YouSaid · the spoken record

Sunaina Sinha

lines on the record: 68
first: 2025-01-02
most recent: 2025-01-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Professionally speaking, in terms of my day job, Barry, what was I really good at? I was really good at the capital markets function. I was really good at the capital raising, liquidity organization side of the business, and that's what Sibyl Capital did. So I knew that was going to be my day-to-day jam. And on the board of some of these companies, I would be able to go and add the value of how to grow their business.”
2025-01-02 · Masters in Business · From Biotech to Asset Management with Sunaina Sinha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the biggest advantage is that there's full alignment because you're not operating with OPM other people's money. It is your money, it's your skin in the game. The alignment of interest is one thing that you learn in private equity and all private markets investing that it's all about alignment of interest. You can't exit these things unless you grow value and you're in sync with the founders and with the management teams because they're private businesses. So you've got to figure out if you have that match and alignment of both economic interest but also vision and execution forte into the next three to five year journey. That's the minimum amount of time you'll be together for. So that's why I think doing it as an individual always gave me much more reward and also quite frankly economic success than doing it as a fund investor. The other thing I'd add is that I found very early on that”
2025-01-02 · Masters in Business · From Biotech to Asset Management with Sunaina Sinha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What attracted me to that angel space was that I was building my business and had skills and learnings I wanted to share. But more importantly, when I looked for businesses and entrepreneurs to back, it came down to really two very important criteria. The first is people people people. I learnt that during my Mayfield fellows program journey at Stanford, where that was drilled into us, it starts with the people, it ends with the people. And secondly, the companies and the products they were building had to do good and do well, right? That they had to have a positive impact on the communities that they operated in. So if you think about the recipe food business, that was all about healthy eating, the fitness business was all about an exercise program that's efficiently designed for women's bodies. If you think about the clean energy business that I am now chair of the board of, that is all about clean energy fuel cell alternatives.”
2025-01-02 · Masters in Business · From Biotech to Asset Management with Sunaina Sinha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That I've encountered at SIPR being on that board, I'll give you one that really astounded me. One of the researchers there, Nick Bloom, has done some of the most definitive research on flexible working and how it impacts productivity, retention, and how it's very much here to stay or should be. Very much flies in the face of how some Wall Street banks think about the return to work. Fascinating empirical evidence there that he's collected. Another piece of research there that I'll quickly mention is work on labor force participation by women dipping in the summer months as kids come out of school. Interesting on how it works.”
2025-01-02 · Masters in Business · From Biotech to Asset Management with Sunaina Sinha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As you know, I love macro and I love thinking about how policy and macro movements around markets around the world really impact what's happening in the ground reality for businesses that are run all over the world. Is the SIPA as it's called, the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy and Research is an incredible congregation of leading economists, Nobel laureates, policy advisors from all walks of life across Stanford, around the world who join the Institute to look at the big problems facing the world today, and think about how do you solve them? How do you come at them? It could be from looking at how social security reform or look at homelessness in California or thinking about the age issue in Japan. They could look at any number of issues globally and parse it using the world's leading experts and actually research how to come out at the other side of it. Some of the most powerful research”
2025-01-02 · Masters in Business · From Biotech to Asset Management with Sunaina Sinha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The faint of heart, that's for sure. Being an entrepreneur isn't anyway, but being an entrepreneur in an industry like financial services, where there's these old and very incumbent eight hundred pound gorillas are all around you is certainly not.”
2025-01-02 · Masters in Business · From Biotech to Asset Management with Sunaina Sinha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the beginning it was focused both on private equity and hedge funds, but within a year and a half I retired all our hedge fund business because I could see the capital inflows going into the private markets opportunity. That was the right call to make as you think about the last decade. The inflows into private equity have been phenomenal and we've been a great beneficiary of that flow and that movement. But in the early days what enabled me to start or what gave me the conviction to start was really the belief that build it and they will come and if they don't come at least you're enjoying the journey for yourself. I knew I loved capital raising. I knew I could do that effectively and I could do that for a handful of clients. And my goal very much was let me give this a shot and if it doesn't work I'll go out and get a job again. I was in my early thirties. I didn't have a mortgage. I didn't have kids. I had very few liabilities. It was a risk. It was a calculated one and I'm very glad I took it because it worked out beautifully, but it's not.”
2025-01-02 · Masters in Business · From Biotech to Asset Management with Sunaina Sinha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not going to use it because you used it already, but you've got to be able to figure out what I call the incomings. Life is throwing a lot at you. The market throws a lot at you. And what are you going to ignore and deflect? And what are you going to say, okay, that's the signal from this noise? That's where I double click. That takes a pattern recognition that I have. Now that said, over the last few years, once I've sold my business to Raymond James, I'm doing that other second leg of the journey. How do you take something that's established, growing, proven, and really scale it? And that's the same thing I'm doing with the public board seat at SFC, helping that management team and that board take an existing business of his businesses doing close to $150 million of revenue, very profitable, growing organically thirty percent year on year. How do you take that and scale that to the next level? How do you make that a billion dollar business? So now I'm trying my hand at that second leg of the journey, but that first leg of zero to 10, that I've done a few times.”
