Jeffery:
Yeah, well like we like to do Tushar, we’re already kind of started, were already right into the thick of things. So welcome to ask an angel. Thank you very much for joining us today from Delhi. And the best way for us to start is if you can give us a little bit of a background on where you’ve come from, the places you’ve been um work-wise and what you’re looking to do now and what you’ve been doing and they’re going to do in the future. And one thing about you that nobody would know.

Tushar:
that’s a large number of questions Jeff, you know, thank you so much for inviting me and having me on your podcast. Uh so where I have come from and what is one thing about me, which nobody would know? So I was born in a small city, but my father has a transferable government job. So, uh I studied in a convent school in a small city, but my father is from India’s best institute, Indian Institute of Technology, so he was always very focused on providing the best education.

So he moved us to Delhi. And uh from there it’s been a journey of uh doing my engineering then doing my M. B. A. in finance from the University of Delhi and uh you know, initially I tried a business which was doing quite valid education but I thought I should upscale myself more. So I joined Deloitte and Touche. Then I joined India’s largest venture capital fund by the name Brand Capital, um you know largest by the number of deals they do and uh and you know uh then you know there’s a Russian telecom company, MTS, which is the largest telecom company in Russia system. I was heading their treasury in Delhi, raised almost $2.5 billion for them. Then I was chief financial officer of company owned by Guggenheim Partners. Then I thought, I have to do something for my own. So I started consultancy ventures. Personally, I’m an investor in four companies, but my company’s more or less focused on getting funding for startups for growth-stage companies uh and also getting funding for venture capital funds uh through my network of angel investors.

So this is my professional profile. Very short on my personal profile. Married. Wife is a very senior investment banker uh in India’s largest investment banking firm. So we talk finance at home all the time, which is quite boring and two kids, and happily married. And that’s about it.

So your other question was what is one thing about me which no one knows is I’m a great singer. I have always been on stage in all the colleges and even incorporates where I work, They used to call me for singing, but I like to send the religious songs. So that’s the bad part. You know, it’s, it just doesn’t add up when you are in a corporate life and singing, right? So that’s awesome. I was born in the foothills of the Himalayas, the mountains. So, and my best vacation is go to the hills.

Jeffery:
That’s great. I’m a big outdoors and mountain guy myself so I can appreciate wanting to get out, get out there and mix it up in the wilderness. So that’s awesome. So to go back to kind of some of the things that you talked about earlier and some of the companies that you work for and work through and of course your background being more heavy on the finance side.

I kind of want to explore how that really shaped, you know, the types of things that you’re doing now for helping companies raise funds, but also how you’ve made investments into companies. That the approach that you’ve taken into investing in these companies. So if we go back to kind of even your entrepreneurial days when you were working through and before and after Deloitte um how did you find that your MBA, in the background that you had, how much that helped you and the desire to work with and help early stage companies.

Tushar:
Okay. So uh so you know you are asking me about my uh days around Deloitte and uh during my entrepreneurial background and how my education helped me. So you know I tell I would tell my children to do an M. B. A. Uh any management course after working for some time. Because the real value of that course in terms of maintaining control over the business is actually when you know how to apply those things that you are learning out there.

Having said that a lot of these courses are case studies driven. They give you real-life problems to discuss and solve. So you know my education was MBA was in finance um and we were very heavy on learning all the aspects of finance. The teachers were really ferocious those days and so you know I learned I I probably did management in commerce plus management, so you know it was a lot of subjects and it did help me but My business was all about marketing, you know, it was education company. I took it to annual 800 students and you know those days uh I could, you know everywhere I saw only positive, I thought you know, 824,040,000. and uh because I saw the growth from zero and you know my time, a lot of my time actually haven’t been talking to customers who were the parents of the students and the students and finance help me a lot in terms of maintaining control over the past.

And also planning out how much to put in in marketing at the end of the day, N E C X. So you talk to Jeff um his main juice is cash flow. You know, end of the day, the costs are there, the officers are there, the salaries are there, the cars are running end of the day. If you’re uh if your targets don’t add up in terms of 25% growth, 100% close. Uh you will really face a lot of problems on the cost side and you will face pressures to restructure to send out people and that is a bad atmosphere for your culture, for your company culture or maintaining the right spirit amongst your employees.

And so you know, you have to really be focused on the cash flow on the top numbers and keep on driving them that you don’t just exceed the target, succeed the targets. And uh that’s what real finances for me, having said that those who are uh finance incentive industries like investment banking or stock markets for them, it is much more.

Jeffery:
And you find that with the education of having an MBA or just having this understanding of finance that it’s really helped you understand business is better that it helps you kind of be able to choose and pick which companies you think have the opportunity to grow. I found it in past interviews, but also just in working with a lot of different bankers that they just have a different view on how companies work, and I find that they almost become their own grouping of people that you can go after, because they tend to get startups better than the average person. I could lump in lawyers into that as well. But it just seems that anybody that’s in finance just tends to have a better grasp and understanding of maybe it’s the balance sheet and understanding how companies operate and they can drive in any industry. Doesn’t matter where you get dropped into, they just have a really good understanding of the modeling and the business. Is that something that you found equates to good success in early-stage investing?

Tushar:
So, does have a knowledge of finance make you a better investor, uh, you know, just the capacity to read balance sheets. And the an extra is deeply uh like investment bankers do. And does it give you a separate better perspective towards companies? Frankly, Jeffrey it does. You know, you don’t need to go further than Warren Buffet. I mean uh in 2008 he was approached by the US. Treasury offering him Um you know, to sell the Lehman brothers. And uh so this guy, you know, he’s on record to say that He spent 2-3 days in his room.

Does the room Studied the entire 808 you know, balance sheet? And uh the whole uh corporate booklet and on, you know, calculated each number. And he said this business does not make sense. So it does help. It does help. And uh you know, I I just wish it uh you know, that it should not make uh investment bankers and financial community negative because they tend to see more risks when they see the balance sheet. And uh, they forget the positive side of it. I’ll give you a very small example, any software which is being developed or any of capital work in progress can be counted as an asset in the balance sheet. Now, this is such a big uh thing, because you are creating something out there, you feel it is a past, the end of the data is going as an asset to your balance sheet. Now, any financial guy, I can say that, no, this is actually just software, so, but you know, uh, you know, actually a businessman would know the real value of it as an asset, so, so, you know, that’s that’s what makes a difference.

But um, you know, I just hope that a lot of accountants, especially in the financial field, they tend to be a little bit more negative than others because uh you know, they just see numbers, there is a whole business behind it, you know, there is a hole, there are teams and there are m