook and 6 million followers on Twitter.
Some 100 million people visit it each month. “Give
people the power to share and make the world happier,” states the company’s mission. The five founders—the other two are over 30, and one of them is
Chris Chan’s brother—believe that if users are happy
they are likely to stick around. “I just like the idea of
9GAG,” Yu says. “I spend a lot of time looking at pictures. I don’t want a job looking at regular products
that are not very interesting.”
They’ve raised $2.8 million in venture capital and
oversee 25 employees working in Tsuen Wan in the
New Territories. The founders say it’s here for the
long term. “It’s like when Jack Ma said he wanted to
build a company that would last 100 years,” Chris
Chan says. —Amanda Lee
LeanDro Leviste, 22
FouNDeR, SoLAR PHILIPPINeS PHILIPPINeS
Between his second and third years studying politics at Yale, Leviste
spotted an opportunity back home. Electricity rates in the Philippines
are among the highest in Asia, and Leviste was convinced that solar
power could bring them down. He invested his savings to set up Solar
Philippines in 2013. “In terms of innovation, solar power is nothing new,”
he says, adding that it’s more important to find a business model that
works. Solar Philippines buys its panels from different suppliers and
then provides its customers with financing, engineering and installation.
The Manila native graduated in 2014, and that same year Bank of
the Philippine Islands gave the company its first $1-million loan, to install
a 700-kilowatt solar rooftop power plant at Central Mall of Biñan City.
Now Solar Philippines, with 200 employees, has received $100 million
in backing from local banks, and in January it completed the largest
solar farm on Luzon, a $150-million, 63-megawatt project. The company
generated $125 million in revenue last year, and Leviste says it expects
to hit $750 million this year. Turning 23 last month (March), he says: “My
generation looks at how Silicon Valley is changing the world and sees
business as the best way of making an impact at scale.” —AL
Manufacturing
& Energy
Richa Bajpai & Abhishek Humbad,
28, 28 India
Cofounders, NextGen PMS
Victor Chan, 29 China
Managing director, Daming Group
Lu Yingying, 27 China
Tenure-track professor,
Zhejiang University
Chiu-Hao (Ted) Chen, 25 Singapore
Cofounder, EverComm Uni-Tech
Singapore
Chinmay Malaviya, 25 India
Cofounder & vice president,
Foodpanda
Dhairya Dand, 26 India
Principal, oDD
Aimee Marks, 29 Australia
Founder & CEO, TOM Organic
Arpit Dave & Mohit Kumar, 23, 26
India
Cofounders, Roadrunnr
Wyatt Roy, 25 Australia
Assistant minister for innovation,
Australian government
Willson Deng, 29 Singapore
Cofounder & CEO, Arcstone
Chika Tsubouchi, 29 Japan
President, Ghibli
Rifeng Gao, ernest Sim, Isaac Tan,
Yi Sung Yong, 26, 28, 27, 27 Singapore
Cofounders, Grain
Wang Yang, 25 China
Founder & CEO, YunMai
Mathew Jose, 28 India
Founder & CEO, Paperman
Simon Ko, 22 Taiwan
Cofounder & CEO, Flux
Reeve Kwan, 27 Hong Kong
Cofounder & operations director,
GoGoVan
VIrgIle BerTrAnd FOr FOrBes
Nikki Lohitnavy, 28 Thailand
Director, GranMonte Vineyard & Winery
eric Chen, 28 Hong Kong
Founder, Vitargent
Hu Zhenyu, 23 China
Founder & executive director,
Linkspace
Changwen Lai, 28 Singapore
Founder & CEO, Ninja Logistics
Kino Law, 28 Hong Kong
Cofounder & CEO, K&K Property
Aaron Lee, 28 Hong Kong
Founder & managing director,
Dash Serviced Suites
Diani Cheng Ni Lee, 27 Malaysia
General manager,
Country Heights Holdings
74 | FORBES INDIA APRIL 15, 2016
Candice Lo, 28 Hong Kong
Head of talent in China, Uber
Derrick (Yifang) Xiong, 26 China
Cofounder & chief marketing officer,
EHANG
owen Xu, 16 China
Cofounder & CEO, MicroH2O
Kentaro Yoshifuji, 27 Japan
Founder & CEO, Ory Laboratory
Zhang Nan, 29 China
Founder & chairman,
Tonnor Material Science
Nelson Zhang, 22 China
Cofounder & chief technology officer,
Wearhaus
JudgEs:
Angie Lau, CEO, Clover Group
Jia Yueting, founder & CEO, LeTV
Finance
& Venture capital
Mohamed Abbas, 25 Singapore
Cofounder, Onelyst
Christine Aum, 28 South Korea
Senior associate,
SparkLabs Global Ventures
Allison Baum, 28 Japan
Managing partner, Fresco Capital
Manju Bhatia, 29 India
Joint managing director,
Vasuli Recovery
Stefan Bruun, 27 Hong Kong
Managing partner,
Nova Founders Capital
Tim Chae, 24 South Korea
Partner, 500 Startups
Rachel De Villa, 23 Philippines
Founder & chief technology officer, Cropital
Anshulika Dubey, 29 India
Cofounder & chief operating officer,
Wishberry.in
Chris Gilbert & Jonny Wilkinson, 29, 28
Australia
Cofounders & managing directors, Equitise
Markus Gnirck, 27 Singapore
Cofounder, Startupbootcamp FinTech
Charlie Hung, 29 China
Managing director & cofounder,
Rocket Internet China
Jenny Lee, 29 Hong Kong
Head of growth, WeLab
Tahan Lin, 28 Taiwan
Cofounder & CEO, Backer-Founder
PoCket sun, 24
FouNDeR, SoGAL; PARTNeR,
SoGAL VeNTuReS SINGAPoRe
She calls it the first cross-border venture capital firm led by millennial females, and now
Sun and a partner in the US, Elizabeth Galbut,
aim to finish raising up to $8 million by next
month to close their SoGal Ventures Fund I.
They plan to invest in consumer technology
and digital health care outfits in the US. She
found her way into the industry after building
her own network of young business-minded
women while she was a graduate student
at the University of Southern California’s
Marshall School of Business. “There was
nowhere to find a network that I could belong
to,” she says.
So Sun, who grew up in northern China,
started SoGal, a community of female entrepreneurs and investors that holds conferences and has grown to 4,000 members in
more than 20 countries, including Singapore,
Vietnam, China and the US. Seeing the power
of networking, she’s now running another
network, Trojan Ventures, which started in
Shanghai and connects entrepreneurs and industry experts who graduated from USC. And
she helped start Trojan Venture Group, an
investor network for USC alumni that targets
early-stage companies. —AL
Liu Likun, 28 China
Partner, ZHONG Capital
Moses Lo, 27 Indonesia
Founder & CEO, Xendit
Hironori Maeda, 28 Japan
Partner, BEENEXT
Ritesh Malik, 26 India
Founder & CEO, Guerrilla Ventures
Johnny Mayo, 29 Malaysia
Cofounder, Neuroware
Haruka Mera, 28 Japan
Founder & CEO, ReadyFor
Anjney Midha, 23 India
Founding partner, KPCB Edge
Hee-eun Park, 29 South Korea
Principal, Altos Ventures
James Riney, 26 Japan
Head, 500 Startups Japan
Cynthia Siantar, 29 Singapore
Cofounder, Call Levels
Harrison uffindell, 25 Australia
Head of growth in Australia, Tilt.com
Abraham Viktor, 23 Indonesia
Cofounder & CEO, Taralite
Wang Yuanbo, 26 China
Cofounder & CEO, NihaoPay
Igor Wos, 29 Hong Kong
Cofounder & development lead,
TofuPay
Jaeseung Yum, 28 South Korea
Cofounder & CEO, Tumblbug
MunshI AhMed FOr FOrBes
Zhu Renwei, 27 China
Founder, Tashi
JudgEs:
Kaifu Lee, cofounder & CEO,
China’s Innovation Works
Jenny Lee, managing partner,
GGV Capital
Henry Nguyen, managing general
partner, IDG Venture Vietnam
APRIL 15, 2016 FORBES INDIA | 75
Retail
& Ecommerce
Mehul Agrawal, 29 India
Cofounder, Cars24 and FabFurnish
Thet Mon Aye & Zarni Nway oo, 28, 25
Myanmar
Cofounders, Star Ticket
Geetansh Bamania, 28 India
Founder, RentoMojo
Holly Cardew, 28 Australia
Founder & CEO, PixC
Sumit Chhazed, Nikhil Jain & Nittin
Mittal, 26, 27, 26 India
Cofounders, CredR
Ian Chua, 27 Malaysia
Cofounder & CEO, Hermo
Carline Darjanto, 28 Indonesia
CEO & creative director, CottonInk
Merrie elizabeth, 28 Indonesia
Founder, BloBar salon
Natasia Guo, 29 China
Cofounder & chief creative officer,
Yetang
Jess Hatzis, 29 Australia
Cofounder, Frank Body
Thessy Kouzoukas & Yiota Kouzoukas,
26, 28 Australia
Cofounders, Sabo Skirt
Wai Phyo Kyaw, 27 Myanmar
Chief operating officer, CarsDB
Ha Lam, 29 Myanmar
Cofounder, Triip.me
Le Hoang uyen Vy, 28 Vietnam
Deputy CEO, Vincommerce
Ivan Lim, 29 Australia
Cofounder & CEO, Brosa
Rachel Lim, 28 Singapore
Cofounder, Love, Bonito
Liu Hanyu, 28 China
Founder & CEO, Yidianer.com
Jane Lu, 29 Australia
Founder, Showpo
Luong Duy Hoai, 27 Vietnam
Founder & CEO, Giao Hang Nhanh
Koh Martinez onozawa, 26 Philippines
Cofounder & CEO, Loudbasstard
Shao Binbin, 28 China
Founder & CEO,
Shifang Direction Travel Agency
Yasa Paramita Singgih, 20 Indonesia
Founder & president,
Men’s Republic
Kanika Tekriwal, 27 India
Cofounder & CEO, JetSetGo
Shivam Tripathi, 27 Cambodia
Cofounder & CEO, CamboTicket
Yuta Tsuruoka, 26 Japan
Founder & CEO, BASE
Ferry unardi, 28 Indonesia
Cofounder & CEO, Traveloka
Raghav Verma, 29 India
Cofounder, Chaayos
Wen Chenghui, 22 China
Founder & CEO, Gift talk
ChArles PerTWee FOr FOrBes
Sylvia Yin, 23 Malaysia
Cofounder & COO, Shoppr
JudgEs:
Allan Zeman, chairman,
Lan Kwai Fong Group
Amit Agarwal, managing director,
Amazon India
76 | FORBES INDIA APRIL 15, 2016
Faeez FaDhLiLLah, 29
CoFouNDeR & Ceo, TRIPFeZ MALAYSIA
Muslim travellers have different needs than other
travellers, so Fadhlillah and his partner, Juergen Gallistl, who’s a few years older, started Tripfez in 2013. It
offers Muslim-friendly tour packages and advice about
Halal food options and whether the Quran is available.
