S3 E08 | Masa, Mergers, and Making It Big ft. Alok Sama, SoftBank’s Deal Whisperer

[00:00:00] Alok Sama: Particularly in that 5- or 6‑year period when I was associated with SoftBank, so much happened. There was this complex, larger-than-life character. This was a period of peak volatility for him in terms of the early days when he was taking off with, say, with Alibaba going public.

And then, the Vision Fund, and then, obviously, the subsequent comedown. Some very interesting events in my personal life, losing both my parents, and then, this bizarre thing with this smear campaign, a lot of people have made the comment that there’s a sense that, look, you’re in a kind of bewildered state through this entire book. What is going on, what is happening to me?

I said, look, this is a really interesting story. It lends itself to something approaching a, if not a thriller, certainly a novel with a lot to unpack.

[00:01:05] Karthik Reddy: Welcome to another episode of the third season of the Blume podcast. The theme all of this year has been ​“Winning Beyond Boundaries.” And today, we’re joined by an incredible example of that across global finance and technology — Alok Sama. 

Alok Sama is the former President and CFO of SoftBank Group International and chief Strategy Officer of the SoftBank Group when he moved on from there. But while he was there, Alok orchestrated some of fintech’s largest deals, the $59 billion Sprint and T‑Mobile merger, and the landmark $34 billion acquisition of Arm by SoftBank. And he was one of Masa Son’s closest advisors during that period.

And what alerted us to this episode is, of course, Alok’s phenomenal tell-all book, ​“The Money Trap.” The subtitle is even more ominous, LOST ILLUSIONS inside the tech bubble. We’re going to ask Alok what that means. And, Alok unpacks like three decades of his career, investment banking, VC, across New York, London, Hong Kong.

Then, he started with shaping Morgan Stanley’s TMT practice in Asia-Pac and then led to multiple multi-billion dollar deals at SoftBank. His journey is very reflective of a masterful understanding of global markets and tech ambition being at the cusp of it. Currently, Alok is a senior advisor at Warburg Pincus.

Of course, he continues to influence the intersection of tech and finance like he always has. Today, the idea is to dive a little bit into his experiences, and insights, get some lessons from navigating some of these complex deals, and extract a lot of the nuggets from that book.

And if you haven’t read it, of course, recommend, to pick it up, at your nearest, Amazon or airport or wherever. Welcome to the podcast, Alok. Thanks for agreeing to do this. 

[00:02:53] Alok Sama: Thanks Karthik. I’m looking forward to this. 

[00:02:54] Karthik Reddy: Super. So, I think Alok, I always like to let the audience get to know our guests a little bit.

So, some amount of background about, growing up in Delhi, and then I know you moved and became a global purvey of finance and the role model for a lot of Indians who want to do that. But a lot of people don’t know your dad was a Padma Shri as well for his research on liver diseases actually.

And you are the eldest brother, if I recall, right? And so what did that mean for you? Did they want you to become a doctor? Did they push you in that direction? Very different years in the 70s, and 80s in India. Everything that we relate to from back then was very stereotypical.

Here you were in a highly, intellectual academic environment. What prompted you to make the choices that pushed you to undergrad in math and then an MBA, etc? 

[00:03:51] Alok Sama: Oh, wow. Okay. That’s a lot of impact. 

[00:03:54] Karthik Reddy: No, 20 years of framework on who Alok Sama was.

[00:03:58] Alok Sama: No, I get it. Look, for the first 21 years of my life, I barely stepped outside Delhi and that’s not an exaggeration.

So that’s certainly where my heart is. My parents met when my father was teaching. He was a lecturer at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences and my mother was a medical student and my early days growing up, it was on the campus of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences.

And you graduated as he went from Lecturer to assistant professor. You went from E‑type housing to D‑type government housing, etc. So, from my perspective, it was by Indian standards, it would be middle class, on a modest government salary, but from my perspective, certainly happy days, happy memories.

I wouldn’t describe the environment as intellectual. It was certainly academic. And there’s a difference in as much as my father wasn’t watching Satyajit Ray films or reading Rabindranath Tagore. He was just a hands-on scientist. But certainly, that created a, if not academic pressure, certainly in the academic environment, my mother was a doctor too.

She took a break after she had me to have my brother Vivek, but certainly, you saw that commitment to academics, to learning. And that was very much part of our Indian ethos anyway. I never felt any pressure to be a doctor, but I think expectation is more the word, particularly a little later in life.

My father broke away from the All India Institute and became a very successful kind of private practitioner and then later on, went on to be Chairman of Gangaram Hospital, etc. So it was more expectation. When I didn’t do it, perhaps my brother felt a little bit more pressure and he ended up being a doctor.

But look I have happy memories of growing up and my parents just gave me so much. I just have nothing but gratitude and nothing but gratitude towards Delhi and towards India. And it’s no accident that I’ve come back and revisited, retouched, and touched down on India so many times with Morgan Stanley.

One of the things you didn’t mention, probably my happiest memory as a banker was setting up Morgan Stanley’s business in India, an investment banking business, in the mid-nineties. And those have always been very, kept me in touch with India in a very meaningful way.

[00:06:42] Karthik Reddy: Speaking of India, I think two big influences that you mentioned in the book as well. One is a fanboy of Amitabh Bachchan, second is you love cricket all around, a lot of love for cricket. I know you’ve traveled far and wide after that, are those still big loves for you? Does everything Indian pull you back to your roots of growing up out here? And then what else about India has fundamentally influenced who you are in a global landscape?

[00:07:18] Alok Sama: Yeah, candidly it’s almost Delhi more than India. I go to Mumbai. I’ve been to Bangalore. Literally, I’ve been to once, if you can believe it, probably twice, actually, in the last, all my life, actually. Even Mumbai, I was there a few weeks ago. It feels like a bit of a foreign country. So, to me, India is very much about Delhi. And that’s where my roots are.

That’s where I feel the most rooted. Amitabh Bachchan and Clint Eastwood growing up, these were my idols, I wouldn’t say they shaped me in a meaningful way, but, perhaps certainly a desire to be kind of that cool, poker face, ironic, that personality I’ve always found very appealing, very aspirational.

It’s not what I am, but it’s certainly made an impression. Cricket, literally that’s the one sport. I don’t play, but I follow religiously wherever I am. In terms of watching, I don’t play cricket. My first love is golf as a sport to play, but to certainly to watch cricket number one.

[00:08:28] Karthik Reddy: When we talk to entrepreneurs, it’s very difficult to discern in one or two meetings, but like most of us, I think, when we make certain choices in life, it’s all about figuring out how much of this had to do with their nature versus being like your genetic pool versus how you were nurtured, growing up. And I don’t know how mathematics happened for you and I know you talked about your obsession in your early years about Fermat’s Last Theorem.

