YouSaid · the spoken record

Dan Tennebaum

lines on the record: 108
first: 2024-05-23
most recent: 2024-05-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“In more than one of the leading telecom companies and the largest brick and mortar retail company, one of the big software companies, and these were not obscure microcap companies, they were big, they had articulate CEOs and sophisticated IR functions and they had nearly unanimous buy ratings from Balch bracket companies and they look a lot on the face of them like the companies that have done great in those businesses, but what distinguishes them, at least in my experience, wasn't that you had to sort of know someone on the inside. It was just that you could see something in the publicly available data that was probably going to tell you. Very seldom have these things gone bust and afterwards people said there's absolutely nothing that would have suggested this. Usually there's something in how they've allocated capital, how they've done business with associated companies, margins they earn that are not consistent with their peers for the”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Will talk to you and say this person has been a great, reliable person to do business with, or they're not. Their distributors sometimes have decades of experience working with them, and it's been a pleasure or it hasn't been a pleasure. So what I would say is absolutely critical consideration. But the way you access and answer those questions in India is not so different than the way you would anywhere else. It's deeply important because there are still landmines just in the time I've been in.”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's absolute critical, but not always the way in the way people look at India from the outside might think. I think there is a view of India that's probably been advanced in some cases by fund managers that 90% of entrepreneurs are crooks and you have to know all the right people who will tell you a small proportion of honest ones are that hasn't been my experience. I think there are great stewards of capital and there are less good stewards of capital just like everywhere else. And the telltale signs aren't that much different than they are elsewhere. People will tell you what they're going to do and then you compare that to what they've actually done over a period of time and it says a lot. Have they enriched themselves with warrants, with deals with affiliated companies that they own? It's right there in the financial statements they're lenders.”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sometimes you are the only person doing that kind of work, particularly in the context of other investors that have to cover every other emerging market or every other AsiaX-Japan market.”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A demand curve, and then you find surprising things. You find that if you're a fertilizer company, the substitute isn't from the grid. They're using this feedstock. So it's NAFTA, and that's the relevant price in comparison. And if you are a tile manufacturer, what you're using this gas was actually to fire a kiln. And so your substitute is cold, and you construct a totally different demand curve that says even pretty expensive gas, people may want this. And that's typically what we're looking to do is develop that type of differentiated view on the earnings trajectory of a company. And it's not always right for sure, but in the Indian context, whereas when I think about my US experience, and it doesn't matter how small the company, how novel the research approach, there are a lot of other people pouring over the same idea in the differentiated edge is going to be small and short-lived.”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pipeline. You know the capital investment. You know the operating cost. The pricing's fixed. It's all about how much volume you can get through there. So the notion was really interesting area, but maybe there won't be anyone buying this natural gas because it's too expensive vis-a-vis power in the grid. That was a reasonable, rough and ready assumption to make for the sell site analysts covering this company, which was a billion dollars in market cap. And the same analyst was also covering 29 other companies in its industry, some of them with $100 billion and market cap. And he was very bright, very thoughtful, but there had to be drag and drop assumptions. If you have sufficient research bandwidth, what we were able to do is actually speak to the customer base that would have represented 85% of the customers for this pipeline and construct.”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sometimes it can be research on a discrete issue. So, for example, there can be a company with a piece of land on the balance sheet where it's only been required to record at cost and it could have been acquired 80 years ago and they don't have to tell you where it is. And it's a matter of sifting through land records, figuring out where the contiguous parcels are, peering over the fence wall, seeing what's there value. That type of thing, which is just kind of hard for other types of investors to do. Usually it's something more integral to the earnings trajectory of a company. So for instance, we decided that there was something interesting about a natural gas pipeline that had monopoly position distributing gas to rapidly industrializing region. And it was being priced like a stranded asset because the cost of natural gas had come up in the world of value.”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Usually intensive piece of research for Indian public markets. And out of that, the bar is pretty high, a busy year might be two or three names in what is today, a 16 position portfolio.”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So typically we meet, and we're from 50 to 100 companies a year, and that's one source of ideas and hypotheses. Another is that we have built our own proprietary database that you would never do in a more mature market. But in India where data disclosure is really good, but data aggregation isn't so good, that's allowed us to do some pretty classic filters for earnings consistency, quality, things of that nature. From that, it's pretty hypothesis driven where we have an idea that we think might be interesting we do on the order of 25 research projects a year, anything from six to 12 weeks testing out those hypotheses. So something considerably short of, I don't know, KKR sending six McKinsey teams to crawl over a deal for a year, but an unusual”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Shows have been standing room only, and the listings are a dozen or a hundred times oversubscribed. But if you have the time and appetite, you can look all sorts of other places in that ecosystem. There are distribution utilities, there are equipment manufacturers, there are specialized engineering companies. And as it turns out, there is a specialized lender to power transmission, companies that earns a 22% ROE that's fantastic. So there are trade-offs and you do have to have a filter, but creativity and research will get you a long ways too.”