Customers are able to compare 650,000 places to stay
in 83,000 destinations. The website rates services and
facilities in how well they cater to Muslims. They plan
to include feedback and reviews from users on the site,
similar to those offered on TripAdvisor. “I’ve always had
a strong passion for travel,” says Fadhlillah, a University
of Sydney graduate. “There is something about travel
that will inspire anyone: The unknown, the adventure and
expecting the unexpected. That’s what I hope to achieve
with Tripfez, to inspire more people—in particular, Muslims—to travel more and explore the world to expect the
unexpected.” —AL
sports &
Entertainment
Choi Si-Won, 29 South Korea
Singer & actor, Super Junior
Ding Junhui, 28 China
Snooker, formerly world No. 1
K-PoP IDoL SouTH KoReA
Stephanie Gilmore, 28 Australia
Surfing, Roxy Surf Team
Among the brightest K-pop stars is the singer and rapper known as G-Dragon (yong is dragon in Korean). In
an industry full of lookalike boy bands he stands out
for his songwriting abilities and his boundary-pushing
fashion sense. That—and his two solo tours of Japan and
elsewhere abroad—have earned him a loyal international
following, while his original style has made him a frontrow fixture at Chanel shows worldwide. He started in the
entertainment business at age 5, and it wasn’t exactly a
smooth journey before he became a star with the group
Bigbang. “I think not getting much attention from the
start actually helped me build a stronger career,” he says.
Where would he see himself if not in the music industry? “I get asked this question a lot,” says Kwon. “Maybe
fashion? But I am not sure about that. I can’t imagine
myself doing anything else.” —RW
Liam Hemsworth, 26 Australia
Hollywood actor,
The Hunger Games
Im Yoona, 25 South Korea
K-pop artist, Girls’ Generation
Shraddha Kapoor, 26 India
Actress & model
Kim Soo-Hyun, 28 South Korea
Actor
Yuna Kim, 25 South Korea
Former Olympic champion figure
skater
Lydia Ko, 18 New Zealand
Golf
Virat Kohli, 27 India
Cricket
Lim Hyung Joo, 29 South Korea
Opera singer
Nehe Milner-Skudder, 25
New Zealand
Rugby, New Zealand All Blacks
Sania Mirza, 29 India
Tennis
Aditi Mittal, 28 India
Comedian
Saina Nehwal, 25 India
Badminton, world No. 1
Ning Zetao, 22 China
Swimmer
Kei Nishikori, 26 Japan
Tennis
Charice Pempengco, 23
Philippines
Singer
Daniel Ricciardo, 26 Australia
Formula 1 driver
Ruby Rose, 29 Australia
Actress, singer & model
Joey Alexander Sila, 12 Indonesia
Pianist
Arunima Sinha, 28 India
Amputee mountain climber
Chaitanya Tamhane, 28 India
Writer & director
Joel Tan (Gentle Bones), 21
Singapore
Singer
Masahiro Tanaka, 27 Japan
Baseball, New York Yankees
Gloria Tang Tsz-Kei (G.e.M.), 24
Hong Kong
Singer
Kohei uchimura, 27 Japan
Gymnast, 5-time Olympic
medalist
Angela Yeung (Angelababy), 27
Hong Kong
Actress, singer & model
Yunalis Mat Zara’ai (Yuna), 29
Malaysia
Singer & entrepreneur,
Iamjetfuelshop
JudgEs:
Anthony Chen, film director,
winner of Cannes Caméra d’Or
Nikki Semin Han, executive vice
president, SM Entertainment
Group
Michelle Yeoh, Hollywood actress
APRIL 15, 2016 FORBES INDIA | 77
PeTer sTeMBer FOr FOrBes
kwon Ji-Yong, 27
health care
& science
Mesty Ariotedjo, 26 Indonesia
Cofounder, WeCare.id
Leonika Sari Njoto Boedioetomo, 22
Indonesia
Founder & CEO, Reblood
Chai Ke, 29 China
Founder & CEO, Dayima
Arun Chandru, 29 India
Cofounder & managing director,
Pandorum Technologies
Marita Cheng, 26 Australia
Founder & CEO, 2Mar Robotics
Hon Weng Chong & Andrew Lin, 28, 27
Australia
Cofounders, CliniCloud
Amin Hataman, 15 Philippines
Inventor of bags made from nata de
coco
Le Hung Viet Bao, 29 Vietnam
Mathematics researcher,
University of Chicago
Atit Jain, 28 India
Cofounder & CEO, Pluss
Zhen Li, 29 China
Founder, Jiandanxinli
Neha Kinariwalla, 23 India
Founder, Humanology Project
Nao Kondo, 20 Japan
Cofounder, Trybots
Shashank ND, 28 India
Founder & CEO, Practo
Yingrui Li, 29 China
Cofounder, iCarbonx
Ruchit Nagar, 22 India
Cofounder, Khushi Baby
Karthik Naralasetty, 26 India
Founder & CEO, Socialblood
Neo Mei Lin, 29 Singapore
Research fellow,
National University of Singapore
Chiyo Nomura, 29 Japan
Founder & CEO, untickle
Jarrel Seah & Jennifer Tang, 24, 24
Australia
Cofounders, Eyenaemia
Neha Sinha, 29 India
Cofounder & CEO, Epoch Elder Care
Su Shu, 28 China
Founder & CEO, Mingyizhudao
wang shirui, 28
sTeFen ChOW FOr FOrBes
FouNDeR & Ceo, MeDLINKeR CHINA
Pursuing postgraduate studies at Harvard Medical School in 2013,
Wang realised that being a doctor isn’t the only way to help
patients. Given China’s shortage of doctors and its piecemeal
medical system, the young doctor thought he had a better idea
for improving health care. So he headed home. “There are two
ways to solve the problem,” says Wang. “You can create more
doctors or help the existing ones be more efficient. We aim to do
the second through Medlinker.”
