Follow Up on Information Sharing and Networking in India

I have received some interesting comments in response to my take on networking and information sharing in India . . . .

 

Nitin Sacheti, a former Uchicago classmate of mine, says:

there’s definitely a smaller circle in India amongst which people more freely share ideas but I think the difference in comfort levels in sharing ideas is solely a function of the number of capital allocators in the financial world of a particular country. I think that if you look at it on a size basis---IE look at the total number of people in india that are in the 2-3 degree base and compare that to the same number of people in the US that are at the top of the financial stratosphere, you’ll see that information is just as easily disseminated, but the difference is in the US, it’s a lot harder to break into that small group of people bc it’s so much wealthier and older. I also think that because of the stricter government regulations and easier monitoring of the financial markets in the US, it makes people more guarded with information. I find that when many people who work for large public cos, find that I work for a hedge fund, they are much more guarded about work stories bc there’s a more concrete risk/consequence to sharing information so openly—ala Sarbanes oxley.

 

I fully agree with Nitin – SarbOx and the culture of litigation makes American business-types more likely to restrict information sharing.  Furthermore, it is much easier to break into the financial / business community in India.  I should say, though, that my aggressive personality does help – i.e. I have no qualms in repeatedly sending people emails until I get a meeting.  At NSR and even with my parents sometimes, I send emails with “PLEASE READ AND RESPOND” tagged on to the end of the subject line. 

 

Ravi Gurnani, a good friend and winetrepreneur, says:

try sharing or getting some information out of the any govt departments.. extracting info from the authorities is like drawing water out of a stone.. thats when you realise its the extreme opposite to this scenario

 

With my minimal amount of experience at dealing with the Indian government, I would have to agree.  If you have a personal relationship (or are able to build a personal relationship) with these officials, though, I would imagine that extracting information would be easier. 

Impossible is Nothing? and other Irrelevant Questions that Add Absolutely No Value

The last portion of this Seth Godin blog post talks about the two types of questions encountered at a meeting:

1. Questions designed to honestly elicit more information
2. Questions designed to demonstrate how much you know or your position on an issue and to put the answerer on the defensive

 

I think that Investment Bankers are bred to ask the second question and furthermore, the “CYA” (cover your ass) mentality is drilled into you from the moment you start as an analyst or associate at any investment bank.  That was the state I was in before I quit banking and ultimately ended up in Private Equity – I didn’t even know that being curious could add value!  I very quickly learned from the NSR founding partners that “question number 2” and the general CYA mentality would not take me very far.  Ironically, it really was our former Mckinsey senior associates who helped me fully understand how to add-value with questions rather then demonstrate knowledge.  I say ironically because I found myself doing a bit of “CYA” towards the end of my tenure at NSR – obviously because once I decided to leave, my motivation level wasn’t all there (see!  that is typical CYA).  Truth be told, if you are generally interested in a subject or a project you will likely find yourself naturally more curious and willing to “dive deeper” to gain more knowledge.  I’m just going to have to find something that I truly love doing to completely get rid of this banker mentality!

How to Get Information in India (or Why India is Better than the U.S.)

Getting important and relevant information that I require (both personally and professionally) in India is much easier then getting it in the U.S.  A lot of information can be found from a Google search but to make it contextually relevant you generally require someone’s opinion – and one that you trust.  I have found that getting in touch with these “experts” and getting information from them is very very easy in India.

 

Let me preface this post by making two comments.  When I refer to professional and social networks I am referring those in a specific strata of society – people who generally make what a NYC professional would make (no, not a banker) or live that lifestyle due to family wealth.  There just aren’t that many people making / having that much money in India.  Secondly, I am making generalizations to make a point but there are a lot of exceptions to the rule (not enough that I can’t make the generalization). 

 

So this group of people who don’t have any problem with money are a small group that tend to socialize and do business with each other.  This makes for a very small very interconnected network.  The law of “six degrees of separation” becomes three at a maximum!  It also creates an environment where it is very easy to reach people who have the knowledge that you are seeking – all it takes is a few phone calls.   

 

The small network of people who are very interconnected is a large part of why information is disseminated so fast and effectively in India but is by no means the only one.  I have found that the concept of “networking” – who you know and who you can connect to each other – commands a high amount of value in relationships in India.  You can win a lot of business by knowing the right people vs. having the best product (I know, this is a BIG generalization).  Furthermore, Indians in this strata of society are less guarded with their opinions and much more open to talking about themselves and their businesses – as compared to Americans.  I have found that as soon as you demonstrate some small piece of knowledge on a relevant topic, the person you are trying to get information from will find your knowledge gratifying and really “open up.”