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We are now, and this is typically the case, a few turns cheaper than the index. We do have a valuation filter in what we're looking for. Having said that, if you are, I think, creative about where you look for it, sometimes it's not as much of a trade-off as you might expect. So by way of example, one of the fastest growing in by some distance the highest return on equity participant in the power sector is trading at eight times earnings. You can pay a whole lot more because if you say, okay, India's got all this power investment company and now the whole country is connected to the grid, which wasn't before. And people can afford to pay electricity. What I need is power generation, and you can buy it. There are any number of companies that have IPO'd in those roads.”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think your point is well taken that there are growth businesses like cement, like power, like real estate that from a US context are pretty mature sectors. In India, they're not mature at all. So that's one thing that I think you have to take into account in India that where growth is may not be entirely.”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This underlying grocery, even if you're talking about a cement company, maybe that's tied to real estate that's growing. How do you think about the different high-level lenses of growth versus value, quality versus the cheap asset in what your sweet spot has become?”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Business that may do a little better than the rest. And that can look like a bunch of different things. But for instance, you'll tend to see historically very fragmented industries in India where there are 300 publicly traded bank and non-bank lenders that are beginning to give way to concentration where the top three or five or six are accounting for an outsized share of top line and especially earnings. ultimately what we're looking for.”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But capacity is due to come in the next five years that will outstrip US, Europe, Japan, Russia combined. That's more our playing field. Within that, not everything is equally amenable to research. So for instance, India has a cadre of generic pharmaceutical manufacturers, some of them very high quality, many of them with their success and their trajectory highly dependent on things like patent litigation with IP holders in New Jersey that were just not well positioned to diligence. By contrast, you have cement companies, three dozen publicly traded in India, many of them specific to one region or even one micro market, where if you can roll up your sleeves, you can understand supply and demand dynamics pretty well. And then lastly, gold standard is if that will allow us to come to a view of”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Simplistically, what we're looking for is strong earnings at an appropriate valuation. And earnings is really just an output. There are a lot of other things from balance sheet to cash flows to brand and management quality that go into it. But as an outcome in India, that's tracked really, really well over the long term with share price performance. And in our own portfolio as well. So mechanically, that's what we're trying to find, our long-term earnings. In less generically, in the Indian context, we're looking for areas that are sunrise opportunities that are amenable to research where it's possible to identify companies that can do even better than the underlying business. And over time, we've come to feel that all the elements of that sentence are important. There are companies in industries where penetration is eight decades behind the U.S.”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, when you have that analytical capability, you still need to narrow the filter and decide what you're looking for to go dedicate the time to dive in. What are the types of names that you look to buy?”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do the work. I'm going to read the constitutive documents of these companies. I'm going to read shareholder letters from 10 years ago and try and understand what the business model of these stocks actually are. Then I came to this with some consulting experience and with a venture toolkit that was really heavy on that kind of fundamental analysis as well. And that's turned out to be persistently a differentiator in the Indian context.”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think, in a nutshell, is that research matters. I have a journalist friend who's fond of saying that India is a vast orchard of low-hanging fruit. In a sense, that's true, that you can identify easily a dozen sectors where you say, oh, it's small, it's going to grow. This is all going to go to the moon. But on the other hand, this observation that in many cases it's not the largest, the highest profile, the indexed constituent representative of a particular theme that's actually going to do best from a shareholder or return on equity standpoint. And it's that appetite to roll up our sleeves and try and understand if there's a different or more interesting way to participate in it. That has been key to John's success in building the firm. John early on distinguished himself and saying, I'm going to actually”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, with that backdrop of growth and really strong potential for growth in the country, the translation to stock performance, and then the opportunity to add value, you mentioned that John and you had kindred spirits in how you thought about investing. So what is that philosophy of how to go about approaching the market?”