I know it eventually got solved, but like, A, how did that fascination emerge? And, then, how do these things influence, you as you think through career choices and say, why do I want to become one of the world’s best bankers or your strategy role in SoftBank?

And I also speak to youngsters who are beginning their careers. Most of our listeners are entrepreneurial, venture-backed sort of company, employees, or founders and they always come to us for advice on careers and how they’re being shaped, post-college. And it’s very difficult for them to relate to what each one of us has gone through.

I know it’s been a long time, but would love to do a little bit of flashback and see how they influenced you. 

[00:09:46] Alok Sama: Yeah, it’s a really interesting thing to unpack, Karthik, and I’m not sure what I’m going to say is going to be useful to anyone, young and aspiring, but I think my life, there’s a lot of serendipity, a series of mostly fortunate accidents, because, yes, you’re right, I studied mathematics, but even that was a bit of an accident.

It’s actually a really interesting story. In high school, math came easy to me. I was good at, but equally, I used to read obsessively and my best subject was in parallel, which could just as well have been English literature, but doing something arty was never an option from again, it’s a very patriarchal success as society India still is, but for a guy to be studying English literature, which is how are you going to go out and studying art?

How are you going to go out and make a living? Going abroad, going to the U.S. at the undergraduate level wasn’t an option. My father became, by Indian standards, wealthy later in life. But at that point, it really wasn’t an option. And so I applied to St. Stephen’s College. My Preferred subject was actually economics, which is the most prestigious course.

When I went into the interview, you mentioned the Amitabh Bachchan influence. And this is kind of comical. I had this ridiculous long-flowing hair kind of quaff model after Amitabh Bachchan. And Mr. Rajpal, who is the principal of St. Stephen’s College. In my interview, I sat down, and the first question… 

St. Stephen’s College was unique in that it was the only college that actually interviewed you. I don’t know if they still do, but I sat down and the first thing he asked me was in this very kind of God bless him, may he rest in peace, very pompous, kind of fake, almost English accent, young man, tell me about your hairstyle. Where’d you get your hairstyle? 

And it went downhill from there. And that sort of Amitabh Bachchan, that hairstyle impersonation got me into trouble. And even though my marks were terrific, they were really good. I was rejected. And I also applied to mathematics and my mathematics interview.

Was completely different. They just asked me to solve calculus problems, which I did breezily in a heartbeat. So that’s how I ended up studying mathematics and I was always a problem solver and yeah, kind of things like Fermat’s last theorem, the obsessively digging into things like that was something I was really into. And then, by the way, finance was, I don’t think that ever really I met anyone.

I certainly wasn’t one of those people who like aspired to be a banker or wanted to be a banker, let alone the world’s greatest banker or whatever. I’d never heard of Morgan Stanley. I had a very peripheral knowledge of what banking was all about anyway. Back then people who had a bent towards finance or commerce wanted to become chartered accountants.

Or the most aspiration you got was maybe you go work for Citibank one day, right? That was a big deal at the time. I described this in the book. It was a pivotal moment in my life. My father introduced me to someone who he believed was a mathematician and he was, and this gentleman, Dr. Shiv Gupta turned out to be a professor at the Wharton School.

He taught operations, research, and statistics, and he’s the one who’s said you should think about it, I’d never heard of Wharton. You should just think about doing an MBA. Again, he wasn’t specifically focused on finance, but he Dangling salary numbers like you could be making $40,000 – 50,000 a year, which sounded like an astronomical amount of money, though, and he really helped out and told me a little bit about actually the first time I heard of the GMAT was from a friend of mine, someone who most of your listeners and I’m sure Sanjeev Bhikchanani.

He was with me in college and in our batch. He was with me in school too, by the way. He was one of the first people who actually did the GMAT and he did really well. And I remember Sanjeev telling me, he says, you know Alok, you should do this too. And maybe your father can. His parents couldn’t afford to send him.

He said maybe your father can afford to pull this together for you. So that’s how he guided me on the GMAT and that’s how going to the US came about. And, again, Morgan Stanley was, serendipitous. It was a very waspy farm. At the time, there was, as I recall, only one Indian managing director who I met with.

He took a liking to me, and that’s how I ended up at Morgan Stanley and worked my way upwards. So, there’s not a whole lot you could take away from that because it really was and I made it. It was a series of accidents. 

Once again, SoftBank, I described this in the book. I’m on holiday with a good friend, Nikesh Arora, still a very close friend. And he sprang this on me and he happened to be entering SoftBank in a very senior role where he was supposed to succeed Son and he asked me to come along for the ride. And that once again was not something I was looking for or seeking and was once again a mostly fortunate accident.

[00:15:33] Karthik Reddy: I think there’s a small sort of feels like there’s a philosophical lesson too and what happens in the current world is we’ve reached the other end of the spectrum where I don’t think people are mentally preparing themselves to fall into these set of participants and they actually want everything to be more programmatic because we are now overloaded with information, opportunities, what was a unique set of circumstances that led to this meeting with the professor or these relationships.

Today, we are all, being engineered through, thousands of counselors trying to send you to the right school. There are income levels, which allow you to go to those schools. So basically, what we experienced in the 70s, 80s, 90s, sadly, I think is lost on the current generation.

[00:16:24] Alok Sama: No, I think actually Karthik, you’re absolutely right to flag that. And I do as you might recall in the book talk about in fact. In the epilogue, I talk about in this bizarre incident where I’m meeting with two Mossad spies, two agents. I do talk about, the idea of control being an illusion, which I firmly believe in.

Because I think the one thing you can’t lose sight of is a certain level of, don’t just step back and hang out on the beach and smoke weed and expect things to happen. It’s not that straightforward to have some people who’ve been fortunate enough to do that, maybe if you bought Bitcoin when it was worth pennies and you get lucky.

But you can’t count on that. A certain level of motivation, a certain level of commitment and that kind of comes from a family where you see your parents, your family, people around you. Your students thriving, working hard, but at a certain level, one of the things that’s been incredibly refreshing for me spending time in India, spending time in India very recently is this kind of drive to learn for social mobility.

It’s just so powerful in India that you don’t ever want to lose that. But beyond that, just appreciate that there’s only so much you can control. In fact, there’s probably very little you can control. 

[00:17:43] Karthik Reddy: Yeah, no, a great lesson in that. I’m going to take a slight deviation, go to the book, and then come back to those set of serendipitous events and maybe one or two fun anecdotes about each one of those eras before we move to the double click into SoftBank.

