The Road Less Traveled: Chapter 3 - Welcome to the Wild, Wild East...Namaste India! (part 4 of 7)

"The biggest risk is not taking any risk. In a world that is changing quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks." - Mark Zuckerberg

My India story has a lot to cover. I experienced so many different avatars in my decade in the Wild, Wild East, so it will come in 2 parts. The first is covers my immigration, first job, being jobless, writing a bplan, working with WME | IMG , and laying the foundation for my time building for the Bharat. The second drops in a few days and covers my depth in building commerce and content digital startups, mentoring, and leaving India.

American Born, Confused Desi (ABCD)?

In our early years, mom and dad had no extra income or time, and sent us to India every summer to focus on building their careers and our life in the US.

💡 Grandma’s house meant sleeping on the floors on mats, learning to use indian style latrines, running away from flying cockroaches in the night, luring curious mice into vessels with rotis and letting them loose down the street. It also meant going to the temple with Grandma and my aunts, flying kites on the rooftop during the Pataang festival, playing Kabaddi in the streets with neighbor kids, racing newspaper-made boats to through the monsoon flooded streets, eating spicy and sweet street foods, and poverty, on a scale way beyond what we lived in and what I’ve ever seem in the US.

Life there was very simple, yet happy. No one complained at the lack of comforts and amenities, and everyone found joy in the simplest of things. This was the India I grew up knowing - these incredibly humbling set of experiences were in stark contrast to my later life in the States.

So, after 6 years in NY and having built/managed the $3B FSI portfolio at Amex, I was curious about the world. Information access and dissemination through the internet and social media started expanding rapidly, and I wanted to learn and experience more - about different customers, ways of thinking, ways to build value and ways of challenging myself.

My travels had exposed me to different cultures and geographies, but

• How different were consumers around the world?
• Could I go upstream and build from 0 to 1?
• Was I capable of achieving the similar success to my enterprise foray?

It was time to take another risk, go to the homeland and be part of something bigger, much bigger than myself, India’s digital and mobile internet coming of age!

Crossing the West/East Chasm

It was early, 2008, and I started hearing a lot about India and the impending mass adoption and proliferation of all things mobile and the internet. While traveling to India for a wedding, I met a number of new economy builders who convinced me that, if I had the stomach for it, I had an opportunity to be at the forefront of building for an ecosystem that promised to be the largest internet population, by country, in the world.

Looking back, moving to Mumbai was an impulsive decision, from idea to execution - about 2 months. This sudden move came out of left field and added to my parents “concern” plate. But my recent trip and set of meetings, armed me with confidence, intrigue, and a job offer. My life condensed into several bags, and a rolodex of 2 people on ground in Mumbai, I closed up shop in the US and set off, to the homeland. Within weeks, my simple and limited understanding of India was shattered.

I grabbed a copy of Shantaram, required traveler reading, by Gregory David R. , and was soon confronted with an image of a very different India to my understanding at that point (fun fact: little did I know that I'd have the opportunity to have dinner with Gregory several times, in my subsequent years there 😎, super charismatic guy).

Mumbai was complex, urban, gritty, chaotic, yet full of energy…like NY. While I was fluent in conversational Gujarati, in Mumbai my choices were Hindi, Marathi or English. 

I found myself trying to decipher Hindi, but found myself often reverting to Spanish when trying to speak Hindi…si senor??!

There is nothing like immersing yourself in a new country and being forced to learn a new language. Over time, I would become proficient in conversational Hindi, effective, but certainly to the amusement of my new friends in India.

Brand Marketing India

I had an offer to be Head of Strategy for a brand aggregator called Brand Marketing India (BMI), fresh of a $10M fundraise from Matrix Partners. The Murjani Group “promoted” BMI and they owned the India licenses for Gucci , Jimmy Choo , Bottega Veneta , Tommy Hilfiger , Calvin Klein , French Connection .