Medlinker’s website and application connect medical practitioners around China to make initial assessments of patients,
allowing doctors to serve more people in less time. He launched
the site 12 months ago, and it already links 20 percent of China’s
doctors, or some 400,000 professionals. Tencent, Sequoia, Jack
Ma’s Yunfeng Capital and others have invested $40 million, and
the company is valued at $400 million. Wang says he still owns
50 percent. The secret of his success? He points to his offline
marketing strategy, which deploys 500 of his employees to visit
doctors and explain the benefits of joining the network. He eventually wants to create a total health care ecosystem that would
also link hospitals, insurers and pharmaceutical companies. —RW
78 | FORBES INDIA APRIL 15, 2016
Shoko Takahashi, 28 Japan
Founder & CEO, Genequest
Tam Wai Jia, 29 Singapore
Medical officer, MOH Holdings
Daniel Tan, 28 Singapore
Cofounder & CEO, DeNova Sciences
Ta Minh Tuan, 27 Vietnam
Founder, HELP International
Wu Song, 29 China
Associate dean, Shenzhen Zhongxun
Precision Medical Research Center
Ivan Zelich, 17 Australia
Mathematician, helped develop
important theorem
Zhao Bowen, 23 China
Founder, QuantiHealth
Jian Zhou, 29 Singapore
Research fellow,
National University of Singapore
JudgEs:
Wong Tien Hua, president, Singapore
Medical Association
Steve Monaghan, regional director,
AIA Group, Hong Kong
Sonny Vu, founder & CEO, Misfit,
Vietnam
consumer
technology
Gaurav Agarwal & Yashash
Agarwal, 25, 20 India
Cofounders, Gamezop
Deekshith Marla & Vinay Kumar
Sankarapu, 26, 25 India
Cofounders, Arya.ai
Ritesh Agarwal, 22 India
Founder & CEO, OYO Rooms
Katsuhito Mihashi, 29 Japan
Founder & CEO, mana.bo
Kevin Aluwi, 29 Indonesia
Cofounder & CFO, GO-JEK
Ganindu Nanayakkara, 25
Sri Lanka
Innovator, iHelmet
Valenice Balace, 27 Philippines
Founder & CEO, Peekawoo
Ankit Bhati, 29 India
Cofounder & chief technology
officer, Olacabs
David Haisha Chen, 26 China
Cofounder & CEO, Strikingly
Bradley Chiang & Timothy Yu, 22,
26 Taiwan, Hong Kong
Cofounders, Snapask
Benny Fajarai, 25 Indonesia
Cofounder, Qlapa
Genevieve George, 25 Australia
Founder & managing director,
OneShift
Ahmed Haider, 29 Australia
Cofounder & CEO, Zookal
Ye Wint Ko & Htet Will, 26, 25
Myanmar
Cofounders, Bindez
Lucas Ngoo & Siu Rui Quek, 27,
28 Singapore
Cofounders, Carousell
Carl Pei, 26, China
Cofounder & head of global,
OnePlus
Florian Simmendinger, 27
Hong Kong
Cofounder & CEO, Soundbrenner
Hiroki Takaba, 29 Japan
Founder & CEO, Translimit
Jack Tang, 24 Hong Kong
Cofounder & CEO, Urban Massage
Yuvraj Tomar, 26 India
Founder & CEO, Thinqbot
Jack (Haoping) Wang, 27 China
Founder & CEO, Xiaozhan
Neo Wang, 25 China
Founder & CEO, Keep
Terence Kwok, 24 Hong Kong
Founder & CEO, Tink Labs
Arief Widhiyasa, 28 Indonesia
Cofounder & CEO, Agate Studio
Jinha Lee, 29 South Korea
Cofounder, Eone Timepieces
Jayoung Yoon, 27 South Korea
Founder & CEO, StyleShare
Li Longfei, 27 China
Founder & CEO, Long Mobile
Liu Junyi, 24 China
Founder & president,
Kibey Culture Media
Lu Cheng, 25 China
Founder & CEO, Raven Tech
JudgEs:
Ya Qin Zhang, president, Baidu
Steven Ji, partner, Sequoia
Capital China
Frank Wang, founder & CEO, DJI
taiChi MurakaMi, 29
He dreamt of becoming a company president since
childhood, so as a freshman at Waseda University,
Murakami launched online job-information outfit
Livesense. It operates help-wanted websites for
part-time, temporary and mid-career jobs, and a site
for customers to share reviews and gossip about
employers. It also runs an apartment-rental and
residential-property site. Advertising is free—businesses and other customers pay only when a person is
hired or a real estate inquiry is made. The idea for the
company came from his experience searching for parttime work in high school; not many jobs were listed on
the internet because of the high cost.
Murakami, who still holds a 48.9 percent stake, is
the youngest entrepreneur to list on the First Section
of the Tokyo Stock Exchange (in 2012) and its startup
section, Mothers (in 2011). Livesense, valued at $95
million, has 192 full-time employees and posted nearly
$45 million in revenue last year, a 19 percent jump over
the previous year. But net profits plunged 98 percent
on higher advertising, marketing and personnel costs.
Those expenses, says Livesense, are investments in
the future. The company forecasts at least 8.5 percent
sales growth for this year and a roughly six-fold jump
in profits. —James Simms
APRIL 15, 2016 FORBES INDIA | 79
PeTer sTeMBer FOr FOrBes
FouNDeR & PReSIDeNT, LIVeSeNSe JAPAN
social
Entrepreneurs
Babar Ali, 22, India
Founder, Ananda Siksha Niketan
School
Gavin Armstrong, 29 Cambodia
Founder & CEO, Lucky Iron Fish
Jeremy Au, 28 Singapore
Cofounder & former president,
Conjunct Consulting
Varun Banka & Prukalpa Sankar, 24,
24 India
Cofounders, SocialCops
osama Bin Noor, 25 Bangladesh
Cofounder, Youth Opportunities
Khalida Brohi, 25 Pakistan
Founder, Sughar
Jamie Chiu, 29 Hong Kong
Psychologist & CEO, LULIO
Minhaj Chowdhury, 25 India
Cofounder, Drinkwell
Nushelle de Silva, 28 Sri Lanka
Founder, Building Bridges
Fiza Farhan, 27 Pakistan
Founder & CEO, Buksh Foundation
Daniel Flynn, 27 Australia
Cofounder & managing director,
Thankyou Group
Faith Gonsalves, 27 India
Founder, Music Basti; executive
director, IDEA
umar Anwar Jahangir, 24 Pakistan
Founder & secretary, Bahria Medics
Zikry Kholil, 29 Malaysia
Cofounder & global executive officer,
Incitement
Jasmine Lau, 26 Hong Kong
Cofounder & executive director,
Philanthropy in Motion
Ling Zihan, 29 China
Founder & CEO, TechBase
Anting Liu, 24 Taiwan
Founder, Teach For Taiwan
Raphael Mijeno, 28 Philippines
Cofounder & chief financial officer,
SALt
Kaito Miwa & Atsuyoshi Saisho, 29,
28 Japan
Cofounders, e-Education Project
Henry Motte-Munoz, 29 Philippines
Founder, Edukasyon.ph
rAjAT ghOsh FOr FOrBes
aLok shettY, 29
Smriti Nagpal, 25 India
Founder & CEO, Atulyakala
John-Son oei, 28 Malaysia
Founder & CEO, EPIC Collaborative
FouNDeR, BHuMIPuTRA ARCHITeCTuRe INDIA
Junto ohki, 28 Japan
Cofounder & president, ShuR Group
On a mission to improve the quality of life in the slums, he
wants young architects and designers to balance making
money and building housing for the poor. He started his firm in
2005 with just a laptop when he was in the second year of architecture school in India. After earning a master’s in advanced
architectural design at Columbia University and working for a
year in New York, Shetty returned to India in 2012 and began
to build his company. Soon he was joining with local social enterprises to persuade Bengaluru residents to try his design for
new houses. They were certainly unusual, made from recycled
and readily available material and built with a jack that could
prop up the house to avoid floods and rat infestations. Some
50 homes were built for 200 people.
Now Shetty is on to his next project: Building 600 homes
for 2,400 people in the city of Belgaum, which he hopes will
serve as a case study in how to promote low-cost adaptive
housing. “Our approach now is not just housing but also the
entire infrastructure—sanitation, drinking water, health care
and education,” he says. “This is a significantly more ambitious
project, but we hope to make a lot of progress this year.” —AL
Yashveer Singh, 29 India
Director, Youth Venture programme
at Ashoka, South Asia
80 | FORBES INDIA APRIL 15, 2016
Anu Sridharan, 28 India
Cofounder & CEO, NextDrop
Heni Sri Sundani, 28 Indonesia
Founder, Smart Farmer Kids in Action
& AgroEdu Jampang Community
Tengku Ahmad Syamil, 24 Singapore
Cofounder & CEO, Skolafund
Muhammad Alfatih Timur, 24
Indonesia
Cofounder & CEO, Kitabisa
Shay Wright, 26 New Zealand
Cofounder, Te Whare Hukahuka
JudgEs:
Solina Chau, executive director, Li Ka
Shing Foundation
Binod Chaudhary, chairman,
Chaudhary Group
Ruth eliott, founder & CEO, Daughters
of Cambodia
JessiCa hart, 29
SuPeRMoDeL & FouNDeR, LuMA CoSMeTICS AuSTRALIA
While the gap-toothed beauty might be best known for her strolls down
Victoria’s Secret runways, she’s now gaining a reputation as an entrepreneur. Two
years in the making, Luma launched in 2014. “Everyone constantly asks me what
I wear on my skin, so I thought, ‘Why not start something?’” explains Hart.
Her love of makeup prompted her to start Luma, but her desire to create
something substantial drives her in building the company. “In modelling you
don’t have much control over your career,” she says. “You don’t know what’s next
and when it’s going to end. I have learnt so much in the industry, and eventually I
wanted to have something which comes from me and which I creatively control.”