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To explode. So I think it's just a difference in kind of having those sort of tailwinds at India's back in a way that other East Asian countries have enjoyed and benefited from. And now it's India where there are a million people joining the labor force each month and a million more moving from the hinterlands to the cities. So I think the basics of the case for India are low penetration, high growth. Simplistically speaking, coupled with the fact that that growth seems to translate quite efficiently to investment performance.”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“India and what's come out of it is businesses with really good capital allocation. Return on equity is higher. Maybe one corollary of that is almost everything you find in the Indian public markets is fully private sector. About 5% of the companies are majority government owned. I think in China it's 30 or 40 or more percent. So there's sort of a structural difference between them if China, the labor force is pretty built out and GDP per capita implies sort of middle income type country. India is in most regards 1520, 25 years behind in overall economic output and in terms of kind of where these industries are at. So now that India is at $2,500 GDP per capita, this is if you track China's progression where a lot of these sectors really become”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“GDP growth has been 16x versus 8x for India, but China's index performance on that 16x GDP growth has been 2.5x in India's index performance on that 8x GDP growth has also been 8x. And without knowing China really well, I don't know all the reasons to explain that. But when I think about these stories of these lean capital efficient Indian companies that may go some way to providing an explanation where Indian households are less leveraged, Indian companies are a lot less leverage, private sector debt to GDP in India is like 53%. I think in China it's 195%. So that free flow of discounted, maybe nondiscerning capital in China has never really been the case in”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that is the comparison people are making now and maybe making in a slightly different way than they were five or ten or fifteen years ago where I think it was just universally understood that China was the emerging market star and maybe India had a role to play somewhere in its orbit. And I think coming from India, China demands and deserves a degree of admiration for what they've achieved. They have delivered wealth in industrial build out at a scale that India has not yet begun to touch. Having said that, there does seem to be this distinction where notwithstanding China's superior growth over the last couple of decades, India, it's translated far better into investor and shareholder returns. So if since 1999 when I started my career, China”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That story of the potential ability for active management to add value because of the differential opinions and lack of research goes alongside a beta case. And if you go back not too long, I guess, there were bricks at one point in time, people talked about Chindia, the importance of China and India. What is the case for India for its long-term call it beta opportunity, particularly compared to China?”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Covering them, there's all sorts of dispersion in terms of the kind of earnings and fundamental performance companies produce across industries like you'd expect, but even within sectors in share price performance, same situation, partly as a consequence of that, there is a usually wide divergence between what consensus thinks is going to happen to a company in what they actually deliver.”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think in terms of the public markets, it is a really broad canvas to invest in and that makes it particularly attractive. There are more than 5,000 publicly traded companies, of which depending on how you cut it, anywhere from 700 to upwards of 1,500, are investable at institutional scale. And it's unusual for an emerging market in that it's not dominated by any one commodity or sector. It's among the most fragmented markets in the world in terms of all the different themes and industries that are represented and it is among the most liquid for an emerging market. It's also one that is not particularly well covered by research. So you have this situation where there are all these different avenues in which to invest in two-thirds or three quarters of companies have one or zero sell-site analysts.”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Before we dive into how you do that, I'd love to talk about today the case for India, say for public market investing. What is that high-level case when people think about where they're allocating capital?”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Has repeated itself in some ways in every turn on the market. In the Indian context, that's a curious thing that market performance has been pretty strong, but manager attrition is really high and duration is not so hot. So we've gotten pretty good at navigating. The bottom part of the cycle, and hopefully we've gotten pretty good at navigating the other aspects.”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was difficult for sure. We talk as investors in terms of the intellectual discipline. It takes to not capitulate and stick to an investment approach, but it's an almost physical sensation of walking into the office every morning in everything you see is red, everything is down, and nothing feels smart. Nothing feels like it was a good decision. And that is a disorienting process as an individual. And then people who you've just convinced that they should make the shift from very stable engineering job and saying, trust me, you're going to love investing. It's going to be great in the software program I mentioned. He was at Goldman before this. He was one of 15,000. He had a safe job in suddenly we're all very, very exposed. So there was an element of just motivating and understanding and encouraging people that”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Backgrounds. I hired someone whose early career was spent trading textiles at Mongoldass Market in Mumbai in someone who'd been an entrepreneur and made a pretty good on-the-ground sense of how India worked. I hired someone whose background was in audit and knew what to look for in terms of earnings quality or red flags, for lack thereof. Someone who'd been a software developer and someone who'd been a structural engineer who just loved tearing through quantitative data and also people whose background like mine was in private markets.”