Piyush Surana | IIM Ahmedabad| VC at Tomorrow Capital | ex-Uber, Ola,Zomato

Piyush Surana calls himself as an average student at DBPC who was more interested in basketball as a career. Joined Bhawanipur College. Realised basketball didn’t have a future in India. Decided to try for MBA, convincing family members who wanted him to join business. Got only 90 percentile in Quant section in his first attempt at CAT. Worked immensely on the same and cracked IIM Ahmedabad. In 2008, got his first job in Investment Banking at Anand Rathi. Post Lehmann, he was asked to leave as they were down-sizing. Then later , worked in leadership positions at three unicorns -Uber, Ola and Zomato. Now is a VC in Tomorrow Capital The Career Conversations series is now also on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/3e6Yoix From Partners of Big 4 to senior HR leaders to entrepreneurs to the unconventional ones Spotify https://spoti.fi/2zwNMKy Google Podcasts https://bit.ly/2YT7JpB RadioPublic https://bit.ly/2WuKqRD https://www.linkedin.com/in/piyush-surana/

Q1. Tell us about yourself before we start off with the questions.

Ans: I was born and brought up in Calcutta just like you. The city is close to my heart with my schooling in Don Bosco. In school I was never really a good student actually, I was a state level basketball player and ended up in Bhawanipur Gujarati Education Society College. When I finally started taking sports seriously as a professional, I realised you get around 300 rupees a match plus lunch, so not really meeting my career aspirations. Indian Basketball does not really have a very high scope and if I was honest with myself I probably did not have the kind of talent required to make it internationally. So I started taking my career a little seriously in terms of education. I come from a business family, always was the Black Sheep of the family because apart from everyone else including my younger brother who passed out of IIM Kozhikode works in the business family so I decided to do something on my own. I actually give CAT two times; first time I give CAT had a 97 percentile but my coms were sub-sixty. That was one area I knew I need to work hard and my parents knew I was not a good student so they told me I was wasting my time and one of my cousin made me write some of the institutes that I would get through otherwise I would leave all this foolishness and join the family business. Fortunately enough the second time I gave CAT worked really hard for my quants. My english has always been brilliant, I just read a lot, I read almost 50 books a year and at that point of time I used to read at least one book a day so I always read a lot and that helped me work with my verbal but maths was a weak area but worked very hard on that for a year. Thankfully the next time I gave CAT I got 99.8 + 90.8 in Maths just above the cut off needed for quants. Fortunately and now that happened and I got through to IIMA, 2 years of lot of learning more outside of the class than inside actually because working with people from different areas. A lot of us were from commerce background. This was in 2008 so about the worst time for a CFA, B.Com. grad to have passed out. I did my summer internship at Meril but by the time I passed out there was no Meril there was bank of Medica. It’s been 10–11 years of journey, been an up and down journey but a great learning experience as well.

Q2. Today there’s a lot of talk around work experience prior to your MBA but you did it straight after BCom so what are your thoughts on that?

Ans: This is something a lot of people ask and a lot of people say also. if I had some work experience before MBA it would have been good for me and I should have gotten that experience and come for MBA. I can understand the logic for it because the kind of contribution you give in class and how much you get out of that MBA is definitely much more but if I were to be honest someone from my background what experience would I have got if I sort of passed out. and I had the experience that a lot of engineers have if after engineering you are going on doing coding at TCS, like me from Bhawanipur the best job I could have gotten was cashier at Westside, that’s kind of job placement happens in Bhawanipur, not a lot of learning I would have got from my job. today the things are a lot different, today if someone is passing out of IITs it’s just a plethora of opportunities whether it’s startups, whether that’s finance with lots of investment banking down the supply chain hiring. Even from a commerce background at least some good colleges like Xavier’s there are a lot of opportunities today. Ten years back specially from the background I came from I don’t think I would have had those opportunities So you need to make a decision on what make sense at that point in time, you need to get an experience that adds value just working is not enough. I keep telling this to people you could have a 10-year experience or you could have a 1 year a 10 years over.

Q3. You graduated in the year 2008, the year of the Lehman bothers and global financial vent out, how did that impact you and your batchmates?