Sydney-based Luma, short for ‘luminescent’, hasn’t turned a profit yet but
expects to break even this year; she won’t disclose revenue figures. The company
sells its products in stores only in Australia, but she plans to expand distribution
this year, starting with Asia or possibly the US, because she spends her time
between New York and Sydney. “Even now, when someone calls me a
supermodel, I don’t consider that myself at all. I don’t think at any point I’ve
thought, ‘Oh, now I’ve made it’. I’m always striving to do more and better.” —RW
art & style,
Food & drink
Xyza Cruz Bacani, 29 Philippines
Photographer
Liliana Chan, 27 Hong Kong
Director, Dadi Creative Dining,
Nan Hai Corp
Angel Chen, 24 China
Fashion designer & founder,
Angel Chen
Vinesh Johny, 27 India
Cofounder & executive pastry
chef, Lavonne Academy of Baking
Science & Pastry Artss
Irene Kim, 28 South Korea
Blogger & model
Jun Kitazawa, 27 Japan
Artist
Ronson Culibrina, 24 Philippines
Artist
Jims Lam Chi Hang, 28 Hong Kong
Artist
Nipun Avinash Dharmadhikari,
28 India
Founder, Natak
Li Xiao, 28 China
Fashion designer
Pooja Dhingra, 29 India
Owner & executive chef,
Le15 Patisserie
Dinh Nhat Nam, 26 Vietnam
Founder & marketing manager,
Urban Station
Yasuhiro Fujio, 28 Japan
Chef, La Cime
Peggy Hartanto, 27 Indonesia
Fashion Designer
Tada Hengsapkul, 28 Thailand
Photographer
Kelvin Ho & Peter Mai, 22, 26
Hong Kong
Cofounders, Black Bear Asia
Htet Myet oo, 25 Myanmar
Cofounder & managing director,
Rangoon Tea House
Hironori Maeda, 27 Japan
Chef, Kyoto Kitcho
Ariana Miyamoto, 21 Japan
Model & Miss Universe Japan
Andreja Pejic, 24 Australia
Transgender model
Vicky Roy, 28 India
Photographer
Su Renli, 28 China
Fashion designer & founder,
Renli Su
Wee Kiat Teoh, 27 Malaysia
Cofounder, myBurgerLab
Helga Angelina Tjahjadi, 25
Indonesia
Cofounder & managing director,
Burgreens
Nicole Warne, 27 Australia
Founder & director,
Gary Pepper Girl
Xu Xian, 28 China
Cofounder, Cuisines Sous Vide
Ye Qian, 28 China
Fashion designer & founder, YE’S
Clara Yee, 27 Singapore
Designer & illustrator
JudgEs:
Gaggan Anand, founder &
executive chef, Gaggan restaurant
Jeannie Cho Lee, master of wine,
CEO & publisher, Le Pan
Edie Hu, vice president, art
advisor, Citi Private Bank
Kenzo Takada, fashion designer
& founder, KENZO
APRIL 15, 2016 FORBES INDIA | 81
Trunk ArChIVe
Yeoh Choo Kuan, 28 Malaysia
Painter
Enterprise
technology
Myo Htet Aung & Ye Myat Min, 28, 24
Myanmar
Cofounders, Nex
Amarit Charoenphan, 29 Thailand
Cofounder & co-CEO, Hubba
Korawad Chearavanont, 21 Thailand
Founder & CEO, Eko Communications
Paras Chopra, 28 India
Founder & CEO, Wingify
Raviteja Dodda, 26 India
Cofounder & CEO, MoEngage
Filip eldic, 29 Australia
Cofounder & executive director,
Bluedot Innovation
Taro Fukuyama, 28 Japan
Cofounder & CEO, AnyPerk
Gao Pengcheng, 28 China
Cofounder & executive president,
Beijing Kuyun Interactive
Dinesh Goel, 26 India
Founder & CEO, AasaanJobs
Guan Dian, 29 Singapore
Cofounder & vice president, PatSnapp
Akash Gupta & Samay Kohli, 26, 29
India
Cofounders, Grey Orange
Sachin Gupta, 26 India
Founder & CEO, HackerEarth
Hu Sen, 29 China
Cofounder & chief operating officer,
Cloudacc Networks
Kelvin Dongho Kim, 28 South Korea
Cofounder & CEO, Idincu
Karby Li, 26 China
CEO, MikeCRM
Saket Modi, 25 India
Cofounder & CEO, Lucideus
Melanie Perkins, 28 Australia
Cofounder & CEO, Canva
Yin Qi, 28
Cameron Priest, 29 Singapore
Founder & CEO, TradeGecko
sTeFen ChOW FOr FOrBes
CoFouNDeR & Ceo, MeGVII CHINA
Yin’s Beijing company develops facial-recognition
applications and other artificial intelligence technology. Started in 2011, Megvii worked with popular
photo applications and dating sites. The focus now
is on more-critical applications for the security and
internet-finance sectors, which are growing rapidly
in China. It counts CITIC Group and China Merchants
Bank as key customers. Ant Financial, the financial
arm of Alibaba, allows customers to log into their
accounts using its facial-recognition system, face++,
instead of a password. “We are using this technology
to solve very basic problems,” says Yin.
Yin launched Megvii—short for “megavision”—with two Tsinghua University friends,
Wenbin Tang and Yang Mu. Yin didn’t go to class
that often, instead spending his time at Microsoft
Research Asia, where he led a facial–recognition
project. After graduation he went off to Columbia University to pursue a computer science doctorate. He says Megvii has attracted $50 million
in funding, which values the company at $200
million; it boasts 200 employees. “In China a lot
of the tasks are very human-intensive. What we
aim to do is use artificial intelligence to replace
humans and do those tasks automatically.” —RW
82 | FORBES INDIA APRIL 15, 2016
Qi Junyuan, 25 China
Founder & CEO, Teambition
Abraham Ranardo, 25 Indonesia
Cofounder, Mailbird
Vivek Ravisankar, 28 India
Cofounder & CEO, HackerRank
Ronak Kumar Samantray, 28 India
Cofounder, NowFloats
REPORTiNG bY:
Kuang Da Alex,
Shu-ching Jean
Chen, Vera Chan,
Grace Chung,
Susan Cunningham,
Rebecca Fannin,
Arvada Haradiran,
Jane Ho, Peg Yoc Hui,
Ralph Jennings, John
Kang, Amanda Lee,
Jason Lim, Gregore
Pio Lopez, Saritha
Rai, James Simms,
Yuelun Sun, Jessica
Tan, Yue Wang, Rana
Wehbe, Xiao Yi and
David Yin
Katsuaki Sato, 29 Japan
Cofounder & CEO, Metaps
Alex Sharp & Sheng Yeo, 24, 27
Australia
Cofounders, OrionVM
Shuta Shibuya, 27 Japan
Founder & CEO, Fuller
Lusarun Silpsrikul, 26 Thailand
Founder & CEO, Page365
Michelle Sun, 29 Hong Kong
Founder & CEO, First Code Academy
Wu Donglin, 29 China
Founder & CEO, QuanziCRM
evan (Yuxi) You, 28 China
Creator, Vue.js
JudgEs:
Goh Peng Ooi, founder & chairman,
Silverlake Axis
Nandan Nilekani, cofounder, Infosys
Royston Tay, cofounder & CEO, Zopim
Yat Siu, founder & CEO, Outblaze
Life
reclIner
In the US, a
classic road trailer
rides out again
P/92
Frequent
FlIer
An insider’s tips
on visting New
York City
P/95
The evolution of life on IIM campuses, and what it says about India
iiM-Ahmedabad
Getty ImaGes
recliner
reclIner
William Robinson
of Christie’s on
the potential of
India’s art market
P/90
Life recLiner
Campus Calling
Snapshots of life at the IIMs over more than five decades
T
he Indian Institutes of
Management (IIMs),
some of the foremost
education institutions in
our country, keep popping into our
consciousness during placement
season (March, for the most part)
every year. The salaries students are
offered are the stuff of headlines.
But these institutes—the first two
By Jasodhara BanerJee
of which, in Ahmedabad and Kolkata,
were established in 1961—have much
more to offer than formal classroom
education. The vibrant campus life
is as integral to the learning process
as the lectures and projects.
We spoke to three members
of the IIM alumni, each 20 years
apart, to see how the IIMs have
evolved since the 1960s.
What we get is a snapshot of
each era: These glimpses reflect
not just the changing profile of
students, but their reactions to
formal management education,
their aspirations and ambitions,
and their approach to life itself.
In many ways, perhaps, this
evolution reflects India’s journey
over more than five decades.