 

From learning about some random scoring system in Bridge to the number of telecom towers a small independent tower company has, I can get the information more quickly and with a lot more accuracy than I was able to in the U.S.  The real dent in my argument is that I have been out of the U.S. for three years and have also grown personally and professionally.  Well, I'm going back next month for a one month trip . . . Let’s see what I think when I get back . . . . .

Summer Camp has Begun – Maintaining the schedule without committing to another person is tough!

Instead of diving right into a new venture (although I am thinking about what to do constantly) I have set up a “summer camp” of sorts for myself for the next month.  The PLAN (and i stress plan for reasons I will explain below) is as follows:

- Conversational Hindi classes – three times a week for one hour

- Yoga classes – twice a week in the morning for one hour

- Cooking classes – 2-3 times a week for 1-1.5 hours

- Sailing classes – 2 times a week for 2-3 hours

- Bridge classes – 3 times a week for 1 hour

 

Only the Hindi and Yoga classes are actually paid for, fully scheduled classes.  Cooking “class” is with our home cook, sailing classes is regular sailing with a “tindel” on-board who does not speak a work of English and bridge classes are, as of now, non-existent (though I am spending time reading and learning online).  It has not been for a lack of trying though!

 

I am afraid that without having a set, committed, schedule with a teacher that i have paid for, it will be tough to maintain my motivation.  Having that monetary pressure plus feeling of responsibility to another person makes it more likely that I will learn.  Take bridge, for example – I started by scheduling an hour of time for myself at home.  First lesson was easy but with all the distractions I have on my computer it is easy to slip. 

 

If any of you have any other ideas of how to keep myself motivated please do let me know!

End of an Era: My Last Day at NSR – It has been a pleasure!

Forgive me, I have been trying to send out an email to everyone outside of NSR informing them of my new contact info but unfortunately the NSR server won’t let me send out so many emails at once.  More importantly (for me) stupid Facebook won’t let me export the email addresses or at least send a mass fb message to all my friends.  What a pain.  Regardless below is the email I sent to NSR – I believe it has the right touch of humor and good will to maintain my bridges with them going forward.  Look for an email from me with my new contacts as soon as I figure out a solution.

 

Dear All,

As my tenure at NSR comes to an end I have had the chance to reflect on the my past 2 years here; I am proud of the firm and how much progress we have made.  I remember my initial few months with the firm in early 2007 when we had offices in the Hilton towers and were doing everything from looking for deals to designing offices (and in my case, buying the coffee machine – thank you very much!).  Since then we have made significant progress in becoming a world-class private equity firm and have some of the smartest investing professionals in India.  We have also established some great investment screening and monitoring processes (which we always strive to improve).  Most importantly, we have developed great personal and professional relationships with all of our colleagues (from Mumbai to NYC to Dubai; from founding partners to Assistants). 

 

I think I am a better person for having worked with you all both because I grew my professional skill set and because I have made some great friends.  I will really miss this place and I hope that I get the chance to work together again with some of you in the future (I envision a future where I can boss Harsha and Nithin around!). 

It is unclear what my plans are for the future but I intend to do a little bit of “soul searching” and obviously have some fun (re: bridge classes!) before I figure out what the next step is.  Importantly, I plan to remain in India where I feel the maximum amount of opportunity lies.

 

I plan to keep in touch with all of you and insist that you be nice when I call you to ask for advice, introductions or most importantly cash! 

Crayon Physics Deluxe and the Art of NOT Being Embarrassed by Childish Things

I know this is going to sound very nerdy . . . . . over the last two weeks as I have finished transitioning my projects on to other colleagues I have found myself with some free-time.  I was thinking about how much fun Lego and those Meccano / Erector sets were when I was a kid so I started searching for similar games / toys I could play on my computer.  I quickly found a piece of software that Lego released but unfortunately it isn’t as fun online as it is in real life. 

 

So that got me thinking . . . what is it about these “engineering” and “construction” toys that I like.  So, as a natural electrical or mechanical engineer (which I'm not which is why this is so nerdy), I started doing searches for PC games with good “physics engines.”  As expected, Line Rider, a game we have all seen at one point (I hope!) came up fairly high on the search rankings.  Two great games, though, also came up.  The World of Goo and Crayon Physics Deluxe.  They are absolutely stunning games and are even more phenomenal when played on a tablet PC.