Ans: I have actually been writing about this in the last few weeks. To be honest, one year out of campus, I was fired from my first job, that was Anand Rathi. There were no jobs left in investment banking at that point in time, I could not find a job in the next 8 months, I actually took up a small time stint for 6 months at a company called Century Metal Recycling which used to be a forger of aluminium so I used to head purchase for them and stay out of the factory itself in Faridabad. There were some dark times but if I look back at it now, we have this saying “whatever happens for the best” because at Anand Rathi which was the first investment banking job I did it was probably a job I did not love, I was in an organisation that did not have the culture that really excited me. The organisation just did not align with the culture I had and so moving out of the job was somewhat good for me. If you look at it, it was a tough 8–10 months but there on the kind of roles I have done, were the roles that set me up for the kind of success I have seen later in my life.

Q4. There’s a lot of talk around B-schools as glorified placement agencies, so for in your case the kind of placement that IIMA gave you didn’t last for long. So how was that as a feeling?

Ans: I have to be very honest, from parents’ point of view, there was always so much support. My dad was in fact happy as I had to join family business then. Even my would-be wife, the support was enormous. I started working in Century Metal Recycling and I got married right after that so we had been dating each other for 5 years before that. The kind of support from the support systems were brilliant. I think anything in life, name or a brand definitely opens doors for you, it gives you certain opportunities, but that’s all it does. I think once a door is opened, you have to prove yourself in that opportunity. If you don’t perform, it’s your first step to move. If you look at larger companies, who do you fire first — the guy with highest salary. From a practical point of view, once you are there you have to prove yourself otherwise all that branding does not help.

Q5. Take us to the initial part of your career post Anand Rathi — the non-unicorn part.

Ans: The good thing that I realised was as I said, when I look back I realise it was good because eventually I found myself in roles that I enjoyed doing and so that one big factor for all of the roles have been the trajectory has been quite steep. The exciting things has been, most of those roles, I have been able to sort of prove myself to targets that I have put been usually quite steeper than what the company has put in front of me. For example, when I joined Indus, as a manager in a circle which is not a very large circle, i.e. Calcutta. It took me around 11 months to get myself roles where I was directly working with the CEOs of the company. A lot of people have not heard about Indus but as I joined between Airtel, Vodafone and Idea, one of the largest company in India in terms of asset base. I was directly working with the CEO on national projects, sort of leading teams. All the other roles, one thing that has been common is the steep trajectory. When I joined Uber, within 5 months, I was the bar raiser globally, which is you are held up as an example for the rest of the company where you have a veto power over any new senior hire in the company in India. Similarly, when I went to Ola, I joined as a manager. Within 9 months I moved from a manager to a senior manager to director.

You have to enjoy what you are doing otherwise you will never be at the top of your profession. You could still do it, it could still monetarily reward you, but 10 years down the line, monetary reward is not what you will work for. What you work for is two major things — satisfaction in your job and the kind of independence you have.

Q6. How was your work-life balance, traveling, 3 tier cities, managing so much?

Ans: When I launched Uber in Calcutta, the first 1000 drivers I had trained myself. So in a unicorn what happens is you see both ends of the spectrum, which is why your growth is so steep. You have to be in touch with absolute core of the business which is the unit level, either the driver, if we talk about Zomato, the restaurant and customer, you have to get at the core level. What happens in unicorn is the hierarchy almost does not exist. As long as you are doing good work and important work, you work directly with the founder. Unlike a professional who is running the company, a founder will be involved in every aspect of the business. India used to be a major destination for Uber and Calcutta was the fastest growing market for Uber internationally. So you get to interact with senior managers as long as you are doing good important strategic work which is why when I took the decision it was easy for me because looking at the kind of work I was doing, even working with the CEO, it was limited, whereas something in Ola I could actually independently run the business like my own.

Q7. Tell us more about this VC industry. What’s the typical life in the day of a venture capital, etc.?

