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e50b54ebd142-0 | so i got rejected from a bunch of consulting interviews uh at that point actually seven in a go and when i got rejected i rationalized this later so when i got rejected from the seventh one and i decided to try and jump off the 19th floor of the building it was not even a huge consulting firm you know what irritated me it was the fact that i got rejected but friends of mine who i thought had less grace got the job it's like that dialogue you know in three idiots so then you feel even worse so i think my inability and i don't think our system prepares you for rejection right you're always told better work hard keep doing your thing study set a lawyer but what happens if you work hard and fail radhika gupta ma'am thank you for being on the ranvi show thank you for having me so for our listeners uh radhika gupta is one of the trailblazers of the corporate world uh one of the most fascinating stories i've | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-1 | world uh one of the most fascinating stories i've come across so before every podcast i do an intense read up on our guests and i just kept reading about your story like everything you've grown up all over the world you eventually found yourself in the indian corporate scene you're one of the country's youngest ceos and uh your kind of what i would like to call you know this is not written but this is my gauge of it you're one of the country's most feared ceos i'm feared in in a very positive way yeah feared or fearless now you have to fear less and fear fear is a nice one interesting yeah so today you are the ceo of edelweiss mutual funds yes uh interesting story but edelweiss was one of the companies that i was targeting in terms of my first job when i was in engineering oh really yeah back i didn't know that how did you find out about it always um so you know while you're in engineering college um you're | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-2 | you know while you're in engineering college um you're constantly told that uh you know there's other things you can do outside of engineering and you just assume that okay the other things are finance or startups so i thought no i might be too young for startups so why not try finance and educause seemed like a cool company from the outside but i have i have so many questions about the world of finance in general uh i have so many questions about the corporate world because that's something i've never delved into and honestly you know like when you're a younger entrepreneur and you're brash and you've also had and i've gone through that phase of the obnoxious young entrepreneur exactly obnoxious yes obviously a part of you i you know for lack of a better word you kind of looked down in the corporate world because they look down on you as well yes yes uh like i mean i have so many questions about the corporate world in general but let's let's start with your story um where did | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-3 | let's let's start with your story um where did this start and very interesting i know that you were born in pakistan yes i was born in pakistan and it's it's really funny so i was born in pakistan and i'm not that old contrary to the attire so i was born in 83 in pakistan which is kind of rare and in fact once in the office i have to tell you this i told some guy i'm born in pakistan and he looked at me with this strange kind of disbelief and then he held my hand and he's like it must have been really sad coming on that train during the partition it's like okay no i was not so my dad is a career diplomat um he was actually born in a village in up called gango district village kind of thing and he ranked 10th or 7th all india which is crazy in the civil services first one and then he got into the foreign service and he had the choice at that point of going to pakistan or | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-4 | the choice at that point of going to pakistan or switzerland and my mom keeps telling me this she's like you know when we got married i was like i've met at a foreign service officer and there was this whole yash chopra and silsila and all that phase going on i was like let's go to switzerland and he's like let's go to pakistan it's good for my career because it's a neighboring country so we lived in pakistan between 83 and 87. uh do you have any memories of junior kg in pakistan no i could not go to school because in pakistan it is too unsafe for an indian diplomats kids to go to school in fact it is so unsafe that you can't even see an external doctor i mean as you think about it it makes sense so what the government does is the embassy has their own doctors for you too they have journalists they have doctors they have a whole ecosystem it's one of our largest embassies in the world do you | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-5 | of our largest embassies in the world do you have any memory of pakistan uh i have memories of a very very big house um my parents have lots of memories of pakistan and they have very very positive memories uh of their pakistan phase they they said the indian embassy was a very bonded place because there was nothing else to do right i mean there was nothing else to do no one else to do but i was really homeschooled i was homeschooled for the first four years um and i keep joking with my friends these days who are obsessed with their kids getting into play school at one and two years i was like it is fine you know just homeschool them till four or five they'll turn out okay so that was our memory of pakistan um and my mother has some very funny memories of guys spying on us and our phones being tapped and she's like we knew people were sort of outside our house watching over us and they knew that we knew and we had | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-6 | and they knew that we knew and we had a kind of nice it's like they would even say ada just used to go on so that that is how it was and uh i was brought up so my first language was actually urdu wow and eventually you found yourself in nigeria eventually we found ourselves in nigeria so the government has a funny rule uh and which is that they rate countries in the world so they take the world map and they rate it from a through c so like a is cool countries like italy or the us and b is like average countries i don't know what that is and c is countries like pakistan and nigeria and because they're super democratic once you get posted to an a country the next country will be a brc country and then it will keep rotating so like we did pakistan then we were rewarded so to say with new york which is us a plus country after new york then we were punished with nigeria so that's actually how the way and | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-7 | with nigeria so that's actually how the way and it's it's really interesting because as a kid you're actually going through very drastic changes because you're moving from a country like new york where you have everything which is so luxurious and new york in the uh late 80s and 90s i mean this was a time when nothing you used to get nothing in india right i remember coming back from new york and there were these orange packets of that tang i mean you might be too you too but we used to carry this for everybody right i mean nobody does that anymore and then you move to a country like nigeria where you can't get out of the house after six o'clock where your house has a bulletproof door where many of your friends and family have been robbed at gunpoint and there is nothing to do except sit at home um so the government i mean a foreign service kid's life actually is subject to a lot of extremes and this was in your teenage years this isn't your | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-8 | this was in your teenage years this isn't your teenage year and what you went through like and this is pre facebook and youtube and twitter so you can't even keep in touch with friends right i mean who's going to send snail mail to nigeria right like who do you keep in touch with right so the other thing with this life is that you don't have school friends so like my husband grew up in bombay he has a ton of school friends i don't have any school friends i mean i don't know anybody so you all you also grow up with that but uh yeah nigeria was a super interesting place to grow up i mean i've spoken about this uh i i really don't envy my mom because i think i was 12 and my brother was nine and there was no place to go buy clothes in nigeria so if you wanted if i wanted a swimsuit or like a prom dress and i went to an american school where you have these prom dresses and all she would have to go | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-9 | these prom dresses and all she would have to go to this market called yabba market this cloth market where you actually buy clothes by the thaan and then put a tailor in the house and he would stitch every piece of clothing that you owned wow so it's just a very interesting kind of childhood i'm gonna bring you back to the present yeah what did america add to the ceo's mind versus nigeria adding to the ceo's mind so i think the change has added a lot i think rather than you know there's something you pick up from each country so one of the things i picked up from nigeria which is very true so nigeria is the most corrupt country in the world right i mean you can't get petrol you need two days of standing in line to get patrol that's why people have do two drivers in nigeria but if you look at the stats nigeria is actually one of the happiest countries in the world nigerians are constantly optimistic about life and i think that's | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-10 | are constantly optimistic about life and i think that's something that i picked up a lot and a mentor of mine told me this he said leaders naturally have to be optimistic you can't have a pessimist inspire a team or leader team so i think that was a really important learning that i got from my nigeria days and i think i've picked up something from each country i've lived in whether it's italy why do you think nigeria is so unsafe though because even i've heard stories about like i was with a relative once and he said that he feared going to nigeria on assignments and he's a techie he's an engineer in america and he said that a friend of his went there or landed up at the lagos airport yeah his driver picked him up and instead of taking him to the hotel they took him into a forest and then they found out that that driver wasn't the real driver he made it utterly believable yeah he made that guy stripped down to his underwear took his | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-11 | that guy stripped down to his underwear took his watch to call his belongings left him in the forest and drove away and then the actual driver like called him and said listen i'm a driver yeah i think it's had a very violent history it's still got a lot of tribalism and communities and it's a very poor country there is you know one thing we're very lucky to have in india and i'm speaking from the hat of someone in finance is a big middle class in nigeria there is extreme richness and extreme poverty and that creates a sense of why do they have what i do they have what i have and so there was a there's an interesting thing that when you go roam around in nigeria you always wear robbery jewelry even a man so he's got to wear a gold chain around his neck or a ring or something so that if someone robs you you don't get killed you can give your ring rather than your life i got mugged last year we got mark | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-12 | your life i got mugged last year we got mark last year yeah like in bombay i was walking in my area actually which is actually a pretty relatively safe area of the city five gardens oh that's super safe yeah and it's you know i i've walked around all my life and uh i was on the phone with uh someone um talking i was on the phone with manish actually he was telling me something about business he's also been on the podcast uh and i'm walking and i suddenly get whacked in the head my specs fall off and my phone falls off as well this guy i was just confused because he whacked me hard i was on the