Is the book like an outcome of all of this love for literature? And I know you went and refreshed yourself with some sort of creative writing inputs from some of the greats in New York. Was it a manifestation of all of those years of unfulfilled desire to actually, I know you read voraciously, but I don’t know if enjoyed writing and the book came from an unmet need over these 30 years or so.

[00:18:30] Alok Sama: No, I think, that’s absolutely, I could not have phrased it better. It really was an unfulfilled ambition. I did want to write. And I did a master’s degree, which sounds like a bizarre thing to do, but it was a phenomenal experience for me.

I did get a master’s degree in Creative writing from NYU, at age 58.

[00:18:51.03] Karthik Reddy: This is how recently Alok?

[00:18:52.20] Alok Sama: At age 58. So, it was, in some respects, a brave thing to do, being in a classroom with a bunch of 28. The average age was 28, typically female, very left-wing, but it was a kind of surreal and in the nicest possible way, experience.

But I didn’t want to write this specific book. I experimented with many different things, fiction, writing short stories, but what I realized that what I’d been through in that, particularly in that five or six-year period when I was associated with SoftBank is so much happened.

There was this complex, larger-than-life character, and this was a period of peak volatility for him in terms of, early days when he was taking off again, I should say, with Alibaba going public. And then the Vision Fund and then obviously, the subsequent come down being part of all of that, witnessing all of that. Some very interesting events in my personal life, losing both my parents. It was a reawakening of sorts. 

And then this bizarre thing with this Smear Campaign and thrown into a world where a lot of people have made the comment that there’s a sense that a look, you’re in a kind of bewildered state to this entire book, what is going on, what is happening to me.

I’m talking about the Smear Campaign specifically, the idea that there’s so much of an effort. Someone spending millions of dollars to get me out of a job that I never really saw it in the first place. And I said, look, this is a really interesting story. And it lends itself to something approaching a, if not a thriller, certainly a novel with a lot to unpack. So that’s what the book came about. 

[00:20:57] Karthik Reddy: I think the two, three things again, goes back to truth is stranger than fiction. So you said by part of it’s fiction, there’s enough here to sound like it. 

[00:21:06] Alok Sama: Exactly. And the fact that it’s all real, makes it all the more interesting.

[00:21:11] Karthik Reddy: Amazing. Second is, I think, a lot of people have told me first books are almost predominantly autobiographical or a manifestation of self in some way. And this is as autobiographical as it can be. And I think this third or second wave of Masa and this post-GFC wave of what the consumer internet/​tech world was going through was a unique phase and I’m glad, the lens on the biggest drama around that Vision Fund somehow gets uncovered.

If I may ask you, if it’s not outside the realms of confidentiality, did you have to get like a tick mark from SoftBank to proofread this and publish this?

[00:21:58] Alok Sama: I certainly it is. It says you write your flag this Karthik when you leave in a certain senior executive role, you sign an NDA and there’s a certain degree of accountability that you have.

And I was very careful to make sure I went to a very prominent New York lawyer, go through a rigorous legal review. But even beyond the legal review, I made books where, you know, kind of outright tell-alls. I actually don’t like it when people describe the book as a tell-all because that kind of sounds like, it’s cheapening the relationship and the respect I have for Masa.

[00:22:33.16] Karthik Reddy: I agree.

[00:22:33] Alok Sama: There’s so much I could have said about his private life and his relationships with his wife or his daughters or whatever, but I didn’t want to go there. That’s just not.

[00:22:45.10] Karthik Reddy: Of course not, respect the relationship too much. 

[00:22:48] Alok Sama: You had respect. I was careful to keep the limits in terms of how much I say about his home in Tokyo, his home in California. Because he had hundreds of meetings, that was his office too. So, I had to be careful about navigating that in terms of respecting someone I cared about and respect, his privacy a little bit. 

[00:23:11.26] Karthik Reddy: Absolutely. 

[00:23:12.28] Alok Sama: So there’s certainly an element of that.

[00:23:16] Karthik Reddy: Super. So I think, I’m just going to try and pick on one or two elements of each part of that longish career. There was one fun anecdote or episode you seem to have when you were trying to explain derivatives to Dick Cheney back in the 90s. What was that conversation like?

And what is dealing with government or governmental sources at that scale? You could come up with another anecdote. You would probably dealt with dozens of these through your SoftBank days as well. I, by the way, chaired the Indian Venture Capital and Alternative Asset Association.

[00:24:01] Alok Sama: Oh, really? Okay. 

[00:24:01.24] Karthik Reddy: And yeah, I just, rolled off that role in March this year. It was daunting to imagine that the small VC fund would take it, but the reason everyone pushed me to the fore is because Indian homegrown venture capital was not represented much. So, I said, if I don’t take it, then they’ll say, we offered it to you, or we wanted you to take it and you didn’t.

So I did, and that means ministerial conversations, cabinet secretary conversations. And it’s like what you described in a way, but I would love to hear some fun anecdotes on what it feels like in the U.S., for example. 

[00:24:38] Alok Sama: Yeah. I did spend too much time on the Morgan Stanley years in the book because you lose focus.

If you know what I mean. 

[00:24:47.21] Karthik Reddy: Yeah That’s correct.

[00:24:49.01] Alok Sama: There could have been so many other incidents bizarrely when President Suharto was overthrown in Indonesia, we were in there. In the middle of gunfire, literally the town, the city, Jakarta exploding, pitching a privatization deal. It is a really surreal experience.

So we had to be a U.S. State Department because I happened to be with a bunch of Americans, including the chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia. We had to be rescued in the middle of that. Lots of bizarre incidents. Cheney was one of those surreal incidences. He wasn’t in government at the time.

So he was there as a private citizen. He was on the board of Morgan Stanley. The reason we ended up talking about derivatives is he was also on the board of Procter&Gamble. And at the time in the early nineties, derivatives were rocking the world, it’s the world corporate America was playing with financial derivatives, and Procter&Gamble company in an attempt to oversell attempt to hedge and perhaps manage their earnings had just announced a hefty, I think the number was a couple of hundred million dollar loss.

And Dick was on the board and as a board member, he didn’t have accountability, but he’d seen all this happen. And he just wanted to, he was a recent entrant to Morgan Stanley, he just wanted to unpack and a lot of detail. He’s a very smart guy, probing, trying to unpack that.

I just thought it was like a surreal conversation. Here I am sitting with Dick Cheney and spending three days with him. And he’s telling me about, the taking out Saddam Hussein. What do you do? Like fire missiles and the CIA dude to take him out while he’s watering his plants. Literally, he’s talking about this in a very matter-of-fact way.