Ans: How venture capital or how start-up world works is very peculiar in a way. Did you know wheel was actually invented twice; wheel is one of the biggest inventions in the mankind. The first time wheel was invented was in Mesopotamia which was around 2500 BC, it changed the way the world worked, it basically started civilisation up in a way, which is why Mesopotamians are called the cradle of civilisation. This is one way to look at it. The other was, wheel was invented around 1000BC in Mexico, and obviously Mesopotamia and Mexico couldn’t connect at that time because there was no land bridge between the two. In Mexico, wheel never amounted anything more than a toy, people just put it in toys. The major difference was that there were no horses in Mexico and there were no other cattle that people could attach wheels to. The difference between the two was the kind of opportunities that a capitalist gave which is what we look at ourselves at venture capital. When we talk about venture capital, we believe we are the capitalists to good a opportunity. At venture capital every year we meet around hundreds of people with brilliant ideas and you are learning something new everyday and over a period of a year hopefully you get an opportunity to partner with 3–4 such people to make their dreams a reality. Now coming to the practical aspect of how we look at businesses, there are 3–4 things we look at: first, is the founder. We need to find a lot of comfort in the founder, someone who is scalable and someone we can work with. Second, we look at the solution the business is trying to provide and whether it’s a new solution, is it solving a point that is big enough for people to actually appreciate it. Third is, the size of the opportunity; how big is the opportunity. We actually look at opportunities that are huge and scalable. Last is, fund figment; is it B to C, does it fall into the 1 to 3 million bracket in terms of the investment needed, is it something that doesn’t fall under any of the category that we do not invest in. For example, as a fund we do not invest in any businesses that has to deal with alcohol or non-veg. Those are the 4 major things that we look at when we are trying to invest.

In a typical week, we do at least 10–15 calls or meetings with founders who have businesses, that’s the large part of my week. We also spend another 15–20 hours on just evaluating a lot of opportunities, we talk to the founders, we like that business a lot, then we get through the next level which is evaluation. So we start looking at the industry, finances of the business, other competitors, the size of the industry, we create our thesis on the business and the industry. Then a lot of these business go to the portfolio companies; unlike a lot of financial investors, we actually spend a lot of time and support in helping the companies grow. Most of our principles spend 3–4 days with the portfolio companies in a week rather than our office.

Q8. What are the entry barriers for youngsters in this VCP industry in terms of academic qualification, connection, etc.?

Ans: There are two ways of getting into VCP, one is going to a good institute and being in the top half of your class specially in terms of finance, and you are picked off campus. The other is, having a firm experience in either building a business as a founder, or in start-ups in operational role. VCs usually look for two kind of people — one is the industrial side of the business, people who are very comfortable with financial modelling and complex modelling; second is, people with operational experience. This is the other thing that I keep telling when I go to campuses, just like I didn’t know that I would work in Uber, Ola and Zomato because they didn’t exist, similarly you do not know where you will be working 10 years down the line, so it’s futile to build the entire career on the basis of going to a certain place. Better way to do it is build a kind of skillsets that are required in any industry. If you have strong operational experiences of building a business from scratch, whether that’s PE, VC, or consulting, people are always willing to partner so that is the better way to look at it.

Q9. In operations, you don’t use much of academics at all; after graduating from IIMA, dealing with customer service executives, it’s a clash of ego and intelligence. So it that a problem since people don’t look at you eye-to-eye?

Ans: The perception comes from the outside. If you go on thinking I am an IIM grad and this is only what I am ‘supposed’ to do. You need to decide what are the skillsets you made in your life, and what are the kind of roles you want. If you decide you want to do strategically important roles, you need to be comfortable with the skillsets that are needed. One example for me very early in my career was I always thought I can never do sales, but the problem was no matter what role you are in life you will always do sales. Whether you are selling a product or an idea, you will always be selling so you better be comfortable with sales. Those are some of the compulsions that come from the outside.

Q10. What is your advice to youngsters to find a career as successful as you have?

Ans: As I said, one or two things that have been recurrent in the top — one, you should be very clear about the kind of skillsets you want to build instead of the role you want, and those will be the skillsets that you know will be required in the world going forward. 30–40 years down the line, probably a lot of manual work we do will be done by artificial intelligence, so you need to have skillsets that are relevant and can find you good roles. Second, whether you are from an IIM or not, a brand name only gets you so far, so if you are from a good institution and have a brand name, please realise it will only open a door, after that it’s upto you to prove yourself. If you are not from a good institute, please realise you may be starting from 10 meters back in a 100 meter race, but it’s a long way and you can still win as long as you know what you want to do, if you are very straight in terms of where you want to head. Lastly, it’s very important to enjoy what you do. I think a lot of people get it wrong, a lot of people think I need to enjoy what I do so if I am not enjoying, I will quit it. I look at it a bit differently. I think if you make yourself good at something, there’s no way you won’t enjoy it. If you are not enjoying it, please don’t give up, give yourself a chance to get better at it. You truly enjoy something when you are good at it or you are getting better at it.