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Why Consensus Doesn’t Lead to Greatness
Long ago, during an evening stroll with a retired VC in New York (from Bessemer), I asked him, "What differentiated your best investments from the others? Could you have seen them coming?" He said, "My best investments were the ones where some team...
Recent Posts
The key to success lies in focus
In the first semester at IIT Kanpur, I noticed this guy whose class notes would just be half a page of tiny scrawl, scribbled with a ball-point...
Finding meaning beyond luxury
I realized the beauty as well as the futility of luxury during my job at a private equity fund. In that company, every few months, we had offsites...
Start every day as a beginner
At an investors’ conference in Mumbai, I once asked a guy, “So, what do you do?” He was so stunned that for a few seconds he was speechless. Then,...
Unseen side of human nature
On 31st Oct 2002, a bloody riot on the roads of Trivandrum showed me an unseen side of human nature. That morning, a protest march of 20,000 people...
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Acknowledging small wins on the journey to success
When I got into the Civil Services, my mind did not go ‘Wow, this is great news.’ It was more like -- ‘Ok, this is done. Now, what next?’ All my life, I have chased the next mountain to climb. As a result, I ended up trying a lot of different...
Commitment is the key to learning
At the fag end of my MBA, having had enough of finance courses and the hyper-competitive MBA crowd, I wanted a short break from the rat race. So I signed up for ‘History of Western Classical Music’, a course outside Wharton, offered by the music...
You can’t run away from reality forever
In 2009, when I first joined private equity investing, I found that we MBAs understood finance less than a typical Marwari businessman. Most investors talk only about growth and multiples (usually EV/EBITDA) but rarely does anyone ask: Is this firm...
Prioritization in life
It was so unfair -- we were all fit, thirty-something guys, pitched against a team that included senior people, including a 70-year old. This friendly football match during a company offsite, in my last job, was going to be a no-contest. And it...