An interview with Ashutosh Tiwari

Impact Series Session with Ashutosh Tiwari

Interview taken by Monika Shrestha

First aired via Zoom in September 2020

About Impact Series: Impact Series is a platform to that is designed to bring together youth in Nepal and the Nepalese diaspora abroad to engage in meaningful discussions. Through bringing in experts from various sectors to share their experience and knowledge we aim to foster inspired action amongst youth to make a positive impact for Nepal. The series covers a whole range of topics such as entrepreneurship, politics, socio-economic landscape, environment, healthcare, and technology.

About the Interviewer: Monika Shrestha is a big believer of life-long learning and is passionate about youth and women empowerment along with raising awareness around mental health issues. She currently works in Business Development at Wiseyak, an Artificial Intelligence Driven Healthcare company. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Development Economics from SOAS, University of London and a Masters in Management from Imperial College London. In 2012, she started Youth Initiated Services, a platform for youth to start community service, gain support from peers, network and learn leadership skills. Having lived, studied and worked in various countries around Asia and Europe she is excited to bring back her knowledge, while continuing to learn.

Introduction: Ashutosh Tiwari is the Founder at SAFAL Partners, Nepal’s first business operations-focused investment and consulting firm, which works with micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs). He is also the Chairman of Society of Entrepreneurship Educators (SEE), which is an organization of academics, practitioners and investors, and which is based at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, India. 

Prior to SAFAL, he was the CEO at Sherpa Adventure Gear-Nepal. Earlier in his career, he served as the Country Director at WaterAid Nepal, during which he was an elected Chairman of AIN, the Association of 114 International NGOs in Nepal. From 2007 to 2009, he was the CEO at Himalmedia, where he negotiated with labour unions and turned the company around financially and operationally. In 2008, he co-founded Entrepreneurs for Nepal (E4N), an institution that helped kick-start Nepal’s organized entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Early in his career, he worked for the International Finance Corporation (IFC) in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and for German Technical Co-operation (GiZ) in Kathmandu. He started his career in Nepal as a social strategist, assisting ethnic Tharu activists to launch a successful grassroots movement that ended up making the practice of kamaiya or bonded agricultural labour illegal in Nepal. In 2011, the World Economic Forum in Geneva honoured him as a Young Global Leader.

Question: You have worked in leading positions in a diverse number of industries and types of organisations -- both corporate and non-profit. What are some lessons you’ve learnt through your work experience that you’d like to share with our youth today?

Looking back, even though my career has been an idiosyncratic one, I think can piece together four lessons that I have learnt, and perhaps others can learn too.

First, do not be afraid to try out new things in life or in your career. That said, you should not try out new things if there are three clear and present risks: a possibility of utter and complete financial ruin, a possibility of death or severe illness, and a possibility of an irreversible loss of reputation. Most things we try out in our normal day-to-day lives do not carry any or all of these risks. So, I say – go ahead and try out new things, new interests, new jobs, new careers, new hobbies, etc. Your life will be richer for the experience, no matter what the outcome is. 

Second, learn to figure out how things work, what goes in and what comes out and how, how an organization works, how a business makes and loses money, and so on. Understanding the connection between and the interplay of the constituent parts of a system or an organization or a concept is important. Learning to do all this requires asking a lot of questions, doing some quiet study and meeting people for conversations. But once you learn to figure out how things work, how its elements are put together, you can then look for ways to add value by doing what you do best.

Third, develop good relations with all kinds of people. People give you opportunities. People champion you. People talk about you – positively or negatively to others. This is all part of life. My rule of thumb is: be helpful and useful to others whenever and however you can be, assuming that you have time to spare. Have friends of different ages, genders, backgrounds, professions, ethnicities, nationalities and life experiences. The wider your network is, the more resilient your career will be in the face of shocks and difficulties.

Fourth, trust yourself. Have faith in yourself. Unless you are asked to do brain surgery or walk on a tightrope above the Kathmandu Valley, do not say “I can’t do it.” That only lets you down for no reason. We all know more than we think we know. We can ask questions, learn on our own, learn from others, try out and fail and learn, struggle to figure things out and eventually get it, and so on. The process of learning hard and new things is never easy, but can be enormously rewarding. Trusting ourselves that we can do new things, and do them well over time with effort could well be an attitudinal issue, but I see this as necessary fuel.

Finally, in my case, I’ve benefitted from two other X factors. One is that I have been very lucky in many instances. I believe that luck explains a large part of one’s success. And the other is that I have benefited much from other’s unexplainable kindness – from my teachers, mentors, bosses, colleagues, friends and even strangers who took risks on me, championed me, supported me even when I floundered here and there, and gave me opportunities to do good work.