floor i mean i was on the footpath and he takes the phone runs away another guy comes on a bike takes him away and goes i couldn't even chase them i couldn't take that guy five gardens which is like super safe yeah and um so here's the creepier part of the story he basically mugged me i was in | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-13 | the story he basically mugged me i was in shock i went and filed a police complaint all that and immediately after getting mugged you have a sense of shock and you have a sense of why did that happen to me and this was like last year when businesses are established and i'm per se famous yeah uh but uh and everything's going well and suddenly you went mugged and then over the next two or three days you realize okay wait maybe that person just wanted that phone way more badly than i wanted it so you kind of start asking questions about life that why like i'm a good person i have not done bad [ __ ] to anyone but why has bad [ __ ] happen to me and then you realize this class difference where you're like you know even even in india while it may not be as much as nigeria there is that class division of people who are given a lot versus people or not so i went to school in philadelphia in the us and uh | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-14 | went to school in philadelphia in the us and uh our area was actually a very unsafe area so i saw a lot of mugging there and if you come to this i mean you think about it it actually had a community of very poor people and then all these university kids and it's the same class difference i mean you wonder why people would mug a college kid because a lot of kids in philly at that point i mean there was a point which you knew you would not cross why would you mug a college kid right but it's the same thing right these people have come into our community and they have something that we don't have yeah yeah 100 um so the creepier part of my story was later on from an anonymous instagram account i got a message saying hey brother i'm sorry i was the guy who whacked you and took your phone and the instagram account was it had like zero followers zero whatever following it was just like an account made for telling me this that it was some fan | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-15 | made for telling me this that it was some fan who had like uh mugged me and he said that this is your phone's uh ip whatever the you know the identification number and it was actually the correct identification number and i didn't know what to do and i was too busy by that point i'd forgotten about the mugging i mean i'd moved on but it kind of just changed my whole perspective on fame uh this concept of class difference uh but yeah there was it was like an eye-opening thing and that's where i actually got fascinated about west africa this is other youtubers a lot who has a lot of business in west africa his name is technical guruji he has explained to me how difficult it is just establishing yeah and you talked about your friend who was scared to go there as an i.t professional i remember i think my brother brother graduated from an indian institute and he said one of his friends got a college offer and it was some 300 000 offer in nigeria | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-16 | offer and it was some 300 000 offer in nigeria he asked me for advice 200 000 of the offer was the worth of life insurance wow so does that country other than giving you optimism which again i find a little uh find a little strange from the outside but i've never been tonight yeah so i never know what else does nigeria give you it also tells you about the importance of a community right and i think we can be very individualistic um so if you look at nigeria and we all had help in nigeria you know your help will run out of money by the 15th or 20th day of the month and so you'll ask your help you know where is the money and she's like you know i helped my sister in another village so my mother asked her month after month and at some point she's like how many sisters do you have because she thought real sister but in nigeria sister means anybody from your community because they believe that when tough times come on them | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-17 | they believe that when tough times come on them the community comes to support them i think that's a great learning at this time i mean i always tell people in financial services too um that build a sense of community around you it's interesting you know i you haven't asked me this but as i've sort of grown up i've realized that women are a rare community in most of the corporate world and when i was in my 20s i was i didn't care about feminism i thought this whole gender debate was quite nonsense because we were all 50 50 at that point they're 50 guys 50 000 girls as i have become older i've actually realized this importance of community especially being a girl and the importance of building a community of women and standing up for each other so this whole concept of sisterhood that i learned in nigeria it's now kicking in in a very different way yeah here's a scary stat which actually might get slightly wrong but uh kunal shah the founder of cred | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-18 | wrong but uh kunal shah the founder of cred was on the show recently and he said that in urban metros in bom in bombay delhi bangalore uh something like 80 to 90 percent of the women are just like sitting at home it could be because 25 percent of our women find participate in the workforce i mean i'll get into trouble for this but in my own industry we have 45 mutual fund companies in india i mean let's just do some quick math they're about four or five leadership roles ceo head of investments etc etc so 45 times five means there should be 200 otherwise 150 senior positions i counted and i think five are filled by women um that's crazy and it's not by the way that we don't know how to manage money yeah no it's it's not that at all so you know as a guy you kind of take this for granted because it's not really your concern you don't notice all these things till you grow up maybe if you become an entrepreneur | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-19 | you grow up maybe if you become an entrepreneur and you have women and men working with that's when you start noticing these little things cracks in society which is actually the first uh kind of reason i thought i should have you on the show i read one of your tweets uh which i just told you about before the podcast remember this uh you posted a video of basically uh trump and modi are together they're walking down this uh pathway yes and there's like 10 girls there wearing bharatnatyam costumes and one guy wearing this traditional indian outfit and that one guy it's a kid and yeah he's a white he's a kid in a white outfit yeah the kid pulls out his phone and goes up to modi and travis says hey can i get a photo yeah and they obliged they'd take the photo with them and your caption on that was i'm gonna let you actually complete so there's two parts to it so my caption on that was ask for opportunities because | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-20 | my caption on that was ask for opportunities because nobody is going to do anything for you and the other thing about that photo is so while the kids tapping and asking look at the expression of the girls so a lot of people trolled me on that saying well what if the girls didn't want the photo but my answer is look at the expression of the girls they were like almost like that miss india moment like i can't believe he got it well my point is why did he get it he asked and you know what the girls were first in line but they didn't ask and i so i go to all these women sessions and they keep asking me you know what's your advice for young girls and i'm like just ask for opportunities ask for the big promotion if you're competent at something ask i think you know on average if a woman is eight out of ten she's probably going to rate herself six and a guy is going to rate herself 11. yes that that's an actual study | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-21 | herself 11. yes that that's an actual study uh one of my friends who's a consultant at bain she sent me this exact that's an actual study there you go what you quoted uh they had actually asked a bunch of women this and exactly that happened most of the women rate themselves lower than the capabilities and most of the guys rate themselves higher than the capabilities and it might be societal conditioning genetical uh pre uh conditioning i don't know what it is it's all that so it's i mean it's it's the smallest thing so i remember when i was getting married i had these peras and i was wearing a reasonably light lengha so i was walking and i walked fast so i was walking around the fire quickly and my husband look and the pundit actually told me i might get into trouble for saying that this slow down you should look shy wow um and from a young age you're told stuff like this but why should i slow down we are | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-22 | like this but why should i slow down we are walking and i'm walking at the pace that is comfortable to me so you're told not to ask you're told to slow down but i'm saying nobody is going to look in a room and say oh that girl is really great you know i should give this role to her the girl has to ask that she used to raise her hand up that's how by the way i got the ceo role only because i asked for it that's crazy um and you know again as once you're in a leadership position what you understand about women in your workforce is that they add completely different dynamics to the same projects compared to men even men have their own you know good things that they add to the project but the same goes for women and the best organizations will always contain according to me an equal mix of men and women but we're probably far from that and it's also it's actually not just about gender i mean i learned this in my first | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-23 | about gender i mean i learned this in my first job at mckinsey it's a diversity of every kind adds value right you have someone who's a physicist versus someone who is a lawyer versus someone who is an engineer they will all have different perspectives i mean i believe organizations should have diversity of age you can't have 30 you know 50 year olds and no young population so it's not just gender is one form of diversity but diversity of everything matters right yeah one whole section on this podcast is going to be about how you overcame this gender bias age bias all these things uh but before you actually you know went on to the corporate path you also had an entrepreneurial side of things and before that you were in warton yes and right after wharton you had an extremely dark phase of your life yes one dark phase but so what what after nigeria what had happened so after nigeria my father moved to uh italy which is where i did my high school awesome | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-24 | italy which is where i did my high school awesome place by the way like the best place i've lived on earth uh and then i think by the time i was in 10th or 11th there was this thing that you know what you want to do next and so that is in the government mom has been a teacher so what what did what what did that add to your personality oh at least such a lovely place i think firstly i think most of my habits personal habits are shaped by italy like my food everything i want to do but i think what i love about italy and i actually do a talk on what different countries add to my personality it is very proud of who they are i think europeans are very proud of their roots like i always say that italians celebrate every stone that there is in their country because they have a very rich heritage um they celebrate so you know italy is a home of espresso and cappuccino and being a coffee fan you'll love this | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-25 | and being a coffee fan you'll love this but you know there's no starbucks in italy right because the italians are not going to let until then there wasn't i think and the italians are not going to let some random american