A man’s introduction lies in his past! A group of our students – Arjun and Vijay - at Amrita, with their urge to know more about their beloved teacher and to let the world know more about their luck in finding him, managed to have a round of chat with Mr. Jay Mishra on his journey in life so far, starting with his tryst in the US economy and the people he was associated with, in his early days.
Having the good luck of being able to try different things, his interest was in the future of technology. He started by teaching MBA graduates in colleges, and soon after, in companies, part time, while working in his regular job which gave him a reasonably good chance of writing about the convergence of communications technology, semi conductors and other things that were occurring in the mid 80’s thus beginning his career in the Silicon Valley. Also, while in Intel, he was on a look out to devise a way to combine the interests of the biggies of the industry into something that was substantial for which learning marketing from a practitioner and technology trends from people who were working on how to write and communicate sounded helpful.
While IBM bought ‘ROME’, the second company where Mr. Mishra worked, he began writing and working with one friend of his, on the same. Soon after he moved on to teaching in Harvard and later in Stanford on the convergence of telecommunications and data communications of computers and predicting what would happen to the future products. He also won the most distinguished teacher’s award while in Stanford. Next he switched from one company to another, dealing with one form of technology to another. His job was to keep a giant matrix of what companies told him about their activities, emphasizing what their company was going to be good at. He also had to find people who gave him the other side of the story – what was not going right. All this information somehow got triangulated into recommendations about what investments to make in the public market. While he was at Capital Group, which had a partnership with Sequoia Capital, the best venture capital company in the world, he got to know Don Valentine who used to invite him to sit in all his meetings, thereby teaching how he crafted his excellence.
“Slowly, there was a sign of respect in the market, so as to say that ‘maybe this person is doing something correctly’. A mix of knowing marketing technology trends, learning from the best type of people and frankly a lot of good luck with coincidences, got me to the point of approaching the ripe old age of 36 and thinking I should retire now and start doing social entrepreneurship, when George Soros found out that I had good numbers”, recalls Jay adding, “When I began working with George, I began to realize that he is the smartest currency person in this world. I wanted to do investments the way I did, irrespective of the political economy, which was the basis of his investments. But in the world of hedge funds that’s not the way it’s done. Infact, you need to have very limited time horizon because your customers are quite fickle and they might not allow you to last for two to three years in the specific investments. So you have to choose something that shoots up the direction you want in less than two weeks and that made it challenging”.
Mr. Mishra surely had some big names in his kitty like Jim Clarke in Netscape, Steve Casset in AOL, Gordon Moore, and Bill Gates etc. He had a for-long desire to help humanity, which to his disappointment was absent to a large extent in these others. “I approached George once and he said, ‘Look, you first make money and then you spend it’, and I said I didn’t make the money, he did. But I made money so I should go out and think about it’. When opportunity occurred in my head to say, maybe I should look at something different, children came into mind! So I began looking at how I could help children directly and started looking at India not just because that was my root but also because I wanted to help the people here. I wanted to have the maximum amount of benefit for the people here.
Soon he realized that charities are great but they also have not solved the problem of how to manage a large organization where people doing some good, also have large amounts of personal direction that they would like being taken. “After some time I was also frustrated and I realized that I didn’t know what to do. And then I met AMMA who offered an example to the world of who she was and that told me that maybe the way I look at things in the world has to change before I can really start helping others. And that is the element of social entrepreneurship that I got very interested in which is not about devotion, not about religion but is about regarding the other equally if not just as important and to support people at one time with the abilities that I have”, says Mr. Mishra.
On being asked on the similarities of trends of VC’s in the US and the VC’s in India, he says, “The search for investments doesn’t really have that many country boundaries. One could create an artificial one through political mechanisms or economic incentives, but the reality is that the investor knows how to look at things in a different way than most normal people do that don’t have that training or background. And they go for whatever countries that they want. VC has the same mentality, where the good ones don’t say that this is the time for me to focus on this country or that country. What they look for is a way to maximize the returns for their investors so that they can make more money to manage and make more profits accordingly. India offers that chance right now for various reasons like the country is now considering entrepreneurship as a healthy way to make living. The US VC firms invest based on trends and a lot due to timing. Somehow they selected the timing to be now and they are all over here”.