‘We aimed to change the world’
By Kiran KarniK
1
968: The world was in ferment,
with massive student unrest and
demonstrations in France, Greece
and the Red Brigade in Germany,
anti-war protests on US campuses,
and Vietnam on everybody’s lips. In
India, the new Prime Minister was
finding her feet and beginning to
consolidate her position. Nationalism
was considered right, but not Right;
along with anti-colonialism, it was
then “owned” by the Left. Idealism
was in the air. That was the year,
48 years ago, that some 80 of us
graduated from Indian Institute of
Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A),
with the exceptional privilege of
receiving our degree personally from
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
We had joined in 1966, just the
third batch of the Post Graduate
Programme (PGP). IIM-A and,
indeed, management education in
India was new and the Institute was
yet to establish a name for itself. We
knew little about what the course
entailed and, for many of us, even
the names of some of the subjects
were as strange and outlandish as the
campus buildings. And then there
84 | FORBES INDIA APRIL 15, 2016
was the “case method”, a pedagogic
approach that we had never heard
of! Coming from an educational
system in which speaking in class
was a complete no-no, we were now
expected to speak up and discuss the
cases in class. No more “finger on
your lips”; in fact, one was evaluated
on the basis of quality and quantity
of “class participation” (CP). Grades
depended more on daily CP, weekly
quizzes and projects, rather than the
end-of-term exams. For most of us,
this was a radical change, and not
one to which we could adapt easily.
Today, these pedagogic methods
are widely known. Students go
into the IIMs knowing about them
Imagine the shock
that the director
was not “Sir” or
“Professor Matthai”,
but just “Ravi”. This
would be near blasphemy in most places
and a fair number might have
gone through something similar in
college. Yet, in retrospect, what we
went through—the surprise factor,
the discomfort, discovering the
unknown—had a charm of its own.
Our batch was the first to join on
the then new campus. Our seniors
had spent their first year in temporary
accommodation outside. We spent
our first year in houses meant for
the faculty and moved into student
dorms only in our second year.
Classrooms were in temporary sheds
and we braved the Ahmedabad
summer (45° C in April) under fans
that circulated hot air. Today, the
only heat in the air-conditioned
classrooms is from the discussions.
The faculty knew almost all
students by name and there was
an easy camaraderie between the
teachers and the taught. This was,
indeed, revolutionary: In conventional
colleges at the time, there was a vast
gulf between teachers and students.
Imagine, then, the shock that the
institute’s director was not “Sir” or
“Professor Matthai”, but just “Ravi”.
This would be near-blasphemy in
most institutions at that time. Yet,
such is the adaptability of the human
mind, that we adopted this in but a
few weeks. Just as we adapted to the
system, the 16-plus-hour workday
of the first few months soon eased
off to the point when some of us
went for matinee shows a few times
a week! In addition, of course, to
evening visits to the outdoor icecream stalls at Law Garden and
late-night snacks at Manek Chowk.
No Ola, no kaali-peeli taxis existed
then in Ahmedabad, and barring
very few, none of us had our own
vehicles. Autorickshaws were the
primary means of transport and since
they generally refused to come to
the “isolated and far away” campus,
we often used the bus service for our
nocturnal forays. However, despite
these outings, the campus itself was
the main centre of activity. Evenings
and late nights saw groups of us sitting
around and—like neighbourhood
addas in Kolkata—discussing
everything from personal problems
to the woes of the world. I don’t see
much of this now; maybe the students
are more studious, or prefer indoor
sessions, or the solitude of their
rooms. Maybe, in keeping with the
times, they are discussing the same
issues on online social networks!
Amongst the campus activities
was a weekly movie, viewed in an
open-air, make-shift “auditorium”.
Everyone on campus—students, staff
and faculty with their families—
would turn up under the clear, starstudded sky. Some faculty members
insisted that the Friday night show
be shifted to Saturday. My fellow
class representative and I insisted
that since this was a student activity,
it was for us to decide, and not the
Institute. This led to a stand-off, and
finally (after suffering some surprise
quizzes on Saturdays) we had our
way, with the faculty graciously
relenting. However, neither such
issues, nor others, affected the
very close faculty-student bond.
Now, I hear, organised movie shows
are a rarity, and I doubt if the faculty
join even these occasional events. Two
other initiatives from our time are
worth recalling. One was the Music
Room: A record player (and, yes,
vinyl records: 78, 45 and 33 rpm) was
procured and an eclectic collection
of music built up. In the days when
most of us heard music only on the
APRIL 15, 2016 FORBES INDIA | 85
© indian institute of ManageMent, ahMedabad; courtesy: Photo Library, iiMa
The iconic red-brick architecture, designed by american Louis Kahn, under construction at the iiM-a campus in the 1960s
Life recLiner
radio or in films—with an hour or
two a day of Western music, at best,
on radio—this was indeed a boon.
A few of us also started a student
magazine, Red Brick, and successfully
brought out a number of issues. It
was produced—using the Institute’s
facilities—in cyclostyled format. I am
sure students of today will wonder
what is “cyclostyled” and, of course,
the more curious will “Google it”.
We lived on a comparatively
small campus, amidst and within
Louis Kahn’s iconic architecture—
exposed brick-work, gaping holes,
few windows. The population on
campus has now increased and so
has the PGP batch size: From 80odd in our time to 400 now. Other
short-term courses mean about 350
more students on campus. The most
dramatic change has probably been
the gender ratio: 24 percent in the
in-coming batch means 100 women
per batch. In our batch, we had one!
Amongst other dramatic changes
is the increase in entrepreneurship.
In our day, the choices we thought
of were a job in an Indian company
or one in an MNC (only a few
crazies like me thought of the
government as an alternative),
and no one—bar a few who came
from business families—thought of
entrepreneurship. Yet, we imbibed
the goal of being “change agents” and
some of us aimed to change not just
the company, but the world itself.
In our days, getting into IIM-A
was probably far easier (I doubt I
can “crack the CAT” today). Yet,
we—the early batches—can take
pride in helping create the reputation
and brand image that IIM-A has
today. That, at least, is what we will
convince ourselves of as we from
PGP 68 get together in Udaipur to
mark the 50th anniversary of our
entry to IIM-A. And we would hope
that successive batches continue
to nurse the dream and make the
effort to, indeed, change the world.
The author is an independent strategy
and policy analyst, and an alumnus
(PGP 1966-68) of IIM-A
86 | FORBES INDIA APRIL 15, 2016
‘I was very grateful
to get a job’
I
By roopa Kudva
joined IIM Ahmedabad in
1984 and graduated in 1986.
There were some landmarks in
terms of what was happening in the
country—for the first time personal
computers came to the campus, the
Indira Gandhi assassination took
place as did the Bhopal gas tragedy.
So, in many ways, it was a very
defining period in our history. It was
pre-liberalisation, so we belonged to
the generation that was just grateful
to get a job. Or, at least, I was very
grateful to get a job. My first job was
in IDBI, where I stayed for six years.
We had a batch of about 180
people; I think we had 19 girls. Only 70
percent of the batch were engineers,
compared to today when, in some
of the IIMs, more than 95 percent
are engineers. So there was a lot of
diversity. But, in general, the bulk
of students were from the metros.
Which, again, has changed; now,
students are from all over the country.
I came from Assam, where I had a
very small-town existence. We were
like a minority; most people were
from the IITs, big cities, the Stephens,
and the LSRs, and the Xaviers.
The first semester is always one
of awe and shock, right? You are not
used to—at least coming from a nonengineering background—the rigour
of daily assessments. You are used to
university exams where you cram in
at the end of two or three years. The
continuous evaluation process is new,
and they do pile on the pressure.
But what I most remember from
my time at IIM-A was the learning
I had outside the classroom. That
would be from interacting with
exceptionally bright and diverse
individuals. There were people who
were talented in sports, in dramatics,
in writing, quizzing. It was a very
accomplished set of people, and
just getting to interact with them
provides huge learning and insight,
particularly for me, who had come
from a smaller town. When I had
joined, I had had very little exposure
to the business world, and had never
even heard of Hindustan Lever.
Someone had to tell me that it’s the
company that makes Dalda and Vim.
One of the things that has changed
roopa Kudva (right), like many others from assam, was a table tennis enthusiast
today is the depth of relationships that
we had with our professors; because
they lived on the campus, they were
very much a part of the community,
and it was not unusual to see a
professor chasing students in their
dorms over assignments; they would
sit and play bridge with the students;
there was a very strong personal
connect, which went well beyond the
classroom, which, from what I hear,
has changed. Partly because the class
sizes have doubled or tripled—in our
time it was 180, now it is 400 or 450.
It is a totally different dynamic.
There was a whole set of sports
and cultural contests called the InterCombos—each group of hostels was
called a combo, so Inter-Combo. The
talent night was big; the inter-IIM
was huge. There were only three
IIMs at that time—Ahmedabad,
Bangalore and Calcutta. We took
a whole train coach and went to
Calcutta for the meet. That was
great fun! Assam has produced some
outstanding table tennis players, such
as Monalisa Baruah, so everyone
played table tennis! Even I did; not
that I was great at it. We didn’t have
as many clubs as they have today.