And I’m explaining derivatives to him, and we’re eating like idlis and dosas and sambar at the hotel. It was truly bizarre. 

[00:26:51] Karthik Reddy: Yeah. It’s so surreal indeed. Coincidentally, I’ve been talking about derivatives, by the way, that was my first job in American Express.

[00:27:02] Alok Sama: Oh, was it? 

[00:27:02.20] Karthik Reddy: That’s actually where they put me, in that division. Strangely enough, it’s one of those fields that I think it’s the only thing that got applied from the classroom right into the job. Like no other thing that I’ve learned in life. And I think I recall this specific incident because it was fresh. My first job was at 96. So this was a case study. I think on what can go wrong. 

Nikesh himself, I know, he’s doing wonderfully as a CEO of Palo Alto Networks. It seems like a very special relationship. So, maybe a little bit on what made both of you click, and is it important when you’re navigating as a sort of an immigrant into these global markets to have a sort of set of people you can trust like this and, bounce things off and use a sounding board, especially if you’re trying to rise to the upper echelon.

I’m using as a proxy, someone who’s risen to the top of the sort of stack in global organizations, which is now everybody reads about them and so many Indians are doing well, and we haven’t had someone like that on our, podcast.

So I’m deliberately double-clicking on what does it take for you to imbibe both networks, lean on people like Nikesh and then, grow together as peers in a foreign country initially. Of course, now you get naturalized, but it’s easier on the kids who are naturalized by birth. But like, how are immigrants like you cracking it in global markets? 

[00:28:51] Alok Sama: Yeah. The point about networks actually is really important because as I don’t specifically touch on that, but I think I alluded to this in the discussion we had in terms of significant events in my life, how did I end up at the Wharton School?

While it was an Indian immigrant professor at the Wharton School. How did I end up at Morgan Stanley? Yet another Indian immigrant, managing director, and Bengali gentleman, Bidyut Sen was his name, God bless him, still out there. And then, how did I end up at SoftBank? And that was my relationship primarily with Nikesh.

And I think how did we connect? Now, initially, and I’ve described my first meeting with Nikesh, the first point of connection is actually the fact that both of us are from Delhi. Now, Nikesh’s father was in the Air Force, so he’d moved around quite a bit. In my case, it was exclusively Delhi, but still, he’d finished his schooling in New Delhi.

There was a point of connection. And Delhi, his wife is also from Delhi. So, you’re a very strong nexus. So we have that in common. And then, with Nikesh, it was also a case of, he is, and I don’t say this lightly, analytically his ability to process. He’s going to lead by himself. I’ve never seen anything like it. 

I’m coming from a position where I’ve dealt with and worked closely with really smart people. It was one of those dynamics where if you’re in a room with them and you’re keeping pace with them, you can give yourself a pat on the back.

And strangely enough, Nikesh himself, I think, would concede this, that there were times when I not only kept pace with him but once in a while I would actually be a step ahead of him. And for his part, I’d like to think he thought that was pretty cool too. So that was a pretty fundamental reason why we got along. And that was a lot of where our connection came from. 

[00:31:05] Karthik Reddy: I think what I’m going to do now is switch gears Alok to obviously the meat of the book itself and the bulk of your last long gig in life, which is of course SoftBank and the mercurial, Masa Son, behind that brand.

You spoke of like multiple mega deals that you were a part of, what is the difference between those early days that let’s say, of course, you’ve done mega deals, even through Morgan Stanley but what makes mega deals happen? Is it about just classic capitalism incentives?

Or is it about people? Is it about egos? People make it seem as if, M&A is, for example, in venture, we think about, Oh, one exit option is M&A and it’s just thrown out there literally out there as if, somebody can just go and get an M&A done and from a founder perspective, from an investor perspective, have you observed when these happen? Why do they happen? What’s the magic behind it? 

[00:32:20] Alok Sama: Yeah, there’s no magic. Karthik, this is the standard MBA curriculum. There’s courses in M&A and why deals happen and horizontal mergers and vertical mergers and all of that stuff. And you look at the deals that I’ve been involved in, in my stint at SoftBank, the Sprint and T‑Mobile merger. It was a case of two companies needed to get together to create a viable competitor. It was literally as simple as that. 

Very big on synergies. That was a big part of the value driver because of the savings and overheads, network costs, marketing costs, distribution, stores, monumental numbers. And the synergy you are still unfolding. That’s one kind of merger. It’s consolidation in an industry where there’s too much competition.

And to create to be viable, there needs to be consolidation. Then, the other big deal in my top bank days, was a completely different kind of deal. No synergies whatsoever. That’s a uniquely Mass Son deal. That deal was a giant bet on technology and a vision of the future. This company, the way it is, even though it’s expensively valued, even though I have to pay a hefty premium to acquire control, I think the world will unfold in a different way.

And I can tweak and even transform this business model to create value. And that’s a really bold deal to do because you pay this hefty premium. The market doesn’t get it or the market doesn’t believe it. And when we did that deal, when SoftBank did that deal, it’s one of those kind of rare cases where markets are perfectly efficient.

So we paid this hefty premium above market value and the market value of SoftBank declined by the exact amount of that premium. Those deals are really difficult to justify, particularly in the context of a public company. So look, different kinds of deals. Deals happen for very different reasons.

Companies want to become conglomerates, diversify. That’s usually not a great reason. One being a kind of seeking growth, deploying excess cash flow. Those are not the best kind of deals to do. The best kind of deals are actually along the lines of T‑Mobile and Sprint, where there’s strategic necessity.

There’s tons of room to create value because there’s lots of synergies. There’s complementarity. Sprint had a ton of spectrum. T‑Mobile had an amazing marketing-oriented management team, I should say. They built a brand which is terrific, very popular among millennials.

So, lots of synergies, lots of complementarity. Those kinds of deals are very different, unique, rare win-wins. Deals like Arm are very tough to pull out. The onus is completely on you to actually go in there and justify and God bless Masa Son, I mean, how he’s pulled that off. He is mind-blowing.

[00:35:41] Karthik Reddy: Yeah. No, I think again valuable lessons, even though they’re like maybe 100^th the scale of what you folks were doing, just this Monday, we were on a call with the board around such an opportunity and you’re absolutely right. I think all sides need to understand. Every dimension of why you would have an attempt at M&A. And I think you adeptly walked us through at least a couple of examples from a 30,000-foot view. So, thanks for that. And then of course the man behind it, and these one-off crazy bets, let’s shift gears to Masa Son.