Quoting the example of Peter Lynch who ran a fund called the Megallen fund for fidelity, the largest in the world and which regularly beat the average person, more so, the index by a very wide margin apart from Warren Buffet, Mr. Mishra comments, “I believe in listening to people and taking a look at the market conditions myself. I make an intuitive feel about how well the economy is doing and by doing similar work I am able to get a head start by a few months about what the economy trends actually are. This is because the economy always does a historical recap of what has occurred. What I notice about India is that the airports, the cars, the furniture inside, the appliances inside are pretty much at par with Europe already in quality and also in price levels. The trend in the works here is that the consumer is becoming higher end. There is a bracket change occurring due to the consumer’s increasing salaries. This country has a steep upper trend for a quite a few of the coming years. With more money flowing, there is a style in spending and Indians are joining that race of people in the western world who do the same all the time. So, the Indian economy is here to stay for sometime in terms of growth”.
Talking about Global Brands in India, Mr. Mishra feels that the fundamental issue with India is that it does not have a direction perceived. If one thinks of Japan it is to associate it with consumer electronics, of Australia or New Zealand it’s about wool or some other thing. But, if one thinks of India it’s not clear what that is, the same problem which Russia has – an absence of a global brand. It could be Indian restaurants, or food or spices etc. Will an Indian car like a TATA or a Mahindra make it in the overseas market? The brand image of India will work against it which is that most people regard India as growing, but as also having a high degree of government corruption, bribery and other things that are questionable. “India is a country that has such a different outlook, as opposed to the rest of the world, as its core which every body can learn from, but at the other extreme because of the lack of resources, people have to really struggle and the practices of many people are really questionable. If I look at businesses, if I look at the noise that occurred when the Ambanies fought and got divided the thing that came to everyone’s mind was, what else can happen there? Now is that country turning around yes it is. I mean if I look at many of the states it’s done quite well but it needs to be reinforced so that it includes majority of the states in the country rather than minority of the states. But the trouble is to create a brand which stands on something that represents reality”, says Mr. Mishra.
Commenting on the time to invest in India, Mr. Mishra says, predicting market trends has never been done by anyone with accuracy. There are people coming in, like this lady from Goldman Sachs called Aby Coleman, who had predicted the growth of the stock market in the USA within 15% of the actual for each year, before 2000, for about 5 years. But the stock market crashed and she was dead wrong all of a sudden. There is no infrastructure. However, the way one looks at a country is riding momentum. India is growing and one can base investment decisions on whether it will grow faster or slower because if the growth rate changes the P/E multiple increases (usually barring all other things). If the growth rate slows down the P/E also goes down. Some of the markets here are definitely unsaturated, for e.g. the TV market. As the consumers get wealthier, they will also go after the products that other parts of the world have. The PC/TV market penetration and other things in India are still at a nascent stage. As a consequence, if someone does an analysis saying that the countries growth rate is the same or rising, then the market goes up. But one could also find some exogenous variable like war and everything will go down. So it’s hard to predict, but the trends look good.
Spelling out the difference between working for a profit organization and for a not-for-profit organization, Mr. Mishra states that both of these can be looked in the same way just that the profit organization pays to look at it in a very practical bottom-line way. The way to look at life has actually been taught by India and its culture and social entrepreneurship allows that learning to be more available for a human being to use. In social entrepreneurship the pressure might be there but the ethical standards are usually higher except for people that wouldn’t have mattered anyway. So, to practice samanya dharma; how the rishies would like us to live as, is much easier through social entrepreneurship and the outcomes are the same, they are not under anyone’s control. So if someone is under a very positive influence and they are working hard, they could be doing anything and it would turn out right. If the opposite is occurring then it really doesn’t matter if people think you’re a great business man because things will fall. Being a social entrepreneur allows the flexibility to make mistakes and not to be afraid of them. Because there it’s much more humanistic point of view where people don’t go out and measure each other on whether you made through the quota and what percentage you have.
On his unfulfilled desires in life, he articulates, “I don’t see myself as a special case, I see myself as a person who went through a certain track because that, was, what I was supposed to do. So I never thought that being in the wealthy environment made me better than other people. As a matter of fact I saw this as an equally skillful game that was crafted by whoever the creator is. I didn’t have a desire to do any more or less of it. The fundamental thing that occurs in this environment of social entrepreneurship is that if one desires to be more conscious of what is happening and how it is happening and how one is reacting to it or not reacting to, that it introduces a level of pain and sorrow in the system that you don’t need to worry about. You see somebody who might have said something and not achieved it but if I were numb it wouldn’t matter, because I wouldn’t see those tears that they would have shed at that time. So as a consequence now I am more conscious but also not at the same skill set like say someone like AMMA would have to be able to know exactly what to do. But, as far as ambitions, I have been at the top of whatever I thought the top was at that time and the people around me were always interesting people to think about intellectually but not what I would want to be. So no I don’t think I have any desires left”.
Edited by Anju Varghese
|