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really, my objective as I saw it was to take this successful ethos John had built and translate that into a higher scale, more institutional setting. And most of that was in terms of building out the research function as more Indian companies were becoming investable, having the reliable ability to turn over more rocks. I was in Mumbai, which is where I've spent half my adult life and was hiring a team. And because in you was such a young market for institutional investing, there was no one else from a pure firm to poach, even if we had wanted to. The few other investors there, what we saw them mostly doing was hiring sell-side analysts and building out a team and a desk that looked a lot like a sell-side desk. We tried and experiment that's continued to this day of hiring different immoral”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sitting in exactly the right place and began to attract a few more investors and then a few more after that. And he got his first endowment and foundation investors right around the time I showed up.”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Away from socialists and towards being more welcoming of foreign participation in foreign capital might be able to deliver growth also. With that observation, he decided to launch a fund and spent a couple years passing the hat until he was able to do so and launched in nineteen ninety four with all of fourteen million dollars, at which point the market promptly crashed. But John was able to endure and persist in actually strengthen his relationship with limited partners. He found his way to a research heavy approach that was really unusual in what was a trading culture elsewhere in the public equity markets. And that helped him build a portfolio that was concentrated and was durable and with companies that actually held up quite well, such that when the market began to recover, he was”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“John's background as an Indian investor was probably even less obvious than mine. He was born in Khartoum, Sudan and then found his way to graduate studies at the London School of Economics, where he in turn talked his way on to the Eurobond trading desk at Trexelburnham Lambert, which in the 1980s was about the headiest trading environment you can imagine. And he had a research role that he gave up to finish his graduate degree. And years later, he was a business journalist in Hong Kong in the early 1990s watching this influx of capital into China. And he and a friend of his had a very simple insight, but in retrospect.”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I got to know someone named John Thorne who had started a public equities investment firm called India Capital the exact same year 1994 as the venture firm I was working for was established. That was very early days there weren't that many people in the ecosystem who dated back that far so kind of everyone knew everyone and a friendly trade was arranged. My firm wasn't looking to mint new partners. John, who is running a one-person shop was looking to add in the two of us found that we were kindred spirits and had a certain affinity for the way one another thought about investing in the Indian context. So I joined him there.”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really nearly got an investment on the strength of his outstanding resume as an MIT professor, and it turned out to be, he was showing us the resume of a different person with the exact same name. People would try anything and you had to be a little ready for that. But I think underneath it all, whether small companies or big, you saw them developing this grit inability to persevere against any manner of resistance, especially poor availability of capital. So what came out of it were these businesses that were really, really lean, inefficient.”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Culture for entrepreneurship, I think, was outstanding, that there were some enormous challenges that people dealt with, that it was difficult to get office space, was difficult to take months, historically even years to get a phone line, so much so that there's a Harvard Business School professor I worked with named Tarun Khanna, who'd done this seminal research where he said conglomerates are the worst form of business unit and organization and suboptimal everywhere in the world except India. In India, actually they make a lot of sense because it's just so hard to start a company. And notwithstanding that, you saw a real culture of entrepreneurship. I think the reputation is that sometimes entrepreneurs played a little fast and loose. And that's probably true anywhere in the world. In the time I was there, there were people who tried to hijack bank accounts of companies we were invested in. There was someone who very”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Caliber venture firms have had difficulty enforcing arbitration rights or put options or even audit rights in its one reason notwithstanding the fact that there's all sorts of growth in India that venture and private market returns have been sort of underwhelming of every dollar invested since 2000, something like 35 cents has come back. And I'm sure the industry will come good. But as I was sort of looking over the proverbial wall at other asset classes, it's not exactly apples to apples comparison, but for example, in public markets, the dollar returns over that same period are seven or eight X. The frictions that were there in terms of getting invested and staying invested and getting out were much less. So I ended up looking to make that shift out of venture. Into public equities.”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think in terms of successes, there were a lot of sectors and segments in India that were amenable to investment, to growth, to disruption, to more competition. So from the standpoint of being able to apply a toolkit of analytical skills and decide where there were conceptually compelling opportunities, it was excellent. Where it was difficult was in actually transacting. Anytime we approached an entrepreneur, they'd never seen a lot of the things on a term sheet. And that could be a really lengthy process getting invested sometimes for years even after the idea had been formed. Exits were similarly difficult in monitoring investments was hard. In some of these things have eased and some of them have stayed very difficult. So they're a well-publicized cases even today where high”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I ended up going to work for one of the early venture capital firms investing in India. So this was a 1994 vintage fund that was investing exclusively in Indian companies. Anything from call centers all the way up the value chain to things where there are PhD chemical engineers doing remote monitoring of petroleum refineries in Houston or Saudi Arabia. They built this portfolio of services companies, some of which did quite well. Not everything was quite well positioned yet to thrive at that point.”