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.
A consolidated reference page of published books — academic, business, and educational — in which Kunwer Sachdev, founder of Su-Kam Power Systems, is profiled or cited as a notable Indian entrepreneur and innovator.
T V Rao’s IIMA book ‘Managers Who Make A Difference’ (Random House India, 2010) profiles Kunwer Sachdev as a leader who turns every problem into a business opportunity — built on C K Prahalad’s 2007 identification of Su-Kam as a great example of Indian Innovations.
India Today’s landmark August 2010 Independence Day issue named Su-Kam’s plastic-body inverter among India’s Top 10 Innovations of the Decade — a defining recognition of Kunwer Sachdev’s leadership in reimagining home power backup for millions of Indian households.