2025-01-02 · Masters in Business · From Biotech to Asset Management with Sunaina Sinha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But an operator and a grower of her own business. So that's the first thing. The second thing is you are absolutely right, Barry. The muscle it takes to grow from zero to ten or revenue or zero to ten of Ebada is very different from the journey that takes from ten to one hundred and one hundred to a billion. These are different muscles and these are different levers in the business, but also levers in mindset. I've done zero to ten quite a few times. So in my angel investing businesses, it was very much that, hey, how do we get from zero to ten of EBITDA? That takes a certain amount of nimbleness, hunger, agility, scrappiness, and I love that. Having done that myself, I know what that feels like. I can relate to the entrepreneurs. I can help them duck and weave through whatever's coming at them.”
2025-01-02 · Masters in Business · From Biotech to Asset Management with Sunaina Sinha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While I think the most important skill I bring is the fact that I've started my own business, grown it from scratch, and sold it to Fortune three hundred. So I've seen all legs of this journey.”
2025-01-02 · Masters in Business · From Biotech to Asset Management with Sunaina Sinha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We all have to decide what our gifts are to offer in the world. What are the gifts I have to offer is how do you help businesses growth hack and get to the next level of scale? I did that with two businesses early on in the early 2010s, as you say, bought a business called Barcore as Fitness Boutique in the UK, doing something new for women by women, grew that over a course of six or seven years, very successful business, and sold that to a private equity-backed strategic. Did that again with a business called Mindful Chef, a healthy recipe box business that grew like gangbusters, especially over the COVID years, and sold at Tenesle as well? I'm chairperson of the board of a publicly listed company called SFC Energy. They do clean energy fuel cells. And being able to steer entrepreneurs and enabled them to realize their vision and think tactically as well as strategically as to how to get there and help them do that.”
2025-01-02 · Masters in Business · From Biotech to Asset Management with Sunaina Sinha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. When it comes to any asset management business, Barry, two things important make smart investment decisions and have investors to back you to do them, right? And so I knew I had to master in one of those streams. And the stream I picked was I do the capital raising that enables the asset management industry engine to turn. And both Bridgewater and Brevin Howard were incredible training grounds to teach you just how to do that. But secondly, how to cover investors systematically and how to think about the world in a holistic way and what levers drive what others. Both were macro hedge funds, as you know, and understanding how macro markets work, how they interplay with each other is incredibly important. I use that day to day when I speak to my private equity clients today. I use it all the time when it comes to understanding how markets are going to affect different types of investors.”
2025-01-02 · Masters in Business · From Biotech to Asset Management with Sunaina Sinha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Brevan Howard was headquartered in London, so moved over to London back in 2009 and the rest is history have been a resident of London, my family would argue with you, Barry, and argue with anybody who asked them that I live on a plane because I manage a global business over seven offices, six of which happen to be in the US, so I'm stateside a lot and also travels the rest of Europe, but home very much is London today.”
2025-01-02 · Masters in Business · From Biotech to Asset Management with Sunaina Sinha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I had the most incredible experience at Stanford, ended up working in the Bay Area straight after that, still very close ties to Stanford was still teaching a class there even after graduation and working with a bunch of professors out there at the time. When it came to picking where I want to do my MBA, again, I had the choice between the Stanford of the East, as I call Harvard Business School, but also to go back to Stanford. And I knew that if I didn't leave then, I may never leave the Bay Area. It's such a special place and such a special bastion and ecosystem of entrepreneurship and technology and growth and ideas, made the decision to leave just to try something new at that point, went to Harvard for my MBA, and then had made a choice at that point to switch out of biotech and interviewed with a whole bunch of firms and ended up getting into the hedge fund world, doing capital raising for two large hedge funds, and one of them”
2025-01-02 · Masters in Business · From Biotech to Asset Management with Sunaina Sinha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I was blessed enough to get into a number of great U.S. Ivy Leagues, but ended up choosing Stanford because even then, Barry, I knew I was an entrepreneur. At heart, I wanted to build businesses, scale businesses, and help other people scale their businesses. And Stanford had that right magic between entrepreneurship and technology and the nexus of starting to grow things, which is what I wanted to learn most.”
2025-01-02 · Masters in Business · From Biotech to Asset Management with Sunaina Sinha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have traveled So, my dad was a diplomat for the World Bank, grew up in Nigeria, in Lagos, in Harare, Zimbabwe, and then in Hanoi, Vietnam. I applied to universities, from colleges in the US and also in the UK from Hanoi. There were no places to take the SAT in Vietnam back then. So we flew to Bangkok. My dad flew me to Bangkok to take my SAT ones, and then we flew back a few weeks later to take the SAT2s, and I flew back again to do interviews.”
2025-01-02 · Masters in Business · From Biotech to Asset Management with Sunaina Sinha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I grew up all over the world. They call people like me third culture kids. They're born in one place or born in India, grew up in many other places and then land up in another place altogether.”
2025-01-02 · Masters in Business · From Biotech to Asset Management with Sunaina Sinha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While the original career plan very much was to go into the biotech industry, which is what I did after I graduated from Stanford, hence the masters in chemical engineering, which was an unusual master's to get after doing the undergraduate in industrial engineering which was then relabeled as management sciences and engineering at Stanford. But it allowed me to go into the healthcare vertical straight out of Stanford. I worked for two small and medium-sized businesses owned by the same investor group. and cut my teeth on those, and then realized as a result of that experience Fussy was phenomenal experience I was working directly with the CEO and president of both companies, but I realized that the biotech vertical was not my playing field for the long term”
2025-01-02 · Masters in Business · From Biotech to Asset Management with Sunaina Sinha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source