company walk in and walk all over their culture they make pizza their way they make stuff their way so they know their core and they celebrate it and i think sometimes we can lose touch with it i it teaches you to celebrate your indian-ness so you should be proud of speaking your hindi and walking around in your study and celebrating your ramayana and celebrating your mahabharat and celebrating your you know culture i mean i keep joking that one at one point in time i have a secret desire to be the tourism minister of india and this comes from living in italy because i just believe we have such a tremendous heritage of tourism in this country i mean india should be the best place on earth for a tourist and we do | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-26 | best place on earth for a tourist and we do a terrible job monetizing it 100 uh it's going you know my hope is that in 20 years time if i am in politics in any way that's one department i wish to clean up from an entrepreneurial perspective so that we can make money off of tourism so tourism is your soft power it's your brand and it's business and the italians celebrate literally everything so that's that's that's what that brought to the table um you know how many questions you're opening up for me through telling me all these things but but okay let's let's come back to uh your you know career story yes um ma'am so like what did you what was your intention behind going to wharton so i and i guess you know i have to thank my mother because she was super aspirational for me she's like you should apply abroad and we didn't have so government doesn't pay you very much money and a college education is expensive overseas i mean forty | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-27 | college education is expensive overseas i mean forty fifty thousand dollars a year then which is like unthinkable for four years that's like i remember saying it's like a crore papa at that point in time which is a big amount of money in our world and i said let's only apply to the places where i'll get scholarship and you know the big schools don't give scholarship they give loans and financial aid my mom's like apply to the best in the world and why don't you just try and it was worth it it was worth it because i actually got into wharton i got in with financial aid which is so the college counselor told me that if you apply to wharton as a normal candidate you have a one in seven or one and eight chance of getting in he said if you apply and ask for money also to support your education you have a 1 in 40 chance of getting in and it's like their way of saying okay don't do this way and my mom's like | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-28 | okay don't do this way and my mom's like no but we are going to apply and we are going to apply with financial aid and we did and she made me apply to the best in the world and she actually sat with me through the whole process she had no idea we didn't do you know fancy college things and you know there was none of that i mean sitting in italy we didn't have very much of that but we actually just did it on a lark we wrote essays from the heart and that was it um and i always used to tell her that you know mom i'm not an athlete and i don't have anything i can't play any music she's like just tell them who you are you have such an amazing background you're a good student just go tell them your story honestly what's the worst that can happen you won't get in anywhere you'll go to india that's how i got into college i mean that's actually how i got into college ma'am so what does this ivy | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-29 | i got into college ma'am so what does this ivy league education add to your head because you know i mean a lot of parents so okay i'll give you my perspective yeah so my dad's punjabi and my mom is half marathon half guju but she's much more maharashtra than she's gujarati and maharashtrians give a lot of importance to education so since i was like three years old it was my mom's heartfelt dream that i go through an ivy league education of some sort and it broke her heart when i choose to make videos for a living so she still has that thing you know like even if i tell her right now listen i'm kind of considering applying to an ivy league college she'll like jump she will be like yes finally finally it's like ultimate thing and that's probably not going to happen so my version of having that happen to me is asking people like yourself what have i missed out on in life so look i don't think an ivy league education is the be all | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-30 | don't think an ivy league education is the be all and end all it's not like you know you don't get an iv league education because people like overdo the craze about it these days so uh ultimately you know what you do i mean you can be perfectly successful without it i think it can change your life and i don't think it can change your life because of the four years there only and sitting in classes i mean classes are good and you meet world-class professors but i just think the community of people that you get exposed to is incredible firstly you're studying with kids from all around the world um and that is and look i had a global background but studying with kids from all around the world is very different from traveling to europe on a holiday i think it's just a very different perspective secondly i think you're always taught to like aim really really high so you're taught that you have to be a learner that you have to push your mind and i think that spirit | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-31 | have to push your mind and i think that spirit stays with you even when you're 30 and 40. and the most powerful thing it does is it gives you an alumni network so i used to head our alumni club here we have about a thousand alumni from my college in india and we're very connected to each other and they all must be you know holding the top jobs in the country yeah they're of course very very successful professionals but they're also very close-knit community and in my case it's really interesting my husband's uh i met my husband in college and all our close friends also married friends from college so we have this group of about five six of us couples and we meet every weekend and we just look at and now you know i mean some of them are ceos of listed company and people have done very well for themselves but we're bonded by those four years other conversations very intellectual they're not they can be but they're not sometimes they can be very silly actually | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-32 | they're not sometimes they can be very silly actually because ultimately you're a group of college kids who were bonded by an experience when you were 18 19 20 21. um so i just think that's what it does i think for me it changed my life it gave me a lot of the confidence i had today i went through my tough bouts through it it gave me a lot of the exposure and confidence i have today you know i always try finding polite ways to ask questions but i'm not going to make this question okay and it's going to be a dark question okay ask um i read articles about you where they spoke about a phase where you even considered you know something like suicide like so what had like happened in that phase after you've had so much perspective what drove you to that thought process so i think rejection is something i didn't handle well and professional rejection yeah i mean it was rejection from on-campus placements and you know anybody in india or overseas who's gone | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-33 | know anybody in india or overseas who's gone through this process of what i call looking for a job on campus knows that that is the most stressful phase of your life and like if anyone is watching this or hearing this and looking for that just calm down i think that process brings out the worst in people i mean it makes you unnecessarily competitive and it's a doggy dog world and you know honestly till then i had never faced rejection because all through my life i was like a good kid class stopper i mean the only insecurity i grew up with was around my looks because of my neck issues and my weight yeah and i think it's a little worse as a girl because like you're an ugly looking teenage girl in like 13 and 40 and teenagers will go out there and say oh you're ugly looking and my mom happens to be beautiful so they're like your mom's so beautiful and she used to teach in the same school how did you turn up this | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-34 | in the same school how did you turn up this way like people actually say this kind of stuff so if you see all that coupled with rejection i think that's what so i got rejected from a bunch of consulting interviews uh at that point actually seven in a go and when i got rejected i rationalized this later so when i got rejected from the seventh one and i decided to try and jump off the 19th floor of the building it was not even a huge consulting firm you know what irritated me it was the fact that i got rejected but friends of mine who i thought had less grades got the job it's like that dialogue you know in three idiots so then you feel even worse so i think my inability and i don't think our system prepares you for rejection right you're always told better work hard keep doing your thing study set a lawyer but what happens if you work hard and fail who prepares you for failure at any point in time so that was my first | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-35 | at any point in time so that was my first power of failure and um on what because i mean i'm sure you've sat through many hiring drives yourself yeah what basis do you think they rejected you on i don't know and uh i found it to be a perfect conversation right and it's not like i haven't been rejected after that it's just that i handle it much better but i always believe that rejection in some way is redirection to a better place ah and this could even be romantic rejection this could be romantic rejection this could be college rejection this could be rejection from you know i mean you're going to book a hotel and you didn't get it and you ended up staying at another one i mean it just it could be rejection i mean any kind of rejection um for instance when i was applying to college i thought mit was my dream school like i wanted to be an engineer naughty all that i didn't get into mit um in retrospect i think they rejected me because | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-36 | um in retrospect i think they rejected me because i was not the right fit maybe this consulting firm rejected me because i was not the right fit or someone else was a better fit than me and i ended up at mckinsey which was great for me so i always think rejection could be just god's way of saying you know you're meant for something else that's a better fit for you yeah 100 rejection opens up new dimensions it does and as i said redirection to a place that might be better for you but you're not taught how to handle rejection well how old were you when you had climbed to that 19th floor that was happening i think i was 20 19 or 20. well i mean you've already seen nigeria usa italy you had experiences there it was flashing through your head i was like why is this so my in my head it was like i'm a really good kid here i really worked very hard uh i went to waton on a scholarship which was very rare | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-37 | waton on a scholarship which was very rare i've kind of survived all this and how can i be rejected seven times yeah like one time is okay but how can someone be rejected seven times after being topper of her class going through all of this being super sincere about everything i mean that's what goes through your head right how can they reject me why did you not jump oh i was lucky um my best friend at that time who most people don't know is my husband today he was sitting with me and he just called the cops and he's like this girl is trying to jump out of the window do something and that's when the cops came and they took me to this mental asylum this thing that existed on campus and then i had to escape and uh my father was