This was my first exposure to a “family promoter” business, which again lacked corporate governance in the traditional sense, and often fell pray to the transient whims of the family leadership. Great people, who I credit with giving me the opportunity and crash course in Indian consumers, but not a great environment to have ownership and make a real impact. I took this time to learn. Given my US experience base, there was so much to learn, or re-learn in many cases, including:

• the similarities and differences with Indian consumers, by spending time in our retail stores
• the power of Bollywood and the it’s impact on all things consumer and beyond
• the most used and effective marketing channels in India
• the love Indian consumers have for Western brands
• how India was truly a cash economy with credit being a distant, distant second
• the complexities of being a license owner versus a joint venture (including the massive problem of excess inventory that I uncovered and tried to solve later)
• the mass adoption of mobile phones at every level of society, priming the ecosystem for a mobile first digital explosion in the coming years.

In 2009, the Indian customer was still reticent about online purchases and the online payment industry barely existed with greater than 70% of purchases being “Cash on Delivery,” and logistics were a nightmare. BUT, the sheer population size of India coupled with the rise and proliferation of mobile phones with internet access gave way to a path to mobile first commerce expansion that was not a question of if but a question of when. Flipkart and Snapdeal began their battle for creating an Amazon-like mutli-category ecommerce platform.  The rise of the DTC vertical ecoms was still to come.

Getting close to a year into the role, I took the hard decision to resign. I felt that there was no opportunity to shine and an increasing misalignment in expectations. I was 8000 miles from home, a year into my adventure, and jobless.

Big Idea! - Solve Global Excess Inventory Issues in India

My first three years in India were about building a network from zero and understanding the differences with consumers, how business is conducted, and life in general in India.

Everyone I met was warm and welcoming. In retrospect, socializing was super easy. It was common to be introduced to someone for the first time and be invited to their home for a meal or a party. This was great! But this is in stark contrast to “new friend” dyanmics in States, where we are more guarded and require more validations to let people in. My network was building, fast!

Coming off the heels of BMI, I saw a dual opportunity. Considering the massively unorganized and inefficient excess inventory market in the country coupled with the consumer love for Western goods, I saw an opportunity to help growing, western and European digital companies find ways to liquidate their inventory in a non-competitive market with huge demand and even bigger potential to grow in the next decade.

With new friends Akash Sheth and Mehul (Mike) Patel , we set out to construct a business plan and financial model for the idea. I reached out to Alexandra Wilkis Wilson and Peter Glusker at Rue Gilt Groupe and Marco Di Pietro at YOOX , separately to gauge interest. Surprisingly, they bit, and loved the idea. This was exciting. We spent the next several months working with both teams, with Gilt committing to a due diligence project to assess feasibility in the complicated, new market. In the end, there were too many regulatory issues in a immature digital ecosystem.

Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in multi brand retail was expressly prohibited in India. Companies like Flipkart and Snapdeal were circumventing this restriction with complicated upstream/downstream entities that were yet to pass any regulatory challenge. This uncertainty, coupled with a non familiar legal system presented to much beta for Gilt and Yoox. The idea was and still is powerful and has potential, but timing was way off. Still, this de novo exercise was instrumental in demonstrating to myself that I could write and sell a business plan. Now I just had to find one that had greater near term potential.

Still jobless, but happy, energetic, inspired, and looking for what else I could do…I met Ravi Krishnan . At first, Ravi and I joined forces to work on a few consulting projects that he had. During this time, he assumed the role of MD South Asia for IMG. Having spent a ton of time together on projects, Ravi was looking for new blood to come in and help him with a number of properties he managed at IMG.

Subsequently, I was brought in to be the #2 at IMG/WME with an overall mandate to help with a Joint Venture with Reliance, IPL operations, and Country Head of the Fashion platform - Lakme Fashion Week (LFW).  This latter exposed me to the media, talent, influencers, corporate commercial players - taking my network from hundreds to thousands.  What a ride, I met my wife during this time :)

Indian fashion now enjoys global acclaim with the likes of Sabyasachi, Manish Arora, Gaurav Gupta, Manish Malhotra and many more. I'm greatful to have played a small part in evangelizing this ecosystem to the world.