[00:36:15] Alok Sama: By the way, just coming back to, I do want to, I think not necessarily a lot of the deals I was involved in, but I think in the world of technology, this notion of should I sell, shouldn’t I sell is actually a really interesting one to unpack, right? You know the history as well as I do.

You look at the number of times, Mark Zuckerberg, potentially had the opportunity to sell out and he didn’t. He held out and you look at some of the deals he did, even when they seemed outrageous, WhatsApp is the ultimate example, 19 billion for what is the guy thinking?

It turned out to be a phenomenal deal. So that I think…

[00:36:55.27] Karthik Reddy: Insta even better probably at $1 billion.

[00:36:56.29] Alok Sama: Yes. Yeah, exactly. Insta is even better. Brilliant in terms of predicting, and hedging its future in terms of where social networks were headed, which is visual, mobile, you got to make judgments about how habits will evolve, how networks will evolve, right?

So bold strategic deals, but equally that self-belief that no, kind of billion dollars is not enough, $2 billion is not enough. I think I’m onto something and it’s huge or spending $19 billion I can justify it because what I’m after is worth a trillion. 

[00:37:32] Karthik Reddy: Yeah, no, that and I think the self-belief that you can arguably and almost always perhaps build it even much better than, who’s going to acquire it because I think there’s a founder, of course, there’s a blog about founder mode and manager mode. Apart from, that distinction, I think as long as you can stretch the vision much further, probably belongs with you, but founders go through these like real lows where they do contemplate that.

[00:38:02.04] Alok Sama: Yeah sure. 

[00:38:03.14] Karthik Reddy: Elon Musk probably sold or tried to sell every one of his businesses and came very close, probably within 10% or 20% of the deal value. And the planet might have been different for the kind of decisions you would have made. If they had Googled it bottom up. 

[00:38:16] Alok Sama: But, the founders too, in my experience, Masa is a great example. Call it this crazy factor, which is a big thing he looks for that consummate hunter living in the future mentality.

And if you look at the greats out there, and I put Elon Musk in there, they have that quality. That’s really, really rare. 

[00:38:40] Karthik Reddy: Yeah. No, he himself is a little bit of that, so I think he definitely doesn’t want to back on this.

[00:38:45.23] Alok Sama: Yes. Of course, he is. 

[00:38:47] Karthik Reddy: Yeah who doesn’t manifest that is not meeting the bar.

[00:38:50] Alok Sama: Absolutely. And when he sees that in someone like Bhavish for example, a little bit of that egos all in. 

[00:38:56] Karthik Reddy: Yeah. And you obviously, take us back to a little bit of his story as a kid and influencing even his dad’s decisions and some commonsensical insights very early in the freemium model.

[00:39:12.07] Alok Sama: Exactly. The coffee shop. It’s an amazing story, isn’t it? 

[00:39:16] Karthik Reddy: It’s an amazing story. But, apart from that, what anecdotally or otherwise, what do you think makes Masa Masa. Why aren’t there more Masas out there? 

[00:39:27] Alok Sama: Yeah, look, I think it’s a bit of a cliché interpretation, adversity and being Korean in Japan is, I don’t know, the Indian closest would be, being, I’d like to think things that are a lot better, but being like the absolute bottom end of the cast system being untouchable.

It literally was that ugly. There was only so much you could do and tell what kind of job you could get your status, you couldn’t vote. It was really nasty in every way. And I have to believe that made an impact.

And he saw his father’s struggles as an entrepreneur. And once again, the resilience, for example, his father, what he had to go through and constantly reinvent himself. I am going to talk a little bit about the evolution of his business model and be thoughtful, being resilient. So, a lot of that I think came from his father and from his early roots, but yeah, that crazy factor, the ability to see the future. That’s unique. 

I don’t know where he got that from. That did not come from his father. And that, to me, is a wow. I don’t think anyone can learn that. It’s not a legitimate aspiration. 

[00:40:54] Karthik Reddy: I know, and that recent Jensen Huang video is hilarious, where Jensen first tells the whole audience that this man has pretty much called every decade-long evolution a generational thing.

[00:41:06.22] Alok Sama: Wow, and I make that point in my book. So if it was a one-off thing, yeah, okay, he got lucky. When people talk about Masa Son, one hit wonder, Ali Baba, bullshit, right? It is you look at

[00:41:21.28] Karthik Reddy: You call that. 

[00:41:23.14] Alok Sama: You talk about the PC revolution, the origins of the company, distributor of Microsoft software in Japan. Call that. The internet, right? Call that, became the richest man in the world. Call that Now, he’s not a trader, he didn’t cash out of the top of the market, but he certainly got the technology then right. Likewise, when it comes to mobile phones and smartphones taking over the world, he called that. AI, he was talking about that 10 years ago. 

[00:41:49] Karthik Reddy: Even his misses are things that he called actually. So he came close to doing the deal with Facebook. He obviously bought into NVIDIA, probably sold it a little early, and that’s when he puts his head on Jensen’s shoulder.

[00:42:02] Alok Sama: But NVIDIA is interesting. Look, I was there at the time. We did the numbers, I ran the numbers and even made judgments as to if you had to buy NVIDIA, don’t buy, I’m not talking about buying the stock. I’m talking about buying the company. With a controlled premium, it would have cost us $83 billion.

I just vividly remember that number. And talking to Masa and basically saying, Sunshine, absolutely. Let’s go for it. This makes so much sense. Because this was Masa at his best, right? Calling a technology friend and saying, okay, the stock’s expensive, but the market doesn’t get how big this is going to become.

But again, the obstacle there was, yeah, no way. So, the idea of CFIUS being the Committee for Foreign Investment in the United States would allow a foreigner, even though it’s a benign kind of Japanese foreigner, to take control of an asset like NVIDIA. So, you end up buying a public stake, less than 5%.

And since it was a 5% stake, a public stake bought on a leveraged basis and bought in a fund which was itself levered. When you make four or five times your money, the impulse is always going to be like, okay, let’s just cash. You know exactly what I’m talking about. There’s an accountability to your LPs.

You can’t just tell them, it takes a lot of courage to tell them, you know what? Even though I’m up 4 or 5% and I could cash in today and send the cash to you, I’m going to sit on it for another 10 years. That does not happen in a fund context. And a lot of people in your business are now going through that and creating these kinds of these different funds, longer term, etc. It’s a very interesting dynamic being in a venture fund. Yeah, exactly. 

[00:43:36] Karthik Reddy: I’m just curious about your personal view. I look at a lot of the analogies you made towards some of these things are not really tech businesses, that internet-enabled traditional business models, you should apply similar multiples to them. 