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I ended up applying to business school and was, I think, one of three people in that year accepted Harvard directly from India. I remember giving this interview where there was sort of a two and a half second lag between every question that was asked and me hearing it and then beginning to answer. And that could have been disastrous. So I went off to business school and India life, the startup I'd been at, was sold a couple of years later. It became Hewitt India by the time I went back halfway through into business school. There were thousands of people running around. So maybe we sold it early, but it was a happy story. And I was pretty hooked on India by that point. So I did all my independent studies and field work and any side consulting project I could find at Harvard with the Cadre of Indian professors.”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh gosh, many, many, but I was a runner then and now. So I would begin my days trying to find places to run where I would not get run over by a car, a hand cart, a bicycle delivering milk beginning each and every day, navigating an obstacle course. And then at finish, and as you do, you start to sort of stretch out. people would think that I was in some sort of distress as I was sitting there on the ground and come running to my aid, it epitomized what India was to me because those same people who was on the street would Once they thought I needed aid, they would stop their car, jump out, and try and help me. It was the wildness, but also something really gentle and wonderful that I liked.”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Into a signal economic moment in the emergence of a major nation's economy or in India's case really a reemergence that what had once upon a time been pushing a third of global economic activity after the depredations of conquest and colonialism and a flirtation with socialism was 3% of the global economy, but you could start to see as these impediments eased with the entrepreneurial spirit people had how it could be a whole lot more. And I figured this is something I've got to do for the rest of my career.”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Were the local trains, which you've probably seen these photos of people crowded in, hanging on to the sides of compartments or the other were what they called Kalipilis, these black and yellow taxis that were converted 1953 fiats with 42 horsepower engines. So think of something with the power of a riding lawnmower careening around Mumbai, hopefully getting you to your destination in one piece. It was very difficult for businesses in that environment that all of them were sort of swimming against the stream. On the other hand, I could see that some of them were succeeding brilliantly. And for me, I saw the few foreigners who were there. It was binary. They either hated it or they loved it. And I loved it. It was everything that Minnesota wasn't. It was loud. It was wild. It was frenetic. Also, I could see that I'd kind of stumbled.”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't much care for India and we don't like life, and pension doesn't sound right to us. How about you just go with services? And that took nearly a year to unravel and get past that problem till we got our funding. In this turned out to be really common in the environment of India at that time, there were constraints of capital availability. Bank lending wasn't that easy to get either. There were constraints of income. The average Indian back then was earning barely a dollar a day. And even the people who are my colleagues who've gone to top flight universities were earning maybe $100 a month. These were not people who could afford to go out at night and consume and spend. There were constraints of infrastructure. So to get to these client meetings, it could take an hour and a half, two hours to get across town in the financial capital. And it was much worse elsewhere, such that the options”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because the company was mismanaged, but because the venture capital investment that we were expecting any day from overseas, the government body called the Foreign Investment Promotion Board that was responsible for reviewing and approving this investment determined that all the paperwork was in order, everything was fine, but they just didn't like the name of our company. India Life Pension Services. And they said,”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Organized so that you have as few distractions as possible. And at that stage, my office in Boston, I think we had Class A space above Copley Place Mall and our fellow tenants were Gucci in Louis Vuitton. And then I show up in India in my office is in a converted supply closet that I shared with my boss's secretary in our server and our fax. There was a chair and a cardboard box and one of us got the chair and one of us got the cardboard box. day one jet lagged out of my mind the phone is ringing off the hook and it's all calls from creditors wondering when we're going to pay their bills it's like what have I gotten myself into and some of that was just the difference between a very well resourced organization in the US in a thinly researched startup which you would see anywhere but some of it was really India specific so it turned out we had all these creditors not be”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that part of what you were doing, it sounds like was maybe easier than you would have thought to be able to go and sell to these companies. What were some of the challenging aspects of doing business in India back then?”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the Tuish years, I was there, we scaled up to several hundred clients and 300 employees, and I was still the only foreigner in something like 10 million transactions a month.”
2024-05-23 · Capital Allocators · Dan Tennebaum - The Case for India at India Capital (EP.387) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source