 

The World of Goo is like a Meccano set where you have to build structures made of “goo” across bridges and fire-pits, etc to get them to the other side, as it were.  There are a lot of twists and turns a long the way that change the properties of the “goo balls” which make it fun, also the graphics are quite good.  If you play this game at work and nobody knows what it is, people will definitely think you are doing something NSFW just due to the name. 

 

Crayon physics deluxe basically makes you draw structures (lines, levers, pulleys, etc) that help in moving one crayon drawn ball towards a crayon drawn star.  You win each level by hitting the star with the ball.  The items you draw follow the laws of gravity and that is what makes the game fun.  The word “crayon” in the name of the name of the game should serve as a warning that the game looks like a piece of construction paper with crayon drawings on it.  It is basic, it looks childish, but it is amazing.

 

Waiting in the Mumbai airport waiting to go to Dubai for an NSR offsite, I whipped out my tablet laptop and told my colleagues to check out CPD (what I call Crayon Physics Deluxe – I know, don’t say it).  Now at first they were extremely skeptical  and chided me on my childishness and nerdiness (when I explained how I found the game).  Since they couldn’t go anywhere I had them watch me play a level.  They were a bit skeptical but still saw how I could find it fun.  When I put the tablet pen in their hands and told them to play they were absolutely addicted!  It was so funny to see three grown men fighting and whining over who got to play the next level.  I’ve beaten the entire game and the entire Analyst / Associate pool is not far behind me. 

 

So that brings me to the moral of this story.  Childishness is good?  Well, I'm not sure what the moral is but hey, once you figure it out, tell me!

Reflecting on Two Years at New Silk Route

I was the first Junior hire my NSR made and, as such, have seen the firm grow from a startup where hierarchy structures and decision making processes weren’t defined to an institution with defined processes and what I would call a “loose hierarchy.”  Over the past weekend, I went to Dubai with NSR for one of our bi-yearly off-sites where we, as a firm, reflected on our development as a firm, discussed and debated our portfolio companies, and made decisions on how to move forward as a firm and with our portfolio companies.  The time also gave me a chance to reflect over my own development over the past two years. 

 

Interestingly, I realized that I enjoyed my first year at NSR a bit more then my second year.  Being the only junior team member among five India partners (now four) and four “founding” partners put me in a very important position where my time and decisions were very valuable.  My initial decisions helped to create our current processes and team; my visibility to the senior team was very high.  This, I think, made me feel very important and valuable – that feeling decreased somewhat my second year. 

 

Don’t get me wrong, my second year at NSR was great and I truly enjoyed it – just not as much as my first year.  As our processes became more defined and our team grew bigger, my visibility decreased and thus I felt less important to the firm.  This is natural since we hired some phenomenal senior associates who have much more experience at running processes, doing analyses and managing teams.  I have learned a lot from them but the trust and interaction with the senior team increasingly flowed through the senior associates because they were smarter and more responsible!

 

The lesson,I think, is to convince them to elect me as a Partner!  For now, I’ll just keep exploring what types of jobs / industries I could enjoy.  My sense is that I am more suited for that “startup” type of environment.

Going all “John Galt” on Obama

Robert Tracinski (a fellow University of Chicago Graduate) the editor of The Intellectual Activist, an Objectivist web publication, points out that the mainstream media in the U.S. has started using some of Ayn Rand’s “Objectivist” language to describe the heavy increase in government scope since Obama came into power in the U.S.  John Galt is one of the main characters in Atlas Shrugged (see my earlier post) who leaves the system and goes on strike – against a centrally planned government, of course.  I bet if Ayn Rand were still around she would see an easy path from Obama’s “Big Government” to Stalin’s centrally planned economy.  And we all know what happened to Stalin’s regime! 

 

One of my good friends hates Ayn Rand and the philosophy of Objectivism.  He hilariously points out that Ayn Rand is “the sort of person who a smarmy Florida patent attorney quotes to justify his obscene living.”  That aside, Obama has re-energized a large portion of the American population (and global population too) who did not believe, or were just tired of, the political system.  His youth and ability to speak have persuaded people that there is an actual vision for the future; something which is tangible.  The die has been cast as to whether the future will turn out the way he wants!