Question: What’s the biggest factor that has helped you be successful?

I am not sure whether I consider myself successful. Success can mean different things to different people. But over the years, certain habits have helped me. Please do know that I did not have these habits when I was younger. I had to develop them over time by consciously practicing them. I believe that all habits can be developed provided we spend time developing them.

Anyway, in my case, being open to new experiences, making a daily investment on studying and learning, and focusing more on my uncertain and exciting future ahead and rather than falling back on my supposedly ‘glorious’ past have helped me take on new challenges as they come. 

Question: What was the hardest decision you ever had to make?

About 13 years ago, I was involved in restructuring a major media company. Like most private Nepali companies, the company was overstaffed. It was bleeding money, and was on the verge of closing down. It had a militant labour union affiliated with the then Maoist Party. I was hired as the CEO to sort out the management difficulties.

One of my major tasks was to let go more than 60 people, most of whom had worked there for all their lives. Deciding who to keep and who to let go and why, was the hardest decision I had to make. I learnt that it was easier to make decisions about things and stuff, but much harder to make decisions about people. And these people had families, children and so on, other people who relied on them. The job at the media company had given them security, dignity, social prestige and a sense of identity. I felt that I was taking all of that away from them. It did not feel good, and I wrestled for days with my conscience.

But ultimately I decided that a well-run media company would add more value to the society, in terms of reporting the truth and holding the government accountable, and, if and only if financially healthy, it would hire more journalists and reporters down the road. I gritted my teeth, took the verbal abuse from the staff who were let go, and saw the restructuring process through despite threats from the labour union which later turned out to be physically violent. But that’s a story for another day.

Fortunately, despite my initial worry, almost all who were laid off either found jobs at other media houses or started their own media- or printing-related ventures. These days, I meet them here and there in Kathmandu, and I sense that the bitterness, if any, is long gone. Instead, we talk about those days like army veterans reminiscing about some long-fought war.

Question: With Covid we know that certain sectors are having a harder hit that others - where do you see the opportunities and which industries are going to see a rise in profits?

You talk about profits, but I think that profit is like happiness in that if you seek it, you will lose it. You become all the more miserable when you actively seek happiness. Just as happiness is actually a by-product of a well-lived life, profit is a by-product of a well-run business. And a well-run business always focuses on addressing the pain point of its customers. Serve the customers well, manage the company well, be patient, and the revenues will follow. This is my mantra.

In this context, a well-run company keeps its costs and expenses low. It is adaptive to changes. It has a strong internal culture of performance, and, it has a healthy cash cushion to get through the difficult times. This is all standard stuff.

The pandemic has not changed these fundamentals of running a business. It has changed the direction and the magnitude of certain business opportunities.

As such, I see opportunities in healthcare services, broadly defined, in e-commerce, logistics and product and service delivery, education at all levels, work-from-home market, home-based jobs, nutrition, and so on. Many industries are taking on digital avatars, and the pandemic has accelerated this trend.

Question: A lot of traditional companies are trying to adapt to the new way of working and shift towards adopting digital technology - what are some positives around this change and what are some things we need to be preserve?

Digital technology has been great for contactless services. It has brought innovations and lowered transaction costs. In Nepal’s case, there are security and privacy issues, which have not been resolved. We regularly see passwords and phone numbers stolen from e-commerce sites leaked online, for instance.

But overall, we have relatively weak digital infrastructure. We rank 111 globally in terms of internet speed. The bundle of digital services we have costs more, and is therefore not widespread, though the spread of mobile phone is encouraging. In terms of investing for the future, there is little support for tech or tech-using start-ups in terms of funding, mentorship, working space, business know-how, technology, and the like. It is changing, but very slowly relative to, say, Bangladesh. I would not even talk about India, which is light years away.

As a nation, we have to invest on talents and technology, and see technology as an input that is going to accelerate changes in many areas of our lives. 

Question: I heard in one of your talks where you mentioned we need to look at the strength of our country and not the weaknesses - what are the strengths and opportunities youth can tap into?

I agree with Peter Drucker, the management expert, that it is easier to grow one’s strengths than improve one’s weaknesses. The same applies to countries too.

Nepal’s strengths are many: we have a large pool of young workforce, including a big segment of urban, English-comprehending population. It’s a shame that young people do not find jobs in Nepal, and have no choice but to migrate abroad. We may not yet have a base for massive agribusiness companies, but there is scope for high-end niche products, grown in the Himalayan mountainous regions. I am thinking of cardamom, ginger, herbs, coffee, timmur, etc.