At that point of time there was a
sole chaiwalla outside the campus;
we’d sit in front of the gate and have
that cup of tea. It was a big thing.
Today, if you walk out of the gates
of IIM-A, you have all these stalls
with really good street food. In our
time there was no heated water;
in winter we would heat our bath
water with immersion rods. Today
the whole campus is solar-power
heated, so you have running hot
and cold water. You had one or two
phones for all the 360 students. One
major feature outside of academics
was the queue in front of that one
phone. And since we got letters, we
had pigeonholes, and you would have
to go there to pick up your letters.
There were two important haunts
on campus. One was ICP—which
was the ice-cream parlour—and they
stocked Vadilal’s icecream, which
was awesome. The hottest selling
variety was Kaju Draksh; it was their
No. 1 fast-moving item! We also
had music in something called the
DJ Room, which was very ornately
decorated, outside which you could
organise a party, where the badminton
court became an impromptu dance
floor. And whenever you organised
a DJ night, people from the dorms
around would pour buckets of water
on you. It was part of tradition.
The food in the canteen was good,
but everyone loved to complain
about it; something I suspect hasn’t
changed. But what has changed
is the fact that there are so many
mobile phones now that you can
get food delivered to your room
from the stalls outside; and you also
now have many more commercially
APRIL 15, 2016 FORBES INDIA | 87
PhotograPhs: rooPa Kudva
Kudva and her batchmates, with their winner’s shield, outside their train on the way back from the inter-iiM meet in Calcutta
Life recLiner
run restaurants on campus. In my
time, food choices on campus was
limited, or you stepped out to have
paratha in the gully outside.
The thing that has not changed
is something called WAC—written
analysis and communication. You
have to write a paper and submit it
by 1 o’clock on Sunday afternoon by
dropping the paper into a collection
box. Students being students, we’d
all be scrambling at the last minute.
And then, as you are going to drop
the paper in the box, the job of
the senior batch was to impede
you at every step—they would
throw stuff, throw water on you.
So it was like an obstacle race.
And then, of course, there was
the IIM, which was the Indian
Institute of Matrimony. A significant
percentage of the girls in every
class got married to someone on
campus. That was certainly true of
previous batches too. I don’t know
how true that remains today.
Placements were much less
important then than what they are
today. I think today the summer
job itself has acquired much more
importance, because if you do well
there you automatically get a job offer.
That concept did not exist then; there
was hardly any linkage between your
summer job and your final placement.
The whole focus has changed for a
few reasons: It was pre-liberalisation,
so the opportunities were limited.
You did get the best jobs, and there
was enough to go around. The second
reason is that it was much less
expensive. And that’s a huge factor.
Today people are taking massive
loans to get the IIM education, and
it is important for them that they
get high-paying jobs. And thirdly,
today’s generation is operating in
a market economy, where they
are more competitive, and their
aspiration levels are higher. People
in my time were happy to get what
they got and made the most of it.
The author is partner at Omidyar Network
and MD of Omidyar Network India Advisors.
She is an alumna of IIM-A (1984-1986)
88 | FORBES INDIA APRIL 15, 2016
‘I always knew I wanted
to be an entrepreneur’
By praveen sinha
I
IM Calcutta (IIM-C) has a very
beautiful campus—it is massive,
lush green, has multiple lakes,
and is a bird sanctuary in itself. While
most may see these as irrelevant
attributes for a management institute,
it really made me feel that I had
chosen the “first amongst equals”.
Also, I was sure that I wanted to be
an entrepreneur at some point in my
life, and hence wanted to choose an
institute where the ecosystem gave
me the time to reflect on things and
pursue my passion. The culture at
IIM-C was different from the breakneck speed of a management study
routine that I had come to expect.
I remember the first couple of
weeks on campus as being really tough
for us, with both our seniors and the
faculty bringing us up to speed with
things. During the first semester,
while everyone was fighting it out
with their schedules, I was among
the very few to go for walks and sit by
the lakes. Later, as my walks became
increasingly regular, some seven or
eight other students would also come
along; but only three or four of them
would come regularly. I am from
Jharkhand—the ‘green state’—so I
was at home amid nature. However,
once the all-important CG (cumulative
grade points, which could determine
our fate in the summer placements)
Every night, we’d
land up at the
canteen to eat Maggi
or omelets. As the
food was prepared,
we’d put in a few
rounds of table tennis
was out of the way, I found many
who shared my interest in nature.
They soon became my friends. I liked
the diversity of the student body, the
general atmosphere of the campus,
multiple extra-curricular activities,
and the calibre of the faculty.
There were lots of clubs on campus,
some about culture, others about
sports, and more related to academics.
Since students could be members
of multiple clubs, membership was
well-distributed. Clubs related to
marketing and finance were quite
popular. I was a member of the
entrepreneurship club and the NGO
club. For the first we organised events
and programmes where we invited
entrepreneurs to come and talk to us;
for instance, we invited the founder
of rediffmail. For the NGO club, we
were a team of four students from
IIM-C who worked with CRY.
To be honest, I knew that at the
end of two years there would be
an excellent job waiting for me,
irrespective of which IIM I decided
on. But during those two years, I
wanted to have the option of doing
what inspired me. I was able to launch
my first venture Aquabrim from
IIM-C and this was an important
step for me. I have never regretted
my decision and have never looked
back since. I was also lucky to meet
my life partner during my campus
days, though she was from our
sports rival XLRI. We met during
our internship at Microsoft.
The night life on campus was
always vibrant. We used to spend our
time playing various sports, going for
walks around the campus or chatting
at the night canteen. Every night, the
regular canteen on campus would
be converted into a night canteen,
where we would land up to eat Maggi
or omelets. So, while the food was
being prepared, we would put in
a few rounds of table tennis. This
was a nightly feature. Sometimes
I would also play badminton.
The best time on campus was
during the annual fests—Intaglio and
Carpe Diem. Students from multiple
colleges from all across India would
come. Sport meets with the other
IIMs were another great time. The
sports meet between IIM-C and XLRI
was the most awaited event for us, and
was hotly contested. Super seniors like
the late Malli Mastan Babu motivated
a whole generation of students to take
up mountaineering and running.
Although the incubation and
innovation centre was not as active
as it is now, I never missed any
entrepreneurship-related session. We
had many entrepreneurs coming to
campus and sharing their journeys
with us. I always wanted to be an
entrepreneur. If I have to give a
philosophical reason, I would say
that it is a “calling”. But the reality
is, I wanted three things: I wanted to
build something, I wanted to work
with people who are passionate about
the work they are doing, and I wanted
to be the master of my own time.
While the campus offered a calm
and serene atmosphere, occasional
trips outside campus used to give us
the required dose of city life, with a
variety of eating and entertainment
options. Apart from the usual ghugni
and chai that we got outside campus,
one of our favourite hangouts was
Park Street. That was one place where
even students could afford to eat good
food. My favourite place was One Step
Up. There was Mocambo as well.
Placements were very important
to people in my class, with everyone
vying for ‘slot zero’. The two top job
options were investment banking
and consulting with three or four
of the world’s biggest consultants.
You could see the pressure building
up, and there would be some
students who would break down.
To sum it up, Joka (the campus,
as we fondly call it) provided a
very mature atmosphere which
lets people figure themselves out
with an incredible balance between
a highly competitive and a very
collaborative environment.
The author is the founder of Jabong.
com, Aquabrim, GoJavas and Pincap. He
is an alumnus of IIM-C (2006-2008)
APRIL 15, 2016 FORBES INDIA | 89
getty iMages
The campus of iiM-C is lush green, comprises several lakes, and is a sanctuary for migratory birds
Life recLiner
‘If You Owned a Modigliani,
You’d Rather Sell it in New York’
William Robinson, international head of world art at Christie’s auction house,
says Indian art has a strong market but it’ll take time for the country to become
a preferred place to sell international artworks
image courtesy: christie’s
By KathaKali Chanda
VS Gaitonde’s untitled masterwork (left)
fetched a record Rs 29.3 crore during an
auction by Christie’s in december 2015. a
granite figure of dvarapala was auctioned in
the same event; it was the first time Christie’s
dedicated an entire section to classical indian
art and antiques
Q Christie’s has been holding
auctions in India for three years
now. What’s your assessment of the
Indian art market in this period?
The market has been consistently
strong. The first sale showed great
strength throughout the category of
modern paintings, and it continued
90 | FORBES INDIA APRIL 15, 2016
with the second sale. The sale
percentages were similar in terms of
lots sold, and even though the total
was a little less in 2014, it was the
highest for any sale [in India] that
year. The year 2015 saw some strong
moments for Indian art: We set a
new world auction record for MF
Husain in June in London (Untitled,
1956, sold for $1.7 million), which
was followed by FN Souza (Birth,
1955, sold for $4.085 million) in
September in New York; it was then
a new world record for the category,
and still a record auction price for
the artist. The third India sale set the
highest total for any auction in India
at Rs 97.7 crore and the highest price
for Indian art, with VS Gaitonde’s
untitled masterwork going for Rs
29.3 crore. The latter also overtook
Souza to command the highest price
for any modern Indian work of
art. For the first time, we offered a
dedicated section to classical Indian
art and the response from our clients
and collectors was very positive,
with only one lot going unsold.