in a country called zambia at that point in time he had moved to zambia from italy so i remember calling him at three in the morning saying papa i need to get out of this asylum | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-38 | papa i need to get out of this asylum and he said how did you land up there in the first place i said you know boy i was trying to do this and a boy i mean he asked me the same question then why did you know i said listen i was with this guy and he called the cops and he's like who is this guy he was more worried about i think the boyfriend then jumping off the floor traditional indian father but that's how i got out of it wow that's a very intense story but um you you've got i'm sorry i'm just a little blown away right now and i've lost my flow uh did that did that add any layout to your personality just coming out of that um i got when i finally after that i was a lot more relaxed i was like so i had a job offer at microsoft and then i went into my last interview at mckinsey obviously you know in a good way can i say that you stopped taking yourself | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-39 | good way can i say that you stopped taking yourself i see you no i was just like i stopped taking life a little less seriously i still take life seriously uh but i calm down a little bit it's like this is just normal i was like okay i can't be this dramatic about everything that happens in life you know i just have to cool it uh my husband always says you know stop and smell the coffee stop and smell the roses just calm down like what's the word i mean he was like what's the worst that could happen to you you'll get rejected by seven consulting companies i had a confirmed job offer at microsoft he's like that's not such a bad deal in life right so i just started seeing the other side of life and putting my problems into perspective and i think that helped yeah and now you're building one of the biggest corporate careers in india's scene and you know i think telling the story obviously much later has helped me a lot | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-40 | story obviously much later has helped me a lot i mean i'm glad i would lived through that story because i also had the ability to tell it later do you do you think you've been free of mental health issues since pretty free actually pretty free i it's not that i don't go through pretty crappy days i mean i keep saying one day a month like i hate my life and i want to kill somebody it work or i'm like oh god i can't do this or you know my team's troubling me or i'm having some personal problems so it's not like i don't go through bad phases uh but i've had the ability to talk about it rather than just internalize it and i think that helps so that was probably my lowest mental health phase um i think the last three four years ever since i have discovered the power of sort of sharing my stories being vulnerable and realizing that i don't need to be perfect have been really good for happiness and confidence that's beautiful oh but | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-41 | good for happiness and confidence that's beautiful oh but like the corporate career how did the trailblazing start so the corporate career is one i have to tell you the corporate career is less glamorous than it is made out to be in your so i like tried to jump off right for this corporate career and so my first job was at mckinsey which is like a top consulting firm in the world now when i joined mckinsey i was like very excited about it i was like okay i'm going to be a strategy consultant and i'm going to sit in this conference room and come up with like strategies and you know white smoke is going to emerge just for the listeners could you explain what a consultant does so a consultant is basically consulting companies basically advise corporates uh fortune 500 companies large companies on various parts how to turn around their hr how to change their operations there's basically a problem that a company could be going through and they hire a consulting company because they have | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-42 | through and they hire a consulting company because they have got expertise in many different companies so that's what a consulting company does and consulting is a career that people are very excited about because at a very early age it gives you exposure to different businesses different problems and you think you're actually going to sit and advise them right so now when you think consultant like you're a consultant to me you think you're probably advising me on something so my impression was you know i'm going to sit in a suit and big board room and the ceo of this company is going to walk in and i'm going to give him advice on how to run his business that's that's that's that's the perception so for my first assignment at mckinsey was for like an equivalent of chroma you know one of these electronic retail forms and it was in a city called houston in texas where there's no vegetarian food and my job was to go to this electronics store and start at four in the | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-43 | to this electronics store and start at four in the morning and follow people around in the store and just catalog on a pen and paper what they were doing from four in the morning till ten at night and i was like what is this i was like i tried to jump off a 19th floor of a building for this and so that's how my corporate career started and i mean the reason i'm saying this is is i think entry-level jobs are not what they are made out to be and it's not just at mckinsey mckinsey is a great employer but you need to go through the tough grind here nobody is going to give you the reins of the company and say solve my strategy and tell you don't know anything right so that was the first thing actually i learned in my corporate career and i always tell younger kids who join the don't expect the first two three hours to be glamorous you're gonna do very very very basic work i mean you always start life at the | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-44 | basic work i mean you always start life at the bottom of the totem pole again like if there's a totem pole you just start life again at the bottom like yeah which is the biggest problem even we see in hiring even for the media industry today we'll hire some very talented kids who will severely lack patience yeah there you go and you know they'll fight with you for larger opportunities you're like dude i need to put you through a grind first to ensure that you're capable of handling those opportunities even in financial services your first few years are sitting in front of an excel spreadsheet and cranking models and it's good because it builds your analytical ability it teaches you to understand detail it teaches you to make mistakes and go wrong no one's going to hand over your company to a 22 year old kid on the first day that doesn't mean you can't make it as a young person but a little bit of the grind you have to go through in life right like | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-45 | grind you have to go through in life right like a lack of patience and a lack of the ability to sacrifice things yeah uh can like really put a you know stop on your career's growth and i also think no job is too small right and i struggled with this a lot so i would sit uh in texas at like 10 at night and i would sit in the warehouse and start crying and i would be like what am i doing and i wouldn't tell my parents about this because i was like embarrassed that this was my role at mckinsey but i realized it was the right thing for them to do and it wasn't just me it happened to everybody right you just go through the grind first your jobs are like that and they get better and better and by the way even now i mean people wonder about the ceo's role 30 of my profession is a lot of this grind i mean it's just a lot of random stuff that doesn't appear glamorous that's | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-46 | of random stuff that doesn't appear glamorous that's not very fun but you have to do it before the ceo journey began and i i'd like to call you a multi-billion dollar ceo see i i have to sell my podcast with a little bit of masala anticipate that the thumbnail might contain multi-billion managing multi billions so that's accurate but you had an entrepreneurship journey before that so what took you from consulting to starting your own firm and then being bought over by someone else so i always say that young people have a little bit of hunger and foolishness in them i again try to rationalize why this so i did the consulting gig and then i worked on wall street for a few years great years because i did 2006 and seven and then i did eight which is like most of what you see in the movies is true about wall street wall street wolf is a little extreme but things like the big shot etc i mean elements i was actually trading mortgages that was my | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-47 | elements i was actually trading mortgages that was my first job on wall street um you know so very selling uh loans to people who had no income no job and no assets they were called ninja loans at that point in time so like you don't have a house take a loan from us you're eligible for a two million dollar loan i know you have no income no job no assets something like that um so yeah we did that for two three years uh how are indians perceived on wall street it's very smart people i mean wall street has a ton of us oh okay i think globally and i have i mean this is an interesting conversation so my dad's represented india from the 70s to you know 2020 or 2015 when he retired i think the perception of india globally has changed completely and he said this when he retired he's like so he keeps telling me he says you market mutual funds for a living but i sold india for a living which is just a beautiful thing he | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-48 | for a living which is just a beautiful thing he says but he has seen the kind of respect that he was given in the 70s which i mean your u.s and german counterparts i don't think thought of him very much at that point in time but then there was this 80s phase and it wasn't a great phase and then 90s happened and the i.t boom happened um so when i moved to nigeria in 95 kids would ask me in school you're from india do you go to school on elephants and are you from the land of snake charmers this was the perception by the time 95 96 97 happened the whole i.t boom happened we made a statement with pokhran remember and that made a lot of news there was ancients on us at that point in time the you know the whole test happened and then by the time my father retired india had gone through and become an economic superpower so the kind of respect he got from the german ambassador or the japanese | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-49 | he got from the german ambassador or the japanese ambassador changed totally and that that's a reflection of wall street too so i think as our economic standing has changed our perception has changed so perception is indians are very very smart capable people yeah on a very personal selfish level yeah my goal in life is to change the perception of india as a creative capital of the world and the artificial intelligence capital of the world because i do feel that in designing artificial intelligence products there will be a huge requirement of creativity and that's my that's the phase of life i want to begin at 35 like so creative is an interesting one because i think we're a very good jugaad artist and i don't like the word jugaad even though it's been associated with india um but sort of original thinking and innovation and creativity i think we can still do a lot more so we're very good at copying yeah while you know we've had people on the podcast who are not very hopeful about india's | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-50 | podcast who are not very hopeful about india's future people in their 40s but i don't know whether it's the meditation based intuition whether it's just my gut from running youtube channels and talking to the youth on such a macro level i feel like we're heading into a good phase so if people your