There is scope for Nepal to negotiate favorable trade treaties with countries around the world to place its products and services on the global value chain, especially in agriculture, where greater value lies when products are closer to the market than are in the farm.

Likewise, in tourism too, we have done little to capture high value tourism. Nepal’s Hindu and Buddhist heritage is a big draw, for example. Industries that require plenty of cheap energy, say, from hydropower, could be established in the Tarai belt. With excellent weather and scenic views, some parts of Nepal could well be developed as hubs for corporate retreats and training, and for global digital nomads to come and work.

I could go on about adventure sports, jungles and rhinos, and so on, but to really play our strengths globally, we have to first invest seriously in our people through good education. We have to make it easier to transfer knowledge and skills, provide training and an enable more exchanges of ideas with others from around the world. Innovation thrives best where there is a constant intermingling of ideas and influences.

Question: We all have ideas but to bring them to fruition takes grit - what would you advise youth who are thinking of pursuing their own business?

I tell them that no matter how highly we regard our Kathmandu Valley, it is not Silicon Valley, and that they are not the next Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, about to drop out of Harvard.

Instead, I advise them not to drop out of Nepali colleges where they are full-time students, and where they should aim to finish the academic programs in which they have enrolled. Given Kathmandu’s entrepreneurial ecosystem’s various real constraints, I tell them to first go and work for others, and spend three years or more building a network, understanding office culture, learning to hire people, working with others of different ages and backgrounds, sensing the market’s or the customers’ pain points, and coming up with solutions to address those pain points.

While getting paid to do the work for others, they should use the time to learn how things fit together and how they don’t, and be open to feedback from all. Besides, working for others is a great way sharpen one’s non-money sales skills such as ability to convince others’ of your ideas, to persuade and influence them to see your point of view.

Only when you sense that your solution is superior to what exists in the market should you do a start-up to speedily commercialize your solution. In entrepreneurship, everyone knows that luck, skills and timing matter, but no one knows in what combination or proportion you need them. As such, every start-up is basically a continuous experiment until you get the right results which you can scale up. You need to be comfortable with this process of experimentation. I understand that much of this advice can be boring to some people, but others do seem to appreciate this approach.   

Question: Do you need to have an innovative idea to start a successful business?

Not necessarily. A hair-salon can be a successful business, if it serves its customers well. Innovation is desirable, but it often emerges in the process of doing something. So instead of obsessing about innovation in a start-up’s work, do the work, and see where you can innovate in a bit-by-bit manner. Innovation makes products or services cheaper (i.e. less price) or better (i.e. in terms of quality and quantity) or faster (i.e. time saved) or all three at once. It could be a function of technology, or of process or approach. Best innovators are habitual tinkerers or experimenters.

Question: What are some ways to validate your idea before investing too much time, money and energy into something that may have little scope?

I suggest entrepreneurs to go join an incubator, if possible. That is one low-risk way to test your idea and get feedback from others. An incubator gives you social connections to trainers, mentors, advisers and investors who can ask questions to help you think through your ideas better. Or, if they are working full-time, they can do a start-up on week-ends, and see how that goes. They can team up with others, while they provide the idea and others do the work. The point is: There is no one right way to do the start-up. Just get started, and let the learning emerge in the process.

Question: What are the top three things investors look for in early stage start-ups?

If an investor asks about profits and return on investment at that stage, run. That investor does not understand early stage start-ups. Instead, seasoned investors at that stage ask: What customer pain point is this start-up trying to address? How large is that market? How is this start-up’s approach different from what exists out there? Do these people have the drive and the determination to see things through? Are they open to feedback and learning? Are they one-man-with-a-phone type of an entrepreneur who likes to give motivational speeches to clueless college kids or someone who can quietly build, develop, train and grow a team?

The focus here is primarily on the founder, the team and their collective strengths. Most investors know that entrepreneurs at that stage are in a risky but experimental stage, and that they may well pivot to something else if the idea A does not work out. Moreover, they look at a seven-to-12-year horizon, which can be a bit too long for most Nepali investors.   

Question: What is a must-read book you’d recommend?

My reading taste is eclectic. My wife jokes that I read big fat books – you know, biographies, history, economics, science, philosophy, public affairs, and so on, which may not be to everyone’s liking.

But if I were to give a book to an 18-year-old, I would give Steven Covey’s classic The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I may not find new ideas in that book if I read it now, but when I first read it in my late teens, it had a profoundly positive effect on how I viewed my habits. I especially liked its habit number three, which is all about ‘putting first things first’ or completing one’s priorities.