Transitioning out of the Corporate – My last Month with New Silk Route

This is my last month as a full-time employee at New Silk Route (“NSR”).  I am very excited and scared to leave the firm – I was the first junior guy they hired and really feel like I have had a significant impact in how the firm has grown.  I am sad to leave this small team of people that I respect and continue to learn from on a daily basis but I understand that I need the “threat” of zero-income to motivate me to make money in some other way! 

 

Leaving a small, tight-knit, firm like NSR is tough.  There are no formalized transition processes as I am the first non-Partner to leave the firm.  As I transition my portfolio company responsibilities to my colleagues, I have learned the value of my knowledge-base and contact-base within the firm, with our portfolio companies and with the universe of service companies we work with on a daily basis (auditors, bankers, consultants, etc).  I wish I had done this type of exercise before – it has helped me to understand how valuable I am to my peers and bosses.  Don’t get me wrong, my colleagues will be able to manage easily without me but there will be at least a few months of a learning curve to get up to speed.  Additionally, my motivation to work and quality of work since I decided to leave has waned a bit so the threshold to meet will be lower.

 

So what will I miss?  I will miss working with some very smart people on a daily basis (both Partners and Non-Partners).  The junior pool of people in India are not only my colleagues but also my friends.  I will see them after work and on the weekends after I leave but I won’t have the benefit of interacting with them on an informal basis during the workday.  I have also realized that I will miss being in the “flow” of business information – seeing new companies, talking to entrepreneurs and VIPs, etc.  A few friends of mine and I are working on a way to maintain this “flow” of information but I will talk about that in a future post . . . .

 

Keep coming back for more!

What to Do With Your Life Besides Make Money and Outperform Your Peers

Since I graduated from college and began my “corporate life” I have never taken a step back to determine what my personal goals and aspirations are.  From a professional perspective it was easy to fall into the trap of comparing myself to my peers in terms of performance and pay.  Thus, the goal became to outperform my peers both operationally and in terms of the amount of money I could make.  I never gave a thought as to why I was making money – to what end?  Nor did I really think about what exactly is it that I would enjoy to do!

 

Two years ago as I was leaving my job at Merrill I began to feel that I needed to find a better “purpose” in my life, not to find the “answer” but to figure out what I wanted vs. what society told me I wanted.   Being aware of these thoughts is tough because finding an answer is REALLY tough.  I ultimately fell back into the trap of working for money and prestige precisely because the answers are tough to find; it is easier to ignore the answers then to confront them head-on.  Tim Ferriss’s book the Four Hour Work Week really helped me open my eyes and think about the “why” and “what” by giving a structured method to think about my life goals.  At the beginning of the book he asked direct questions that helped tackle my fears and define worst-case scenarios.  This exercise ultimately freed me to think about all of the positive possibilities / outcomes as well. 

 

After defining my biggest fear – to lose my entire net-worth and the respect of my friends and family (realizing of course that losing the net-worth is much easier then losing the respect of my friends and family) – I proceeded with Tim Ferriss’s dreamscape exercise.  Basically I had to think about what my ultimate life-goals would be in the next 6 months in an ideal world (where I would not have to worry about money).  Very simple for me -

1. Spend a month in Buenos Aires
2. Learn how to cook
3. Learn Hindi properly
4. Learn Bridge
5. Get my own fully furnished apartment on rent (I'm talking a really NICE place!) in Mumbai

 

Based on this initial list I had to figure potential costing and a definite way to prove that I have achieved the goal -

1. spend a month in Buenos Aires (USD 1,500 round trip –> ~USD 6,000 total spend including rent)
2. Prepare an Indian meal for my family alone (lessons free from my cook!)
3. Speak to my cook for five minutes without stuttering or pausing to translate in my head (~INR 5,000)
4. Play bridge for an hour with my dad and his friends (~INR 5,000 for a teacher)
5. Apartment on rent (~INR 50,000 per month)

 

Now with realistic actionable goals and an understanding of the end-product (for skills learned especially) it makes it easy to break down these tasks into smaller and more actionable items.  I can also see from the above list what goals are realistic and what goals I will need more money for.  More importantly, though, I realized that I can achieve my dreams for less then I thought (if I were to spread the costs over 6 months it would be INR 100,000 per month [including a 30% buffer for extra expenses]).  Going back to my obsession with GTD, this type of thinking is helpful because now I can define specific steps to achieve my goals vs. being paralyzed by larger less general objectives. 

 

Now the key is, how do I make enough money to afford an apartment and go to Buenos Aires.  I am going to start learning my new skills next week!