For a long time after Su-Kam went into insolvency, I stopped speaking on stages. I lost the habit. I lost the belief that a broken founder had any right to hold a microphone. And then one afternoon, Udit Pathak’s team at Media Mantra sat me down — and gave me back something I did not know I had lost.
On the popular Hindi show ‘Kissey Kamyabi Ke’, Bollywood actor Annu Kapoor sat down with me to trace the whole Su-Kam journey — from selling pens on a cycle in Class 10, to naming Su-Kam in college, to building it into a ₹1,200+ crore power-electronics brand across 90+ countries with ₹10,000 of starting capital.
There was a time when India had almost no home-grown electronics brand story to tell — and TiE, IIMs, and every business conference kept calling me to the mic. This is what I told the young entrepreneurs in those rooms, and why I still believe it today.
I went to SkillCircle Noida to mentor a young team. I came back with the sharpest lesson of the year — from Gen Z employees who answered ‘Who are you working for?’ without hesitation. What Indian corporates should learn from them.
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.