Bringing Lakme Fashion Week into the Digital Era..

I had no direct experience managing a biannual, 20k person, multimillion dollar event. This was big. I remember the first day meeting my small, new core team. They looked at me like I was from Mars. My joking style was received with weird looks and deafening silence. I later learned from the team that I was unlike any leader they had had before. My western style was in stark contrast to traditional, patriarchal styles that they were accustomed to. We learned and grew together into one of the most fluid, agile, and effective teams in the business. I was the conductor of this incredible symphony anchored by my core team and several hundred contractors each season.

We brought process and organization to the event, developing a playbook to document, track, and execute across 38 unique business vectors. This was a first of its kind playbook on “How to Run Fashion Week’…aka “The Binder”. We eliminated redundancies, we were professional, but had a ton of fun. We brought LFW into the digital era with new social profiles, the first of its kind live streaming (in 2010!), and a snazzy new website laden with video. I also forged ground breaking partnerships that were among the first of its kind globally with partnerships with online fashion retail startups that were taking the country by storm. What was already the hottest ticket in town, was even hotter.

I met Fern Mallis , aka the Founder of NYFW. She graciously took me under her wing and helped me get my fashion bearings and became a lifelong friend! I developed relationships with Hindustan UniLever (HUL) leadership (owners of the Lakme brand) like Rajaram Narayanan and Anil Chopra . I learned a ton from Ravi's expertise in corporate sponsorship and deal making, and helped him execute myriad initiatives, being a person he knew could get shit done.

Until this time, I had predominantly flexed my left-brain in the sciences and business. During my fashion stint, I had the opportunity to work with so many amazing talents from designers, choreographers, set design, media, models, photographers, and more. I befriended and learned from so many incredible right-brain flexors - Bandana Tewari , Nonita Kalra , Gautam Kalra, LittleShilpa Shilpa , Gaurav Gupta , Rohit Gandhi + Rahul Khanna , Manish Arora Paris , Aki Narula , Mohan Neelakantan , and many more. Little did I know that this would be a foundation for my ecommerce and media start ups in the coming years, and the source of some of my favorite years full of laughs, conversations, experiences and social connections.

Fashion Guy to Founder

Perhaps given the social and media visibility of this role, friends and family back home started to label me as a “Fashion” guy. Was I? Not really. This was a high profile and fun learning experience around commercial sponsorships, event management, operations, and P&L management. I gave it my all during those 2 years, and I learned a lot, gained an appreciation for the industry, but knew that my calling was something that married my right and left brain capabilities.

With 2 years of fashion weeks under my belt, the fashion portfolio work became less innovative, saddled with politics, decreasing budgets and increasing opinions. The Reliance JV was complete, adding a new layer to the voices in the room.

At the same time, India’s appetite for and delivery of digital commerce and content entities started to get frothy. Flipkart and Snapdeal were fighting for cash, consumers, and winner take all dominance. Amazon was biding its time using Junglee.com as it’s free, comparison engine and data collection entity to arm it with first party data around inventory wins for the India consumer. Millions were being raised in the land grab to create western clones of internet companies catering to the unique Indian customer.

In late 2010, I got a call from the internet clone kings - the Samwer Brothers of Rocket Internet fame. The call came at the right time during my tenure with IMG, the vision was lofty and aggressive, and opportunity seemed catered to my background. It upended my relatively comfortable and fun life and threw me back into the unknown, again.

📢Next Up: Chapter 4 -Build, Grow, & Monetize. The Story Behind My Highest Highs and Lowest Lows…, Part 5 of 7 - 10/03/23

⬇️ To go back and read Parts 1, 2, or 3, please click below:

If you enjoyed this story, follow me Sujal Shah. I’ll be publishing the rest of “my story” weekly, followed by a bi-monthly newsletter I am starting with BandraRoad AI tentatively called, “AI and the Future of Digital Families”