My tryst with Mr Tata

I have never met him.

It was the monsoon of 2004 when I first visited Bombay House working on a takeover opportunity of a distressed asset being pursued by one of the Tata Group companies. It was the start of a period, that laid the foundation of my thinking on how to build an enterprise. Over the period of the next 9 months, I would have visited the most impactful Indian corporate headquarters 30-40 times with another unique transaction that has laid the foundation to my thinking of how I am building my venture that I set out to run 15 years later.

While I have never met the man, RNT as he was called by the executives, senior and junior in the Tata organization, every conversation, notes and summaries that were prepared made me realise what was important to RNT led Tata Group. Being ethically right and going beyond what the law required was the crux of thinking and no short-term actions, however beneficial was to be considered. As a young financial analyst involved in the project when I made a suggestion that there is a significant benefit reducing the employee count, I was gently asked to look for other options to extract value even we were in a competitive bidding for the asset and was at the risk of losing. During the course of the transaction, we knocked the doors of Supreme Court, that gave me an opportunity to prepare a brief for one of the sharpest legalminds of India, a former SG.

When we eventually lost the bid we regrouped to analyse reasons for the loss, the issue of overstaffing came up a senior executive remarked (my words) – “Employment has to go hand in hand with capital returns for a responsible business house”.

Around the same time, a group of scientists that had returned to India from US a couple of years earlier wanted to pursue “Drug Discovery” when CRaMS as an idea was picking up. Every Venture capitalist considered the idea of “Drug Discovery” as too risky to back them. We took them to the Tatas and a mutually beneficial structure emerged. A structure that had a division to raise cash (CRO) and a division that will consume cash (DD). The focus was to discover drugs that can make lives of millions of Indians better and in the process “Create Value” for the capital! It was unique as not too much capital was invested and some of the under-productive group assets were transferred as seed in the venture. Since, not much was invested by way of capital, and the fee for our services as envisaged in our engagement letter was peanuts. But they upheld the spirit to pay “fairly” for our services.

At the end of these engagements, one of the executives asked if I want to move to their side (and that was my bonus on the transaction). Unfortunately, I could not join as I was moving to US for my Masters. When I met him 6 years later, the offer stood.

When I graduated from University of Chicago, the first offer I received was from a PE – FoF that was founded by CoS of a former PoTUS. One of the Tata CEOs gracefully agreed to be my professional reference and mere mention of his name was good enough. The reference was never checked (an information I got when I met him later).

That 9 months when I worked alongside the senior executives of Tata Sons and other Tata Companies was much more than what an Advance Management Program from the best B-School could help me learn.

From caring for employees to not taking a short-cut or chasing short term goals to positively impacting clients and being fiercely competitive and ambitious all along to create value for stakeholders and the society at large – It was a masterclass in Management.

When I set out building Wealth Yantra Technologies Private Limited - RIA , a bootstrapped venture – I set the following

(a)????Impact families positively – work with the aspirational Indian middle class households to help them achieve financial independence

(b)???Keep employees at the core of the organization – build processes around them and benefit them with long term equity ownership [few of my early team members in their 20’s have equity upside and I hope they understand the value and the trust I have placed in them]

(c)????Two divisions – although correlated to each other, the revenue models will be different and one will support the other (one that generates revenue and one that will burn cash)

(d)???Focus on sustainable growth – one for the long term and one that does not have a high capital intensity.

(e)????Have a stress-free workplace – this is a work in progress

(f)?????Spirit over letter of the rule and ethics alongwith compliance to rule

(g)???Give back a certain % of our earnings (and my time) to societal impact

I hope to build an organization that RNT would be proud of.

I hoped to meet him one day and pay my respects to him for shaping my thinking.

I can never meet him now.

Thank you SIR

- An Eklavya!

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