Q Where does that place India on
the world map? What does India
have to do to catch up with global
art hubs like London and New York?
The market in India at the moment
is a market for Indian art. It has
already more than caught up with
the London and New York markets
in that regard. For Indian art, the
Mumbai sales are our strongest. This
is what we save up for. There is a
very international buying audience,
especially with the modern and
contemporary works of art. In all
our three annual sales, the buyers of
the top lot have been from abroad.
However, we don’t sell [Amedeo]
Modiglianis in India and it will
be a long time till India becomes
a preferred place for selling
[international] works like his. If there
was a Modigliani that had an Indian
provenance and appeared with a
family in India, there would be a real
interest in it because it adds to the
history. But more of the highest prices
for modern and contemporary pieces
have been achieved in a place like,
say, New York. So, if you owned a
Modigliani, you’d rather sell it there.
Q Christie’s entered both India
and China in 2013. How would
you compare the two markets?
It’s difficult to compare, partly
because there are very different
regulatory provisions. In China, we
can’t sell anything that is older than
1949. Here, we can sell but there are
great restrictions on various importexport categories. What we are
trying to do separately is to develop
William Robinson, international head
of world art at Christie’s
markets that are appropriate for the
clients we have in India and China,
taking advantage of the extra interest
garnered for having a local sale.
Q Despite an economic slowdown,
there is a steep rise in prices for
artworks. In your first auction in
India, Gaitonde sold for Rs 23 crore,
a record that was beaten by another
Gaitonde selling for over Rs 29
crore last December. Recently, in
New York, Modigliani’s Reclining
Nude went for $170.4 million, the
second-most expensive piece of
artwork to be auctioned. How is
the art market continuing to beat
economic doldrums year after year?
First, good art is a scarce commodity.
So when you get auctions like these,
people want to buy. The other thing
is that while some markets haven’t
performed well, it is also true that
people who have money have a
huge amount of disposable income.
Art has been seen as a good place
for putting your money. That has
been a factor why Christie’s sales
have performed extremely well
over the last six to seven years.
Q Christie’s started online
auctions in 2012. How is that
helping the growth of art
appreciation and the market?
These things happen slowly. We
recently had our first online miniature
painting sale that performed very
well. Each online sale brings new
bidders. But this is part of a growing
process. We intend to grow the
online market in all areas of art.
Currently, over 25 percent of our
annual sales are online-only. Online
is fantastic for broadening our reach
and selling good art that Mr and Mrs
Smith would want; we may not yet
know the Smiths, and the internet
is a great way of reaching them.
But for great works of art, like
a Gaitonde, the live auction is a
wonderful place to sell. There is
something about the theatre of a
live auction that encourages people,
gives them a sense of excitement
that you don’t get in an online sale.
You still have very determined
bidders at times and pieces making
many multiples of the estimate, but
it will be a long time before we put
some major pieces of work online.
Q What do you think are some of
the richest forms of Indian art?
I was really impressed by “Sultans
of Deccan India 1500-1700”, an
exhibition that took place at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art last year.
I came to India three years ago and
spent quite a bit of time in the Deccan,
so there’s a personal echo there.
Some exquisite works have emanated
from places like Bidar, Gulbarga,
Bijapur, Golconda and Ahmednagar.
Q India also has a diverse heritage
of folk art, like Madhubani, Gond,
Patachitra, scrolls. How do you
think global organisations like
Christie’s can take it to the world?
There is an element where we are
reactive and an element where we
are proactive. For our sales, we will
have to sell what our clients want.
For local art, it’s more of what we
will do in our involvement with
museums. We are always looking
for opportunities within the market
for facilitation or links between
people using our huge network.
APRIL 15, 2016 FORBES INDIA | 91
Life recLiner
The Road Chief
Rides Again
Feather-light and ultracool,
the classic Bowlus trailer is rolling
after 80 years, thanks to the
drive of a father and daughter
By Mark Ewing
A
fter earning an
undergraduate degree in
economics at Wharton
and a master’s in finance
at the International University of
Monaco, Geneva Long knew she
had the entrepreneur’s itch—she
dreamed of updating and relaunching
forgotten brands. “I grew up watching
my parents passionately build
their company,” says the 25-yearold Long. “No matter the pivots or
missteps, they made working look
like the most fun you could have.”
Her parents, John Long and
Helena Mitchell, had pioneered
internet banking systems two decades
92 | FORBES INDIA APRIL 15, 2016
ago. “In 1999 Helena and I sold
Quadravision after growing it for
seven years to over 400 employees
serving financial institutions with
internet solutions in the US, Canada
and Europe,” explains John Long.
He spent his first years of early
retirement restoring a 1935 Bowlus
Road Chief travel trailer for road
tripping with his vintage 1937 Tatra,
which he showed at the Pebble
Beach Concours d’Elegance in
2011. “The positive reactions at the
Palm Springs Modernism Show
and by attendees at SXSW in 2010
encouraged the decision to rejuvenate
the brand,” he says. “Bowlus Road
Chief was actually a true zombie
trademark,” adds Geneva. “It was
never registered nor was it ever held
by another party, so securing it was
much easier than we anticipated.”
Developed by Hawley Bowlus in
the years after he led construction of
Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St Louis,
the Bowlus Road Chief was 80 years
ahead of its time. Bowlus, a world
leader in the design of sailplanes and
gliders who also worked on the early
development of the Learjet, brought
the engineering and design principles
of aircraft and race cars to the travel
trailer: A light weight, a low centre
of gravity, stable aerodynamics and
ride and shine: geneva Long and
her father, John, bought the zombie
trademark for the iconic Bowlus
trailer—a precursor to the airstream—
and breathed new life into the brand
not a square inch gone to waste. The
original Bowlus remains a marvel of
efficient packaging and Streamline
Moderne design. The iconic Airstream
trailer owes its very existence to
the Road Chief. (The Airstream
company was founded by former
Bowlus marketer Wally Byam.)
And original Road Chiefs still have
tremendous cachet: A 1935 Bowlus
went for $187,000 at the Gooding
& Co Scottsdale auction in 2011.
The Longs have brought the
Bowlus brand into the 21st century
since relaunching it in 2014. Ten Road
Chiefs were delivered in the past
year, and 25 are under construction,
cash deposits already banked. Prices
range from $115,000 for the simpler
Heritage Edition that sleeps three
to the $140,000 Open Road Edition,
which can accommodate four. Inside,
ceilings and paneling are maple
veneer on birch core, and owners
can choose from a range of colour
themes and special equipment.
“We gave a great deal of
consideration to how people work and
play today,” says John. “That’s why
we offer tablet and laptop charging
on the go with a cellular amplifier
so you can catch up effortlessly with
work or stream all your favourites. We
added solar-panel hookups with an
easy storage option and long-life AGM
batteries so you can travel where
and how you want. We want our
customers to follow their dreams with
as little to encumber them as possible.
“The vintage Road Chief served
as our style icon and design DNA,”
he continues. “While we elongated
the new Road Chief to 24 feet,
widened it to 80 inches and grew
the overall internal height to 6 feet 4
inches, we kept the original aircraft
quality of 2024-T3 aluminum along
with 5,000 aircraft-grade rivets to
create an ultra-strong monocoque
[French for “one hull”] lightweight
structure akin to an airplane wing or
fuselage.” Overall, the Road Chief tips
the scales at a featherweight 2,300
pounds, less than half the weight of
a comparable-length trailer. Due to
its superior aerodynamics and low
centre of gravity, just about any SUV
or crossover, and even some luxury
sedans, can tow it. As John explains:
“This appeals to many users who
don’t want to add a new vehicle just
to tow their travel trailer.” Geneva
regularly pulls her Road Chief
behind a V6-powered 2011 Porsche
Panamera, and Helena does the same
with her beloved Saab convertible.
Texas cardiothoracic surgeon
Staton Awtrey and his wife, Blythe,
exemplify the new Bowlus owner.
They traded their 27-foot Airstream
and requisite huge tow vehicle
for a Mercedes SUV and a Road
Chief. Blythe and their 5-year-old
daughter, Lillian, keep logbooks of
their travels so Lillian can replicate
them one day with her own children
in the very same Road Chief, which
Staton named Spirit of Adventure,
because it resembles the airship
in Lillian’s favourite movie, Up.
“The Bowlus Road Chief
captures imaginations,” John
Long says. “It encourages people
to wonder what’s next.”
APRIL 15, 2016 FORBES INDIA | 93
Life ApprAisAL
Car: Audi S5 Sportback
By Rahul RichaRd
Courtesy: overdrive
C
hoosing between a
beautiful two-door coupe
and a boring four-door
sedan is an eternal battle
between the head and the heart. Does
it make sense to spend more than Rs
60 lakh on, what many might think,
an impractical, inefficient alternative
to the older diesel Mercedes-Benz
C-Class parked in the garage?
