The Banker’s Son Who Made It to Cornell — My Story with Ishan Sehgal

People of Su-Kam — #6

This Story Begins in 1990

Every company has a beginning. And every beginning has someone who made it possible — someone who said yes when everyone else was still deciding.

For Su-Kam, one of those people was Mr. Devinder Sehgal. He was my bank manager at State Bank of India in the early days of Su-Kam — the early 1990s, when the company was young and I was hungry and the numbers were small but the ambition was anything but. Mr. Sehgal gave me my first credit limit of ₹2 lakh. In those days, that meant everything. It was not just a number. It was a signal of faith — from a banker who looked at a young entrepreneur and decided that the bet was worth making.

I have never forgotten that.

Years later, Mr. Sehgal left the bank and joined Su-Kam as our Chief Financial Officer. The man who had once evaluated my creditworthiness from the other side of a desk was now part of the company he had helped, in his own way, to create. Life has a way of completing its own circles.

“Mr. Sehgal gave me my first credit limit of ₹2 lakh in the early 1990s. In those days, that meant everything. It was not just a number — it was a signal of faith from a banker who decided the bet was worth making.”

The Son Follows the Father

When Mr. Sehgal referred his son Ishan to me, I did not need much convincing. I knew the family. I knew the father’s character — his integrity, his seriousness, his commitment to doing things properly. These things tend to pass from one generation to the next.

Ishan Sehgal joined Su-Kam in 2011, working in the marketing team alongside the Graduate Engineer Trainees — young, fresh-from-college professionals who formed the backbone of our market operations. He was of a similar age and energy, and he fitted right in.

What struck me immediately was how quickly he picked things up. The inverter and solar industry has its own language, its own rhythms, its own way of working with dealers and distributors. Some people take years to fully grasp it. Ishan absorbed it at a pace that was rare for someone so young.

Bubbling with Ideas, Ready to Work

Ishan was a thorough hard worker — and I do not use that phrase lightly. Hard work is common enough. What was less common was the quality that accompanied it: he was constantly bubbling with ideas. New ways to approach a dealer meet. Better ways to structure a demonstration. Fresh thinking about how to make a product’s value clear to a room full of sceptical businesspeople.

He worked closely with me on demonstrations at dealer meets. He was not just an observer — he was an active participant, learning by doing, and then doing better the next time. At a very young age, he began organising dealer meets on his own. That level of ownership, at that age, in that environment — it is not something you see every day.

There was a sharpness to him, a restlessness that I recognise in the people who go on to do significant things. He was not the kind of person who waited to be told what to do. He was already thinking about what needed to be done next.

“He was constantly bubbling with ideas. At a very young age, he began organising dealer meets on his own. That level of ownership, at that age, in that environment — it is not something you see every day.”

[PHOTO_ISHAN]

From Su-Kam to Cornell to the World

Ishan spent five and a half years at Su-Kam — from 2011 to the end of 2016. Then he took the next step that his ambition had always been pointing toward: he went to the Cornell University Johnson Graduate School of Management — one of the most respected MBA programmes in the United States — and earned his degree there.

Today he is based in the Greater Chicago Area, working at Whirlpool Corporation — the global home appliances giant — in a role that spans Strategy, Business Development, P&L ownership, Monetization, and Partnerships & Alliances. He is doing exactly what his years at Su-Kam trained him to do — but now at a global scale, in one of the world’s most competitive consumer markets.

I went to his wedding a few years ago. Just as I had gone to his father’s home, sat across from the man who had once given me a ₹2 lakh credit limit, and felt the particular gratitude that you carry for people who believed in you before you were worth believing in — now I was sitting at his son’s wedding, watching the next chapter begin.

A Story That Spans Two Generations

What makes Ishan’s story different from every other story in this series is that it does not begin with him. It begins with his father — a banker who extended credit to a young entrepreneur in 1990, who later joined that entrepreneur’s company as CFO, and whose son then came to work there and carried the relationship into a new generation.

That kind of continuity — of trust, of connection, of one family’s belief in what Su-Kam was building — is something I think about with deep gratitude. Mr. Devinder Sehgal’s faith in me, expressed in a ₹2 lakh credit limit more than three decades ago, has a direct line to his son sitting in Chicago today, working in global strategy at a Fortune 500 company.

Su-Kam was a part of that journey. I am glad it was.

“Mr. Sehgal’s faith in me, expressed in a ₹2 lakh credit limit more than three decades ago, has a direct line to his son sitting in Chicago today. Su-Kam was a part of that journey.”

Also read: Jagdeep Chauhan — The Man Who Invented India’s Sine Wave Inverter  | 
Venkat Rajaraman — The Man Who Left Nvidia for a Dream  | 
Sunil Badesra — The Boy Who Became a Leader