generation and my generation are not optimistic then i really worry i feel we are the two generations that are out mystic it's the ones um you know older than yours you're eighty-three born people in born in the 60s and 70s they're the pessimists so interestingly i mean this is a detour but when i moved back you know it's been 10 years since i've moved back from the us and this is lovely in the indian thing that when you move back from the u.s it's a very big deal to move back from the u.s wall street career you've left to come to india so people always ask me this question did you regret it like till date everyone asks me | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-51 | you regret it like till date everyone asks me this question you know do you miss the us and then of course there's a famous one what would your salary have been in dollars if you were living in the u.s which is a totally irrelevant question i always say talking about optimism that i don't regret it at all um and the reason i don't regret it is is the u.s is such an evolved place it's a great market but it's a market where most problems have been solved so you really have to do things that are third order to make any impact here i think with what you're doing or what i'm doing there's so many people we can cater to and we can do basic things and solve a lot of problems so you can make tremendous impact here which i don't think you can make in a market like the us yeah i completely resonate with what you're saying at the age of 27 but at age 22 it was my alpha ego kicking in saying that | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-52 | it was my alpha ego kicking in saying that no i want to be a king in this country and not a second-class citizen which it may not even be true like you know i'm sure that once you're in the u.s yeah you settle down it's a country that takes you in very nice yeah they're very accepting people very very which i've learned over time back then the ego told me that no let's begin i want to be here raja here yeah uh but that brings me to my question on entrepreneurship what was uh that journey like starting your own business because i've seen that a lot of people who try transitioning from the corporate world into the business and i'm not generalizing but i have seen a bunch of people who can't really keep up with the world of entrepreneurship because for example in the world of corporates if you eat a banana yeah and you want to throw the peel somewhere there's a dustbin captain you can throw it in the world of entrepreneurship if | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-53 | can throw it in the world of entrepreneurship if you eat a banana there's no dustbin to throw it into it and you have to buy the dustbin yourself yeah i'll tell you a story about the dustbin but no it is a very i mean people keep saying the u.s to india transition i think employment to entrepreneurship is a very big transition especially when you're young i will say i was a super arrogant like wall street kid how old were you 24. okay so and 24 is not young for a startup person it's a little young for a financial services startup person because we are a gray hair and you know we like gray hair right it's a it's it's a business of trust what uh i'm sorry i'm cutting you shortly yeah but uh why okay for example i chose content entrepreneurship because i was very fascinated with the world of content you know i loved watching television and i thought wow i want to get into this business i want to show people visuals and | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-54 | into this business i want to show people visuals and that's why i chose content and media as my domain what initially made you choose finance because on the outside it can seem boring to a lot of people okay so i'm not gonna give you the glamorous answer to this see there are people like you and i think you're taught that you know you should find your passion and you should follow your passion and all that stuff and i think that's great right and there are people like you who find your passion in life i was just a good student who went to a management school and it happened to be a finance and management centric school dad had never had a corporate career for me to know that i so if you are going to ask me did you want to do finance since you were a kid no i had no idea what this was right um i think some of us just start in careers and we grow to love our careers as we it's almost like a ranged marriage right | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-55 | as we it's almost like a ranged marriage right some of us find our life partners and we choose them and you know we fall in love and that we get married but some people i mean a lot of this country has arranged marriages and you marry someone and it works and i think that's my case and now i have stayed in the profession for 15 years because one of the good things about finance is that you're constantly learning something so one of my old bosses at aqr used to say so i used to ask him that listen you have yachts right you have all the money in the world why are you doing this at the age of 50 and he's like you know this is the only profession in the world where you always have something new to learn every day because either you should be making money every day or you have something new to learn and nobody makes money every day so i think it's a very dynamic industry and that's what i love about it um and that's why i've stayed | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-56 | love about it um and that's why i've stayed around it but i just found it because i was a kid at a manager stimulating very very stimulating um it can be as stimulating as you want it to especially in a country like india where the market is involving see you are living in a country where the prime minister is going to people and still seeing open bank accounts um and you have hyper rich people who know what to do yeah and you so you have the whole range and you have a capital market that is constantly evolving so you have lots of people where you can make a tremendous impact and it's it's the most heartening thing in the world to have someone say you know i did an sip and i'm so happy i invested in mutual funds and i was able to pay for a surgery or do something like that or my dreams were able to come through i mean ultimately we are in the business of money management and we we make people's dreams come true people invest | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-57 | we we make people's dreams come true people invest and people save and they make dreams come true whether they are a vacation or a business or whatever it is so in that sense it's a very rewarding profession yeah the stimulation and the ability to help other people is the joy of yeah i mean you know you could you could make a woman independent and enable her to start her own business uh you know you could change the financial fortunes of a family so there is a deeper purpose i think it's not wolf of wall street we're not the evil industry that the media makes us out to be by the way we're also not like the hyper i mean i hate the media portrayal of us we're not like the you know high glamorous like the girls all around and there's this high rich life most financial services professionals are actually very if you talk to fund managers who manage money like fund manager someone who manages your money if you give me money they're very quiet people and they're very burdened | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-58 | they're very quiet people and they're very burdened by the responsibility of managing someone else's money it's actually very easy for me to manage my own money but when you give me money to manage i feel stressed here there is a responsibility that there are thousands and lacks of people who we are responsible for so i think that's also another so we are there's a word in our industry called fiduciary but fiduciary means you're responsible for someone else and i think we live with that responsibility every day i sometimes think people don't understand that so that's the stimulation part of it but uh it was it's stimulating enough for you to say okay i want to start a business in this business can be a very brutal game so business teaches you some things so i was an investment professional right but as you said there are lots of other things that happen in running a company that you have no idea about when you have a corporate career and i think there's so many things that you learn | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-59 | and i think there's so many things that you learn once you run a business for instance if you run our money management business someone also has to run the office and do administration someone also has to do accounting someone also has to hire people someone also has to do marketing and we are a regulated business so someone also has to do legal and tax now in the u.s someone else is doing it for us when we started there were three of us partners and so it was you your husband me my husband and a third partner who was a colleague of mine in the u.s all three of us had only investment backgrounds now somehow i became the person who decided to leave investments and do everything else so i remember setting up our company with registrar of companies and going to the roc website and filling the name and i remember applying for the pen card and fighting with the id guys as to why our pan card has not come and opening our first bank account with state bank of india so it really | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-60 | bank account with state bank of india so it really teaches you that listen you know in corporate india ownership can be like oh it's his department i mean it's almost like when you call someone at a call center he's like ma'am this is not my problem when you run a business everything is your problem right and i was the one in fact uh get into trouble for saying this uh we had come from the u.s so we didn't realize you have to have a sign in hindi and marathi on the door outside of the company and we didn't do that so i actually got a shop in establishment tax notice in my name and i realized this is also the stuff that you have to manage and i'm so grateful i did it because today in a ceo stint you don't only look at money management you also manage marketing you also manage an office you also manage hr in fact you spend more time managing hr i learned all of this in my forefront capitals 10 so i was very | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-61 | in my forefront capitals 10 so i was very well prepared but your basic product was that you'll take someone's money and help them take care of it yeah so our first product was a portfolio management service which is basically that you'll take someone's money rich people's money and help them manage it our second product was something called an alternative investment fund which is like uh it's like a mutual fund for the rich so it is more sophisticated in terms of what it can do than a mutual fund and probably you need more money to invest in this than you would one crore minimum versus 1000 rupee minimum which i managed today so those were our first set of uh products how do you convince rich people to part of the money and give it to you it's hilarious so the minimum that sebi lets you take from a client in a portfolio management service is 25 lakhs so that's what we started with and we would go to friends and family and say please give us money and you know you have | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-62 | say please give us money and you know you have this belief that when you are a what and return graduate people are like waiting to give you money you know you said ivy league return nobody cares but does every wharton graduate or every ivy league graduate have that capability of actually multiplying those 25 lakhs oh forget multiplying it do can you even convince someone that you can multiply it but say you have good sales skills do you think they have the like they are good enough and strong enough to so i think money management is is a very basic profession i think uh you know it's a profession that involves understanding what is a good business and what is not a good business um and whether you're a