That’s where the Audi S5 Sportback
comes in. It’s not too large, has four
seats, is comfortable and easy to drive,
looks pretty darn good and, most
importantly, has that sweet-sounding
3.0-litre V6 engine that doesn’t fail
to entertain. The S5 Sportback’s
supercharged 3.0-litre V6 puts out
440 Nm of torque, with Audi’s claims
of 0-100 kmph time of 5.1 seconds.
Like all other Volkswagen dualclutch transmissions, this slick 7-speed
S tronic transmission is swift and
precise. It also gets Audi’s Drive Select
with four modes—Efficiency, Comfort,
Dynamic and Individual. In Dynamic
mode, the gear-shifts are served up
faster, the throttle sensitivity increases
and the exhaust opens up fully to
give a sharp bellow that puts a smile
on your face. For best results, switch
94 | FORBES INDIA APRIL 15, 2016
without too much roll, while being soft
to manual and use paddle-shifters.
enough to allow a comfortable ride.
The car also gets larger discs that do
The S5 is a very good daily driver.
a pretty good job of bringing it to a
It slips and slides its way through
standstill from three-digit speeds.
traffic. The electric power steering
The S5 Sportback, like all other
feels quite light, and especially in
Audis, is a very friendly car to drive—
Comfort mode, the car feels almost
make a mistake and it’ll cover up
as easy as a D-segment car.
for you without a hiccup, thanks to
The S5 Sportback gets a new
the Quattro system. The big letplatinum-finish front grille bearing
down, though, are the 245-section
the S5 badge while the
Pirelli Cinturato tyres.
rear gets a lip spoiler
Sure, these low rolling
tech specs
and quad-exhaust tips.
resistance tyres claim to
Type
2,995cc supercharged petrol V6
The car also gets skirts
help with the efficiency,
all around, ‘V6T’ badges
but they squeal when
Power
333PS@5,5006,500rpm
on the front fenders and
pushed around the
Torque 440Nm@2,900platinum-finish outside
bends. To add to that,
5,300rpm
rearview mirrors to help
the car feels a little too
LxWxH 4718x2020x1382
differentiate it from
light: At 1,820 kg, it isn’t, (mm)
the regular A5 model.
but over crests at high
Price
Rs 62.95 lakh (exThe only downside
speeds, the car feels like
showroom Mumbai)
of the design is the
it’s almost taking off.
+ Efficient engine
lack of headroom.
Over roads that have a lot - Tyres
My favourite part?
of crests and corners, this
The V6 soundtrack.
can be a little unnerving.
The turbocharged five-cylinder
Audi has found the sweet spot
Audi Quattro from the 1980s makes
between sporty and comfortable
quite an iconic sound. In fact, it
with the S5’s suspension. Although it
manages to make me smile every
doesn’t get the adjustable suspension
time I watch a video of the car
of the more expensive Audis, it is stiff
tearing through a rally stage.
enough to handle the windy roads
Life Frequent FLier
My New York
The pulse of NYC is difficult to replicate in any other city
Recommendations
While on work, I mainly stayed at
the New York Hilton Midtown,
which is located on the Avenue of
the Americas. During my latest visit,
I stayed at the Waldorf Astoria.
New York has many hotels, and
now a large number of boutique
hotels have come up as well.
The subway is the best way to
get across town in Manhattan.
For short trips, jumping into a
cab works, otherwise walking
in NYC is always fun.
The best places to hold business
meetings are the many Regus
business centres across
the city. There are more
than 60 which are
conveniently located,
and they provide the
right professional
environment.
I love eating at the
diners and the local delis
in the city. Dining in SoHo
is a great experience, with the
multitude of restaurants that serve
cuisines from all across the globe. I
love to experiment each time I am
there, from Spanish tapas bars to
authentic Vietnamese restaurants.
After Hours
In NYC, a brisk walk works well to
charge me; the city is so dynamic.
Another option is to take some time
off to visit some of the great museums,
such as The Metropolitan Museum of
Art and The Guggenheim. The city has
a great nightlife, from the bars on the
Upper West Side to the ones in SoHo.
It also has great shopping options,
from large stores like Macy’s and
Bloomingdale’s to the shops
down Fifth Avenue and
Madison Avenue. You can
find all
sorts of brands in New
York, you just need
the time to explore the
city. On my last couple
of trips, I had picked
up some American wines
from California and Oregon.
Tips
Among the things you should avoid
is getting ripped off. However, this
could happen anywhere in the world
and is not restricted to New York City.
You should also check the weather
forecast before your visit to make sure
you pack the right clothes. It tends to
get very cold in and around winter.
The pulse of the city, the people,
and the culture of New York are great
and hard to replicate in any other city,
including any other American city.
Harsh Lambah is the country
manager (India) for the Regus Group
(Coordinated by Jasodhara Banerjee)
APRIL 15, 2016 FORBES INDIA | 95
Gary HersHorn / reuters
I
used to travel to New York City
(NYC) for work; now I travel
for pleasure, and try to plan a
trip once a year. The first thing
you notice when you get into the city
is the skyline; the Manhattan skyline
is majestic and singular. My first visit
to the city was as a student in 1992. I
was studying in the state of Indiana,
and my exposure to a large American
city until then was limited to Chicago.
But even that did not prepare me for
my first encounter with New York
City. It was truly unforgettable.
Life nuggets
A pick of the best, the latest, the greenest, the
quirkiest, the most luxurious... that money can buy
Style
Suede it Out
Johnston & Murphy’s
suede collection offers a
wide variety of formal and
semi-formal footwear that
embraces the heritage of
artisans from northern
Italy, who are fluent in
centuries-old techniques
yet remain contemporary.
Fine detailing makes the
shoes flamboyant, while
meticulous craftsmanship
keeps them comfortable.
johnstonmurphy.com
96 | FORBES INDIA APRIL 15, 2016
Home
Upcycled Light
Living Pixel is a series of lightfittings and lampshades made with
discarded advertising banners,
reflecting the upcycling ethos of
Hong Kong’s KaCaMa Design Lab.
Each lampshade is made with
banners specific for each re-used
stand, sorting out matching colours
and sewing each patch by hand
for the perfect irregular shape.
The white side of the banners face
outwards—when the lights are off,
they appear to be white; once lit,
they glow with a colour from within.
kacama.hk
tecH
For Mini Threatres
LG’s Minibeam PF1000u is an “ultrashortthrow” projector that can put a glorious 100inch image onto a wall from just 15 inches
away. Video plays in full 1080 phD, but your
room needs to be dark, dark, dark for optimal
quality. It comes with integrated speakers, Wi-Fi,
bluetooth and smart-TV software and apps.
lg.com
Style
Balancing Time
Starting a chronograph is a mechanical challenge as it disturbs
the main gear trains. To solve this problem, Breguet has fitted its
new Tradition Chronographe Indépendant 7077 model with
two independent trains that start a chronograph instantly, and
a patented chronograph balance-wheel in titanium that ensures
perfect symmetry with the movement balance-wheel. Available
in 18-carat white or rose gold, with a sapphire-crystal case back.
Breguet.com
Upcycled light, courtesy Better Interiors APRIL 15, 2016 FORBES INDIA | 97
thoughts
“Stay hungry,
stay foolish.”
—Steve JobS
on ManageMent studies
The business schools reward difficult complex behaviour
more than simple behaviour, but simple behaviour is
more effective. —Warren buFFett
illustration: Chaitanya dinesh surpur; top: KiMberly White / reuters
Management teams aren’t good at asking questions.
In business school, we train them to be good at giving
answers. —Clayton CHriStenSen
I got more out of the farm than Harvard Business School.
—GreG brenneman
You wouldn’t want to be called a sell-out by selling a
product. Selling out was frowned on, whereas now you
can major in it at business school. —alan alda
We mislead ourselves when we pretend we can make
someone into an effective manager by putting them
through a few courses in business school.
—mattHeW SteWart
When I came back to India after Harvard Business School,
I started as a lawyer and as a trade union leader.
—P CHidambaram
Formal education will make you a living; self education
will make you a fortune. —Jim roHn
98 | FORBES INDIA APRIL 15, 2016
“You can’t learn in school what the
world is going to do next year.”
— Henry Ford
Everyone needs a coach. It doesn’t matter whether
you’re a basketball player, a tennis player, a gymnast
or a bridge player. —bill GateS
In the United States we have the great Harvard Business
School, but America is the country with the greatest
debt in the world. —maHariSHi maHeSH yoGi
Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased
constantly, or it vanishes. —Peter druCker
Listen with the intent to understand, not the intent
to reply. —StePHen Covey
Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with
an open one. —malColm ForbeS
Business schools don’t create successful people.
They simply accept them, then take credit for
their success. —JoSH kauFman
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