In May 2017, KOHLER India invited me to speak to their senior and middle management. I opened with one question: ‘Who are you working for?’ Most of the room said, ‘for the company.’ By the end of the session, they were saying something very different. This is what happened in that Gurgaon workshop — and why it was easier to motivate somebody else’s team than my own.
In May 2011, one of India’s biggest startup events of the year returned to Bangalore — at the NIMHANS Convention Centre — with Krishnan Ganesh (TutorVista), the founders of FusionCharts and BharatMatrimony, and me. This is what a marquee Indian startup stage looked like before the modern ecosystem existed.
In January 2011, I flew to Kolkata for the IIM Calcutta Annual Entrepreneurship Summit and ended up staying on the campus for two full days. The keynote was the smallest thing that happened during that visit. This is what actually mattered — the classrooms, the courtesy of the faculty, and the moment they told me they had been teaching the Su-Kam case study, and were about to rewrite it because they had now met me.
In March 2013, TiE and Canaan Partners pulled together an invitation-only mentoring camp for India’s most promising early-stage founders. On the mentor list: Deep Kalra of MakeMyTrip, Vijay Shekhar Sharma of Paytm, Saurabh Srivastava of Indian Angel Network — and me. This is the story of that day, the friendships behind it, and why Su-Kam ended up owning the room in a way that surprised even me.
In 2011, Livemint invited a panel of industry veterans to share their thoughts on public speaking. I was among them. Here are the golden rules I gave the paper that day — the three-minute rule, why I still refuse to speak in English if the audience understands Hindi, and why I sometimes throw out my prepared speech sitting on the dais.
The story of Su-Kam Solar in 2018. Solar was still a luxury. Every big Indian brand was reselling Chinese inverters with a fresh sticker. And the Chinese manufacturers were entering India directly. This is what we chose to do about it — and why I wrote about it in The Economic Times.
The Start-Up Summit was delayed by heavy rains. Some of us reached early, some were stuck. And in that unplanned green-room conversation, a thought I had lived by inside Su-Kam for 25 years quietly became a keynote — the one ET EnergyWorld would cover the next morning.
I went to IIM Ahmedabad in March 2017 to deliver the ‘Power-Up with Kunwer Sachdev’ keynote at TiECON. The bigger discovery came in a quiet conversation with the professors before the talk — my Su-Kam story was already being taught to their MBA students. Here’s what that reframed for me.
Nine published books — IIMA, HarperCollins, Springer, Rashmi Bansal, Harsh Pamnani, Disha, ProjectX Digest — have profiled Kunwer Sachdev and Su-Kam Power Systems. Here are the covers, the references, and what each one captured.
From Dataquest 1999 to HarperCollins, Springer and IIMA — nine published books and multiple India Today Group editions have documented Kunwer Sachdev and Su-Kam Power Systems as part of India’s innovation record.