what in graduate or not what in graduate i think if you're a strong thinker if you are disciplined about your approach and if you know what is a good business you will be able to do it so i don't think it's that difficult in industry um it's a difficult industry in terms of | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-63 | industry um it's a difficult industry in terms of temperament so one of the things my husband says because he's also a money manager is that this is a career where every week it's like a report card comes out on you it's almost like the film industry because you do badly for a month or two months and people start you know questioning the last 10 years of what you've done so in that sense temperamentally it's a very difficult business and markets move up and down and you know we live in like a social media and noise-induced world so there's so much noise so just to maintain a calm disciplined temperament and have conviction that okay i like this company it's going to do well i don't care about what other people say i think the temperamentality of money management is pretty underrated so most portfolio management services in india like because i know a lot of our listeners actually think of their life with that target of at some point i will definitely invest with a pms okay that's | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-64 | i will definitely invest with a pms okay that's just how young people think thanks to influencers like myself but uh basically a pms firm in india what do they do with those 25 lakhs or 30 lux once they have it in the end is it all stock market is a mixture of fd stock market sure so i mean look there are multiple ways to get your money managed in india um mutual fund is one pms the other and there is a third called aif pms and aif are meant for so pms requires a minimum ticket size of now or just like 50 lakhs is the minimum you have to put in aif requires one crore all of them invest basis certain rules so all of them have an objective right so you could have uh a mutual fund or pms that is focused on the stock markets you could have one that is partly stock markets and partly debt markets you could have one that is just doing safe instruments so it's very important to understand what the objective | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-65 | so it's very important to understand what the objective of what you're getting into is like you could have a health podcast or you could have uh you know food podcast or you could have a music podcast and i just want to add one nugget of listeners like people often who are not from the financial world get intimidated by these words like uh you know pms mutual fund like they get very that's the big hurdle i think for your industry to tell people listen all this is very basic and simple yeah uh but uh all these things are very whatever ma'am saying if you're not understanding it pause this podcast or pause this youtube video go google it and come back yeah and this you know there's a ton of financial education out there so uh i always tell young people just learn and i mean you know guys like you have made expertise out of it but the big challenge for my industry is to try and just simplify communication uh you know we've interested we started our podcast where we're trying | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-66 | we've interested we started our podcast where we're trying to explain people the basic principles of investing through ramayana which is a very homegrown kind of thing um or we're releasing a tv ad next week but we're trying to use kabaddi as a medium uh to explain one of our financial products so we're also trying to simplify it because i agree we have too much jargon yeah i mean and that's the that's the big hurdle honestly i remember being a 23 24 year old getting concerned about managing my money yeah and the big intimidation factor was this that i didn't understand what uh my wealth managers were talking like and then i had to stop them i had to actually take out my phone google or call up a friend who's in fine and say bro can you please explain this in like simple words and there is always a simple way to explain it absolutely but uh it's it's the challenge that your industry faces as a whole it's not well one thing i would tell young | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-67 | whole it's not well one thing i would tell young people though is that you know even if you are a financial services professional you will screw up in your 20s with your money management i mean i have made major mistakes um and out of recklessness or lack of knowledge and it's okay because if you make them in your 20s um you make them when you're not very rich i mean you have your life to earn right so it's better to start learn invest a little bit make mistakes hopefully in five years you'll learn something and you'll learn what suits you personally right and then you'll be okay so it's okay to make mistakes in your 20s in fact inevitably you will make mistakes you make mistakes in your career also right so why not in money and these financial mistakes are uh being spoken about by someone who created an extremely successful financial services business and then got bought over by advice so i mean tons of mistakes which is okay so i mean i'm guessing that you finally got | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-68 | so i mean i'm guessing that you finally got your first client that led to a snowballing effect where you did a good job for that person so then you got more clients so i got my first outside client and this is a really hilarious thing i mean it's about social media so the first few clients we got were all friends and family right i just again want to cut you short for a second just to explain to the listeners that i'm guessing the business model here is you manage someone's money and the profits you make on that money you take a cut from those no so again that's so you manage someone's money and you charge a small fee for managing that money so it could be like one two percent is typically the fee sometimes in some products you charge something above the profit so like if i make 15 then i'll take something of that but the basic money that we make is a small it's like a bank charge it's called a management fee in our business so it's a fixed fee for | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-69 | fee in our business so it's a fixed fee for managing your money typically it's one to two percent of your money that we charge um yeah but then what so what happened once you got your so first few clients were all friends and family uh then i got this advice from someone very famous in financial services i won't take his name i was like okay so all the clients were getting our friends and family now how do we get on friends and family because you want to run out of that bank of people right um and you're a young kid so he said you know there are all these tv channels like cnbc and et now et cetera he's like india man he actually said this in hindi he's like i mean whatever is visible actually sells so he's like you have to promote your brand you have to go out and build a brand so i remember going on linkedin and talking to all these journals and i'm like can i show up on your tv channel that's what i did and i | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-70 | on your tv channel that's what i did and i started writing articles on money control my first external client actually was a guy who read an article of ours in money control and he showed up to our office he lived in honey showed up to our office which is a little industrial estate in wali and he gave us two crores at that point in time when we had a total of two crores he gave us another two crores and he didn't know us and he just liked what we had said in the media that's actually how we got and then the business grew from there in fact it's it's it's unfortunate but he died two three months ago in the lockdown but he remained an investor with us for ten years you've written a thread about this on your twitter yeah please please go follow radhaka i'm on twitter you are one of the reasons uh that i say that there's a new wave of twitter happening in this country so people's perception of twitter is that it's | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-71 | country so people's perception of twitter is that it's entirely political which is not true it's it's one of the easiest ways to grow your mind it's a very underutilized tool in the world share your thoughts good or bad yeah i think you discovered us also off twitter i'm guessing i discovered most cool people i know of twitter i mean twitter has done so much for me and i just think that people complain a lot about twitter but if you look at the positive side of twitter twitter has like we're a young brand it's totally democratized i mean in the earlier days marketing was about having big budgets etc now you can have good content and twitter gives you reach as an individual and as a brand so i love twitter and you know if five percent of people are trolling me hey it's okay it's all good yeah um i think that's a modern life hack you just need to learn how to embrace the concept of trolling early in life yeah and you will be able to grow | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-72 | in life yeah and you will be able to grow massively don't you get trolled offline doesn't some relative tell you we are too both motivated i mean don't you get trolled offline so why do you get why do you object to online trolls and uh it's it's a part of the new modern human experience yeah so it's it's all i actually have fun with them sometimes um i've chosen to not talk to them but i have fun reading them uh trolling in twitter being trolled in the corporate world by older guys yeah so uh how why did edelweiss buy you guys out like what does a big company like i don't advise perceive in a privately owned company and say that okay we need to buy these people is it that they want to buy the assets which is people like you that i want or radhika gupta to work at it do they see that do they see all the portfolios you're managing so i think it's a combination and you know selling your company is a super | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-73 | combination and you know selling your company is a super emotional thing and we talked to a lot of buyers we actually spent about 9 12 months in this whole acquisition process how long did you actually run the company before four and a half five years 2009 to 2013. so long enough and then we started this process of kind of selling the business and honestly we spoke to companies bigger and smaller other needle wise now people think these deals are done only for the money and you know you sell your startup for xyz i can promise you and you know you've said that you wanted to talk to it always you know and work for them out of college the reason we picked advice was the brand and the culture um in you have to find see financial services businesses are not food businesses where you just sell it and you walk away they buy the business for the founders because they expect the team will hang on now if you as a group of people have to work with a company afterwards your primary criteria is | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-74 | to work with a company afterwards your primary criteria is dude is this a place i want to work so it's a marriage rather than a buyout absolutely and i said this again and again when i did the deal that it's a partnership it's not an acquisition and you know people always in fact when we sold the business people kept saying they're going to eat you alive corporate india is going to because this was our first time working in indian corporates they were like oh it will be a lala company it will eat you alive i mean all the standard stuff thankfully they have not eaten me alive and in fact the partnership was a four-year partnership after which you know my husband and i could have moved on but we haven't moved on right we've steered and growed um one of the things i like about idle voice and this is very rare i don't think they get enough credit is it's one of the few financial services companies in india that really cares about young talent most | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-75 | in india that really cares about young talent most of the ceos are super young i mean there are a lot of ceos who are in the 35 40 age that doesn't happen in this country um like we just like people with gray hair i mean i got this opportunity when i was 33 so you have to give something to people what do you think they saw on you at 33 i think with it wise it's always been a passion to do something they know that the good or the advantage of young people is that they are passionate and they adapt to change so if you want to challenge your brand you have to be someone who is open to changing right you have to be someone who is like okay i don't care what anyone else is doing i don't care if i'm small i'm just going to go out and make a mark so i think that ability to adapt and change in young people is something that they like to take a bet on and because they saw that in me i've had | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-76 | and because they saw that in me i've had the confidence to hire young people in my team so most of my hiring has been very young ma'am like i know like you're one of the most humble people i've spoken to and uh i've spoken to ceos where i don't sense humidity uh and i hate doing this to you but i read a very very interesting stat about what happened at idlewise after you took over yeah uh could you just share some of those just like that number with the viewers about those many billions of dollars that you're managing now and what you're aiming for in 2025 okay yeah so one is the aspirations are super large so i've seen it wise mutual fund and we have ranks right in our industry of 45 mutual funds like a hierarchy yeah it's like it's literally it takes the money you manage which is called assets under management so that's the money you manage so i may manage 100 crores you may manage 200 crores and you'll be ranked | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-77 | you may manage 200 crores and you'll be ranked yeah you're ranked based on that and these ranks come out every quarter and there's like a lot of social media who play about these ranks so it's a very league table obsessed industry um so i've seen us as 36th rank we just broke into the top 50 in this quarter which we're super excited about uh and i've seen us manage six thousand crores of money which is a little less than a billion dollars and we probably manage a little less than 50 000 crores of money in the last few years from 6 000 to 50 000 yeah and i mean look the aspiration is and i've said this in interviews that we want to manage three lakh crores um people also ask you know what's the strategy to get to three lakh crores and i don't think i have an answer to that i don't think you need to have answers to that even at 6 000 crores i don't think i had an answer as to how we'll | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-78 | think i had an answer as to how we'll get to 50 000 but i did know that from six i'm gonna grow this business to nine and ten and from ten i'll grow it to fifteen so life is a series of small steps taken daily and as you take those small steps a little bit more confidence develops in you a little bit of luck also comes into play a few opportunities come and you grab them and you know lo and behold you grow the term ceo is intimidating yeah especially on the outside amateur listeners college kids we don't even know what a ceo does so i have two questions one do every like do all the companies have different roles for their ceos and two what does your life as a ceo entail like what do you do like what's your what's your daily work okay so the daily work changes day one day but um i think it's unfortunate that i see your role is intimidating and i've had these debates with my father i think the old model of this | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-79 | with my father i think the old model of this your role being intimidating in itself is a problem i don't think the ceo is the one who sits in the corner office and like everybody is really scared of the ceo who's going to walk in i think a ceo is a people's leader right the coach of the team the coach of the team the mentor of the team the guide of the team and it's your one among equals and i always say that you know organizations have these designations etc we're all playing roles but the ceo is i think a few things one you lead a team and i think i spent 50 percent of my time doing hr by the way i literally spent 50 percent i mean you think it is the easiest thing to do to hire a bunch of smart people and you just assume they're all going to work together they don't you have to facilitate it you manage egos you manage interpersonal issues sometimes you'll just be sitting in meetings where the only you | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-80 | just be sitting in meetings where the only you have no technical contribution right because i'm not a technical expert in every department right but i'm just there to facilitate two people working together or i'm there to just motivate a team and then tell them that they can do it um so i think firstly we are people leaders secondly and i think you will understand this well we are also carriers of the brand um because you know in your ceo os mutual fund your responsibility is to carry the message of edelweiss mutual fund everywhere that you go and make sure that people think the highest about always mutual funds so i like wake up every day thinking like i represent the brand and i have to be the best ambassador of the brand i mean this is something i learned from my father so he said i'm ambassador of india right he start his title all these years was ambassador of india and all his life he spent marketing india and making sure that people thought the best about india | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-81 | and making sure that people thought the best about india and i think of myself as an ambassador of mutual funds so i think that's the second role that we do and then of course you know you do a lot of routine stuff and you manage business and you make sure the company is profitable and all that stuff happens um but first you're a leader of people and you're an ambassador of the brand the one common thing i've seen in all the ceos i've met is yeah they have different personalities different ways about going about things but all of them are good communicators like any any thoughts that they have and it's often a massive amount of thoughts they will articulate it very simply so i'm told this and i didn't believe this um but actually i over time i've realized that i think it matters because you know it's one thing to have thoughts and in india i don't think it's as much about thoughts it's about convincing a large number of people that this is | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-82 | convincing a large number of people that this is what if i say tomorrow we all have to wear red t-shirts because that's what's going to be good for the company it's about convincing everyone that they have to wear a red t-shirt tomorrow and making sure that they wear a t-shirt tomorrow and that is communication and i i think you know i think a ceo has to be an optimist and has to be a communicator because you have to lift people up and inspire them what would you like to tell young girls or watching this and telling themselves i'll never be a ceo it starts with you believing that you'll be a ceo in fact you know the thing that irritates me or inspires me the most when i interview fresh candidates uh is i ask them look what do you want to be in life and then they'll say you know i just want to be a manager or like i want to grow and i want to hear that you want to be a ceo this is a | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-83 | that you want to be a ceo this is a beautiful little quote that i read a long time ago as a kid that if you aim for the stars you will reach halfway through so if you am for less than a ceo i don't know where you'll get i mean it's like if you wanted to play cricket and your son or you aimed to be a cricketer you would always say i want to be tandulkar i want to play for the national team nobody says i'm going to be a ranjit trophy player or i'm going to play for my state team so i think the biggest thing to tell little girls and guys is set aspirations here be hugely ambitious and ambitious is not a bad word it's not a bad word for a girl yeah and i also want to highlight this other thing told to me by money she was a common friend and this is also something i only learned after starting my own businesses and like learning about professional life through people like yourself it's | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-84 | learning about professional life through people like yourself it's a beautiful concept and there's something even mukesh mania said himself he said that it took my dad maybe 40 years to build out his legacy it probably took me 20 years to build out a much larger legacy and it will take my kids 10 years to build on a much larger legacy than what i've built in 20 years and the reason for that is india yeah the spectrum and the number of people that we have this is something that young people underestimate like i remember being an engineer in college and i always had the same question that why are these people living so low in life like uh and i had that perspective fortunately because of having a lot of business savvy friends outside of engineering college you weren't studying engineering you were studying bba who were running their own businesses in college i used to talk much more to them and i said have this disconnect with my engineering college friends and i asked my business away friends in the engineering college do you | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-85 | my business away friends in the engineering college do you sense this with all these other people like why are they aiming so low and they told me that dude it's just cultural upbringing they've been told that you're in engineering college you better have a stable job at the end of it and that's it it's that whole uh settle yeah and at the core of it it's a status game the parents want to be able to tell their friends that oh my kids got a great job yeah and then if you're a woman then you have kids and all that but why am low at least start by aiming really really high and i think this is this is definitely an ivy league education it forces you to aim really really high at least start thinking that you're the best in the world right i you know one of the things i always used to tell my team even when we were ranked 36 is that you know the league table can call your rank anything okay that's reality but in your head you have to | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-86 | that's reality but in your head you have to be number one [Music] and in your head you have to be number one because if you think like number 36 in your head you will always stay at number 36. 