And now when you, out of step removed from all that mayhem for 10 years, where have you landed in the sense, on two fronts, one is, I know that belief we share and I agree with you, that’s how business model should be evaluated, but when it comes to tech itself, one, apart from ideas that Masa might’ve instilled in you, like singularity and how you chase those kinds of goals.

What do you think of tech going forward? What do you see as the future? What excites you as both an investor and an observer of technology? And just the discussion we completed, if you had to advocate something, would you be one of those perpetuity vehicle folks who say you should never let go of like really long-term directional trends for maybe not perpetuity literally, but 15, 20 years as opposed to trying to flip them around for in 5, 7 years cycles.

[00:44:57] Alok Sama: Yeah, look, I’d be the in all humility, I will tell you. I’ve never been the one to get these big long-term bets. I should have bought NVIDIA, when I was at SoftBank, obviously couldn’t because we were looking at buying the company would have been completely inappropriate.

But every time I’ve looked at it, it’s become too expensive now. And kicked myself every year on a regular basis since. When I’ve been completely unrestricted to buy, so it’s really, really tough to get these bets right. And I certainly have not got this right, but coming to your question about technology, I don’t have a terribly original answer other than to say that when it comes to AI, I am a believer, certainly as a productivity tool at the enterprise level, it is nothing short of transformational, probably as big as the internet.

You go back to that old line. Every company is an internet company. In that sense, every company is an AI company. And I mean that from the perspective of, and by the way, that’s a reason to be bullish on stocks generally, because leveraging AI, it can be expensive, the cost associated with it, but those are going to come down in terms of processing energy as more supply comes online. At some point, there may well be too much supply just as there was with the telecom build-out.

But to deploy AI as a productivity tool and as a potential for margin extension is a good reason to be bullish on enterprises across the board. 

Now, what does that mean in terms of investable propositions? It’s not that straightforward. We talked about my friend Sanjeev, his team InfoEdge introduced me to this company called Gnani, which is doing some interesting stuff in terms of a voice-based AI platform that originates, collects loans. And then, on a fee basis, that’s a platform that’s used by people in the financial services business. But over time, those companies, financial services companies, they’re all going to have that capability, maybe there’s companies that create enterprise-focused business models, that become really profitable.

I think there is that opportunity. Jury’s out as to what happens at the individual level, at the consumer level. I haven’t seen evidence of compelling business models. What happened with Web 2.0 when he had 4G or 5G networks and then models like Uber, etc. That social media generally. Evolving forms of social media. It’s just not obvious what that’s going to be, but you’ve got to watch that space. I think there’ll be some interesting opportunities there as well. 

[00:47:57] Karthik Reddy: And the second part, if you were advising us as I know I don’t control like you said, you’re not much in control of our, we have to talk to our LPs, convince them, sell this vision.

Even a Masa couldn’t sell the vision. Of course, albeit at a different scale to people around the world, the Vision Fund should meet a certain set of objectives, but I know you talked about the time machine strategy of Masa, like if you can double-click on that for the audience.

And is this what he means by, being able to play the long game and as a fund manager is that what I should aspire to, to devise a strategy which allows me to hold these really, like almost the strategy itself should be like, akin to this time machine strategy. 

[00:48:45] Alok Sama: Yeah, let’s unpack the time machine strategy because I think we’re talking about two different things.

One, you’re talking about kind of the actual fund strategy. That gets into your obligations to your LPs. And at the end of the day your business model, you have a customer-client relationship, your client is your LP. And if the LPs horizon is okay, yeah, there needs to be a J‑curve and I’m investing with a certain set of expectations as to when I’m expecting money back.

That’s what you sign up to. That’s what you’re going to deliver on. Again, we touched on this in terms of permanent capital vehicles, longer-term vehicles that you could create, but until you have that, you’re locked into that model. For better or worse, that’s what you signed up for. You’re stuck with it, right? 

You could distribute stock to investors and they could do what they want with it. If a company goes public, which is what we see is doing in the United States.

The time machine strategy is very different and it’s very straightforward. And incredibly powerful in India and incredibly powerful, certainly in my lifetime, probably in yours and most people listening, right? And what Masa is talking about is something I was talking about. It’s very straightforward. No magic in this. It’s not like Einstein and time travel or whatever. It’s as simple as you look at disruptive models that have worked whether it’s transportation or FinTech and you transport them to emerging markets like India and with modest tweaks, it should work.

And I’ve argued. Masa has argued, and I think it’s absolutely spot on that when you don’t have legacy infrastructure, retail in India is a great example. You have a transition ongoing macro trend that’s going to continue in the US which is less of the shopping mall culture, more of shopping online. That’s where the world is moving. Even the AI models, moving towards, e‑commerce capability. That’s where the world is moving.

In India, you never had that shopping mall culture. A handful of shopping malls, maybe Delhi, Mumbai, other places, so there’s nothing to disrupt. You don’t have that much of a public transportation infrastructure in most Indian cities. They’re trying to build it out. But the need for, Uber-like alternative, it’s natural, right? there’s even more of an argument for Bhavish to do what he’s doing with electric cars, electric scooters or whatever.

So that is a secular trend that’s there to stay for the next 10, 20, 30 years. All you did in India, don’t get too funky about deep tech or new technologies or biotech, which are inherently very risky. These are all, as long as you’re getting in with the right set of entrepreneurs at sensible valuations, you just got to write that.

[00:51:36] Karthik Reddy: Awesome. No, since you brought them up and I was going to cut over from Masa as an individual to what he enabled for the Indian ecosystem. He was probably the boldest investor other than, Tiger set it off, but I think he layered 

[00:51:52] Alok Sama: Tiger came to the bandwagon much later. I think that the Tiger was, I think more kind of 21 globally, they got into that spray-and-pray mode. 

[00:52:02] Karthik Reddy: Small disagreement because in my first year, I wrote like a quarterly, one of our quarterly updates was actually a tribute to Lee of Accel.

[00:52:13] Alok Sama: This is true. Lee was a plan. Okay. I’ve got a lot of time for Lee. I did spend some time with Lee. 

[00:52:18.15] Karthik Reddy: But you’re absolutely right. I remember this conversation. 

[00:52:20] Alok Sama: Point well taken. 

[00:52:21.04] Karthik Reddy: There was a funky anecdote. 

[00:52:23] Alok Sama: He wasn’t trying money on the same scale as Masa. But you’re absolutely right. 

[00:52:25.25] Karthik Reddy: No, no. Not even remotely.

[00:52:26] Alok Sama: Lee was the plan. 

[00:52:27] Karthik Reddy: So this is the anecdote if Lee ever listens to this episode. 

[00:52:30] Alok Sama: Yeah. 