100 um you know and one thing i've learned about business and entrepreneurship and careers is that anything is possible oh yeah oh my god you you can aim for the sas and it'll just boil down to how much you're willing to execute and sometimes you know i've seen this in my last three year career uh you know things like bharatpar and some of the things that we've done i mean opportunities come at you and you think there's no chance that i am going to have to get this you know why would this come to me why would i get this and it just happens if you want it hard enough i mean look so don't judge me for this i am a total shahrukh khan fan of crime and i actually really believe that whole dialogue about actually | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-87 | i actually really believe that whole dialogue about actually the world conspires you to make you to succeed yeah um my my my reason for choosing this career and not creating say comedy content or light-weighted content is that i want to breed entrepreneurship in india i want to share my mistakes i want to share the fire i've been blessed i've been born with a lot of fire and i just want to put it out there for the world and i you know if there's ever a hundred billionaires of the world list i want 50 to be from india and i want oh wow 49 to be like listeners of this podcast i know it's too high a name but at least they should have heard one podcast and got some i want 25 of them to be women i i really hope so i want 25 of them to be women i want that to be a change through the podcast um and i'll tell you why again um there's this concept i read about a lot so it's this concept | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-88 | concept i read about a lot so it's this concept of matriarchal societies uh i believe that um bhutan is a matriarchal society parts of the northeast yeah parts of the northeast kerala and you know what it does it i've been to the northeast i've been and spoken to men from matriarchal societies again i will get hate from this because um you know india does have its section of oh yeah yeah people who do not believe at all in this concept anytime i say something pro woman on twitter there's like ten percent of people who are going to hate me yeah it's just it's okay that's okay we'll we'll bear some of those arrows short uh why do you think a matriarchal society is good for the earth i'll let you take that answer first and then i'll give my own perspective also could you just explain on matriarchal societies and very simple words to the listeners so i think matriarchy is where women play a strong role in society i | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-89 | is where women play a strong role in society i think you mentioned kerala in the northeast i've also seen this my mother-in-law hills from bangalore um and i think the advantage of a matriarchal society and forget matriarchal society of lifting women is that when you lift a woman you live a community and when you lift a community you lift an economy just want to give a nugget like a story here yeah yeah in israel so the country was developed after world war ii yeah where they had jews from all over europe and all of the world settled into israel yeah but they didn't know how to unify everyone so they did this very interesting thing where they made hebrew compulsory and hebrew was like their sunscreen like this is a unifying thing yeah sanskrit is kind of it's dying out in india it's coming back slowly yeah it's coming back gradually like people are getting interested in sanskrit again but hebrew was a language that had entirely died out and the | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-90 | a language that had entirely died out and the government didn't know how to bring back hebrew completely so they made hebrew compulsory for everyone till fourth standard but for all the girls still tell stanford because the girls would become mothers and they would teach the entire families that's the core concept of matriarchy that women have this ability to unify to what we call galvanize so galvanizing and engineering is when you dip in other metal and zinc and the whole metal gets covered in zinc that's the power of matriarchal society when people learn to look at societies businesses life like that and not just i don't want women to get power i want men to be in power that's when we'll really start so we had uh you know my mother-in-law had this maid and i think i've told this story before from bangalore um and she i think maybe would have been fourth or fifth pass and she came to bombay and she started working with my mother-in-law now she | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-91 | and she started working with my mother-in-law now she didn't know any english i think kannada medium or whatever and then was forced to drop out of school to support a big family of brothers etc so she brought up my husband and then i think when my husband's aunt went abroad she went abroad with her and she traveled the world she learned english she did everything came back to bombay and she was able to migrate two or three of her sisters from the village into bombay she was able to settle down her family and buy them land in bangalore and she became a base for other girls of that community in bangalore to come settle down in bombay so that is the galvanizing effect that a woman can have she now by the way she paid for her own wedding she's now sending her two daughters to english medium schools and i think that shift now from hindi kannada medium fourth standard drop out to sending your daughters and getting them educated but that is an orbital shift | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-92 | and getting them educated but that is an orbital shift in our society right ma'am uh like what do you think are the strengths and weaknesses of both men and women like could you list out strengths and weaknesses of women and also strengths and weaknesses of men so i won't say men and women i'll say masculine and feminine because i do believe that there are feminine qualities that also exist in men but um i do believe the world actually if you look at the skill set of the future it favors the feminine skill set so the old skill set which was the masculine skill set is analytical i mean like you know you remember these books that used to say if two men can do a task in this much time then how many you know like we can screw a light bulb then how many men will it take to do four light bulbs etc so it was all commoditized stars i mean nobody wrote those things about women by the way because they know each woman is | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-93 | women by the way because they know each woman is different um but if you look at the skill sets of women they are creativity customer experience for instance um at its core it's compassion like understanding it's understanding so your mother is the best provider of compassion and customer experience in the country your indian mother on average knows how to manage her husband she knows like my mother managed my father's profession and career and she cooked samosas for everybody on 26th january because that was part of his profession she knew how to bring me up and send me to an ivy league school she dealt with my brother she dealt with her in-laws and she ran a job of her own she had four five different customers in her life who she was managing to perfection every single day what is this customization of experience yeah you know the goal of spirituality from a career and practical perspective is to balance your internal masculine and feminine energy which in the real world means balancing your masculine and | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-94 | in the real world means balancing your masculine and feminine skill sets for example if you think too much like a guy which was me in my early 20s it was about so i'll list out some masculine and feminine strengths that and weaknesses yeah so masculine strengths i feel that guys for some reason and i might be wrong please correct me if i'm wrong but in my experience i've seen that guys can a scalable team players you can make a guy work with 10 other guys who are kind of in sync with them and the team will work very well and that 10 can even be transformed into 100 if those 100 guys think similarly 100 guys will work in june yeah if they think similarly if they think similarly if they think somebody yeah uh women's trends on the other hand again it's multitasking yeah it's endurance being able to take like you know a huge amount of being able to handle pain i mean you know one of the top one of the most | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-95 | you know one of the top one of the most beautiful memories of this whole covet period is what are the countries who've handled covert well well they seem to have women prime ministers or presidents to understand what's happening on the ground and to handle a situation of human suffering they say that if there are only women leaders although there won't be any wars so i mean you look at and again you know you look at someone like jacinda arden right she's a mother and during the covert period she's sitting and managing her kid at home on a sweatshirt and talking to her people on video and she's just making it like she's part of the problem she's not above everyone else because she's this untouchable so vulnerability which we talk about yeah but i'll tell you i'll i'll also bring in a bitter truth here at the cost of being pessimistic okay uh and uh okay now there a big weakness that women are especially in indian society is a lot of conditioning | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-96 | especially in indian society is a lot of conditioning that they've gone through yeah because indian society from the time you're a little girl you're told certain things or even even in the matriarchal parts of india and that's what i'm saying women need to have because you're not told to be ambitious you're not told to have big aspirations and unfortunately and i think sheryl sandberg said this in the american context i think it's even more true in the indian context you are told to quit your job well before and make a huge deal out of this whole marriage and kids thing so i have women still coming to me saying you know i don't want to take on a bigger project or you know i can't change jobs because i'm planning to get married i mean yeah it's it it is how it is and this is the bitter truth i feel like we are one generation away from the equality you spoke of when we spoke with us 25 yeah according to me practically | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-97 | spoke with us 25 yeah according to me practically what's going to happen and this is not something i wish i wish that it's 50 50. yeah but i think it's going to be something like a best case scenario would be 60 40. i hope my daughter's generation i mean i know that it's i know my generation will always hear things like the only woman ceo and all that stuff i hope my daughter's generation is able to change that i'm seeing some signs of it because you know what's happening now is that while there is a strong feminist movement there are two sections of that feminist movement as well and the majority in that is just a lot of um highlighting the negatives without thinking of solutions but the next generation will start thinking of the solutions and by the way i should also tell you so people keep asking me these questions of like what are your challenges as a woman and all that stuff there are huge advantages to being a woman um for instance when you're the only | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-98 | being a woman um for instance when you're the only woman of 44 men and my peers often tell me i get a ton of attention maybe much more than i should i've had the opportunity because i'm one of the few young women ceos to interview people like arundhati bhattacharya to spend time with people like ziya modi to talk to marycom i have been given opportunities because your gender makes you different it makes your thinking different it makes your approach different and the world is looking for different people so i will not step back and say it is only a burden i think it is about how you look at yourself i think people are a mirror right if i think being a woman is an advantage the world will make it an advantage ma'am like when i meet other youtubers i know that they've been through a similar struggle like like like myself like as in it's very similar our journeys our initial struggles we have to figure out camera workouts yeah we have to figure out then | LsgtokPbtDY |
e50b54ebd142-99 | out camera workouts yeah we have to figure out then we have to figure scaling up so when you meet ambitious successful women like yourself um what's that underlying vibe like where do you connect our sisters we connect on so many levels even when i meet women ceos by the way and there's so few of us and i have friends who are women ceos in manufacturing businesses and who are film producers my god the bond is incredible because we connect on shared experiences and we all have shared stories we all have shared stories of going into rooms where we're the only girl and maybe the guy's bathroom is working but the ladies bathroom is not working in the office we have stories as banal as that we have stories of being scared to talk in a conference room because like i struggle with this even now like there are 15 guys talking and there's like an arnab goswami kind of like everybody talking over each other i get very withdrawn and many of my girlfriends tell me these stories | LsgtokPbtDY |