[00:52:30] Karthik Reddy: So I’m on the phone with Lee or I’m meeting him in New York. And this is the month where Masa has cut both the checks into Snapdeal and Ola. 

[00:52:38.14] Alok Sama: Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:52:40.01] Karthik Reddy: And Lee says, this guy just wrote more money in this month than I’ve written for the last eight years.

[00:52:44.16] Alok Sama: There you go.

[00:52:44] Karthik Reddy: And so he’s what do I make of this? And then he’s obviously I need to ally with him. And of course, Lee tried that with even Flipkart being brought to Masa’s table. 

[00:52:58] Alok Sama: So I was front, I was bang in the middle of that. So I was looking with Lee, with Kunal and Rohit trying to engineer that persuade the Snapdeal deal to come along for the ride.

God bless them. They could have walked away with that, promised them up. Gave them a really, sweet deal in terms of money they could taken out, but they’ve been like, it’s great to see them be as successful as they have, but yeah, you’re right. It was legally recognized that you needed to have that Masa capital cannon behind Flipkart.

[00:53:30] Karthik Reddy: Yeah. And you’ve seen, tons of founders in different parts of the world and the very best in the US. And you’ve now obviously run, Adam Neumann is a different camp altogether on that spectrum. Even when it comes to Bhavish and the whole ton of folks you, SoftBank backed in India, compared to global entrepreneurs, do you see us having an edge or there are certain areas that we need to work on number one?

And I know you took a break from that and came back this year and spent a bunch of time. I don’t know if you had a chance to engage with a lot of entrepreneurs and what do you think has changed in these 5, 7 years? Are we the same time machine strategy? Are we taking an entrepreneurial cohort itself and taking them to a different level in India? Or do you believe there’s still time to do that? 

[00:54:19] Alok Sama: No, look I think it’s the same set of factors. And that is a positive, not as a put down because I just think that you don’t even need to disrupt. You’ve got the digital transformation. It’s not even a transformation. It’s growth is powered by increasingly by technology in a growing economy.

It’s just such an extraordinary macro trend. You’ve got a government that at a minimum is not in your way. You’ve got a global, VC system that is behind India, a collateral beneficiary of people being disillusioned with China and it’s flotations, going a little bit backward in terms of even fundamentally promoting, capitalist-type, growth model.

You saw what happened with Jack Ma, made a lot of people really wary. So what happened with DD? So India has been a beneficiary of that. I tell you what I was really blown away by this is getting off a piece and it goes beyond just technology and I talked to this about a number of people and this is more related to the reception to the book, and I think actually is India’s greatest strength and something to be proud of, which is this obsession with Gyan, knowledge, in every form, I’ve seen that phone at me in ways that just blown my mind. It’s every word I write, people want to understand, what did you mean by that? I’ve heard someone say this, but I’ve never heard someone say it like this. Can you please explain what that means?

Just a very sincere desire for self-improvement, for social mobility. It’s extraordinary. I don’t see that in the U.S. I don’t see that anywhere, to be quite honest. It’s very, very cool. 

[00:56:16] Karthik Reddy: And actually, there’s an interesting follow-on question to that. And maybe, I don’t know what chances you give us as a country but for the very first time, other than IT services and manufacturing, traditional industries where Indians have actually transcended borders and built for global markets, we’re beginning to see that kind of courage coming to even things like consumer internet and SaaS, of course, software and, even hardware, for example.

So we have some in our portfolio, I have a request to you as well on this, UltraHuman, Ethereal Machines, GreyOrange, etc. Do you think they have a chance, what would your odds that you would give on us building phenomenal global companies from here, which even China has done a few, but like in this generation of the post-internet world, but is it possible for India to actually win on that count as well, you think. 

[00:57:17] Alok Sama: I question the legitimacy of that question, which is, do you want to be global just to be just for the sake of being global? Because you’re dealing with India itself is a giant market, right? If you want to make one advantage, you do have if you’ve grown up in India is you are operating in one of the most cost-sensitive markets in the world. The Indian consumer is the most constant. So, if you found a way to make money, you should be able to transport that elsewhere. One of the entrepreneurs, different generation, I’m quite close to, and I’ve had a mentoring relationship with him as him mentoring me is Sunil Mittal, right?

And Bharti is a classic case of operating in India. Where your ARPUs are a fraction of ARPUs in China, lower than in Africa. Think about that. It’s mind-blowing. And they’ve been profitable and phenomenally successful. And there are a number of things that they did that were pioneering in terms of what they did with their network, the early relationships with Ericsson and how you can take some of that knowledge and transport that to the Western world.

When he looked at BT, for example. I very strongly encourage him to do that. Now, he doesn’t have a controlling interest there, but I would wager that if exactly as this happened with the Tata’s and with the steel and the auto industry in the UK, if Sunil was running BT, it would be a better, probably more profitable company.

So there’s certainly room to do that in terms of transporting kind of management skills honed in India to the Western world. Technology you’ve got to come up with, I’m trying to think of models, emerging market models. TikTok is a great example, but TikTok is that rare case of a company and to his credit was very early in identifying the addictive power of the AI algorithms that TikTok use. That’s their secret sauce. They get inside your head, warm inside your brain and they get your hook. 

It’s not particularly healthy, but from a commercial perspective, they did that. And if you want to go global in the world of technology, that’s a very high bar to come up with something like that. I haven’t seen evidence of that in India, but I’d be willing to be surprised in the most positive way if that happens. I just haven’t seen that. 

[00:59:51] Karthik Reddy: I wish for it to happen as well. I agree with you. I agree with you. It’s not a proven thing at all. I think there are a lot of people like humming into that zone, but it’s a very big ask.

I know we touched a lot about your views on where you think tech is going. We’re up on the hour. Want to maybe move to a little bit of rapid-fire questions. But a couple of questions around your new avatar. So what’s keeping you excited nowadays? What is the Warburg role likely to look like for the next half a decade to a decade?

And by the way, coincidentally, bizarrely, I ran into both Dan and of course, we know Vishal in India. So, essentially we know, half of the Warburg leadership. Dan and me went to business school together.

[01:00:37.26] Alok Sama: Oh, is that.

[01:00:36.24] Karthik Reddy: We ran into him all these years in Singapore at some event this year. Dan told me a story that was fascinating. All folks, I happen to coincidentally know, but.

[01:00:47] Alok Sama: Yeah. No, those guys are, my relationship goes back to Chip Kaye. We were together in Hong Kong for a while, and I’ve gotten to know, the Mark Colodny, who’s now co-heads the US business and heads the global technology business.

My issue with them, and when I say issue, this as a compliment to them, is those guys are just so damn good when it comes to domain expertise. That I find myself adding no value at all. And, so I love the association, but candidly, it ends up being a case of, purely from a selfish perspective, me learning from them and I plan to contribute when I can.

[01:01:28.28] Karthik Reddy: Being very humble.

[01:01:28] Alok Sama: No, but, seriously, they are just absolutely terrific and their track record in investing in technology is absolutely awesome. And I don’t just mean India. Vishal, Viraj, the whole team on the ground in India. They’re terrific people and the global team is absolutely top-notch too.

I like that association. But from my perspective, I’m also associated with a small VC fund. It’s only 70 million, but they’ve done God bless them a couple of young men, interestingly, both of Indian origin, out of New York and LA, and they’ve done spectacularly well Valhalla Ventures.

And they’re doing some off-the-wall stuff in the world at deep tech, ranging from psychedelics, LSD, separating it out into the two kind of components, separating out the therapeutic component, which is proven to have benefits for schizophrenia, PTSD, ranging from these like that to biometric guns, like Americans are going to use guns anyway.

So why not have biometric identification with guns? Another deal in the satellite space. Really interesting deep depth, off-the-wall kind of deals. I do enjoy that interaction too, but for me, I really do want to write more. Two years in that master’s degree with the intention of writing. Once I’m basically done with the phase where you’ve written a book and you’ve got to invest in marketing it and have an obligation to the publisher to do that, now it’s like a really sinking my feet into the next wedding project, which I’m very much looking forward to.

[01:03:12] Karthik Reddy: Amazing. No, I’m not saying this just to get you chuffed, but like after the Phil Knight book on Nike, I think this was one of the most enjoyable books I read. 

[01:03:22] Alok Sama: Yeah. Thank you. 

[01:03:23] Karthik Reddy: Before I let you go, I’m just going to like quickly fire some rapid fire at you. 

[01:03:28.08] Alok Sama: Oh my God. Okay. 

[01:03:29.22] Karthik Reddy: Amongst all of these, myriad deals over these 30-plus years, most challenging deal and what did it teach you? 

[01:03:37] Alok Sama: It’s got to be Sprint and T‑Mobile because I was in a quasi-principal role. I wasn’t just advising someone. There’s a lot at stake. It was almost existential in terms of that Albatross hanging over Masa’s head to deal with that company.

And you know what it taught me at the end of the day, deals are all about figuring out what’s crucially important to you? Were you willing to compromise on? What is the other side willing to compromise on? And I want you to know what the hot buttons are, you can never approach a complete win-win but you can at least get to a point where both sides get a piece of what’s really, really important and what they’ve compromised on is what’s less important to them.

That’s always the key in any negotiations. It’s just reinforced that and very happy to have brought that to a close and it’s been obviously phenomenal for SoftBank.

[01:04:28] Karthik Reddy: Awesome. And I know mentors leave a little bit of them with you whenever you’ve had a long stint, but best piece of advice that of Masa’s that stayed with you.

[01:04:40] Alok Sama: In the world of technology, nothing he does that can never emulate. But one piece of advice I practice, I really take to heart is after you’re 50, every time you pass the restroom, you just do it. 

[01:04:53] Karthik Reddy: That’s amazing. It’s really funny. So, Masa. A technology trend that you wish you’d bet on a little earlier. 

[01:05:03] Alok Sama: Oh man. Ironic, but, buying NVIDIA AI. I’m sitting by it. It’s just so ironic. I’m sitting by Masa’s side. I see it. I believe in it. I still don’t pull the trigger.

[01:05:14] Karthik Reddy: One place in the world, given how crazy your life has been in terms of where you move, where you truly feel like this is home? 

[01:05:21.13] Alok Sama: Oh, Delhi, always. 

[01:05:25] Karthik Reddy: Oh, wonderful to hear that. And is that coincidentally, as I’m sitting there today and a book, that you go back to often, do you read the books? 

[01:05:34] Alok Sama: Yeah. One of my favorite writers, big influence, Nabokov, he had this line, you never read a book. You only read it, which, I really believe in. But a book that has really influenced me, it’s not an easy read, absolutely fascinating read, it’s not a long read, is a German writer called Winfried G Sebald, and the book is called Rings of Saturn. I think it’s a real tribute to intellectual curiosity. I read that. I reread that. And there’s just new depths to it. It’s just really, really an amazing journey of the mind. And by the way, the number one quality I look for when I interview people, a lot of people in the investment business agree with that.

I don’t know if you do, is the number one standout quality is smart etc. you almost take for granted, motivation is intellectual curiosity and that book…

[01:06:25.12] Karthik Reddy: I agree.

[01:06:26.21] Alok Sama: Whatever you are, whatever you see, try and figure out what’s behind this. What’s the story behind this? 

[01:06:31] Karthik Reddy: Doubly so in venture capital, right? Because you’re trying to rewrite our business models altogether, right? Anything conventional is almost out of the window. Thanks for that. And your favorite restaurant, any? 

[01:06:45] Alok Sama: Yeah. it’s actually a neighborhood restaurant in London. It’s called Yashin Sushi. It is just terrific food, nothing fancy, and it’s the best value for money meal anywhere in the world including India.

[01:06:58] Karthik Reddy: I’ll check it out next time. It’s called Yashin Sushi? 

[01:07:00] Alok Sama: Yashin, yeah. 

[01:06:59.23] Karthik Reddy: Okay, Yashin Sushi, okay. And finally, golf or cricket? 

[01:07:05.29] Alok Sama: To play golf to watch cricket. 

[01:07:08.06] Karthik Reddy: I thought as much, I was expecting that. Again, Alok, you’ve been a fantastic guest. 

[01:07:12] Alok Sama: Thank you. I really enjoyed the conversation. 

[01:07:14] Karthik Reddy: Thanks for being the sport and taking all of the questions and, yeah, we wish you luck in this new gig at Warburg. We’d love to read your new books whenever they’re out. Wish you more luck on that front and hopefully we’ll catch up in person soon. 

[01:07:28] Alok Sama: No, likewise. It’s amazing what you’re doing and in many ways I’m envious. It’s just a great, time to be an investor in India. So, let’s stay in touch and I’d love to find ways to be helpful.

[01:07:39] Alok Sama: Thanks Alok. 

[01:07:40] Karthik Reddy: We thank IDFC First Bank for being our annual partner. IDFC First Bank is deeply engaged with the startup community in India. The commitment to fostering innovation and supporting entrepreneurship has made them a valuable partner in the growth journey of numerous startups, including many, many Blume portfolio companies. This partnership helps us in a mission to back the next generation of revolutionary founders in India.