I used to think the hard part of lending was the money. It is not. The money is the easy part. The hard part is the silence. You make a decision today. You approve a borrower, set a ticket size, and agree on a tenure. You do this with the best information you have, and…
Nobody sends an email to say the book is loosening. There is no formal meeting, no board resolution, no policy change. The loosening happens in the white space between decisions like one approved exception, one negotiated flexibility, and one adjacent segment noted as underserved. Each accommodation is defensible. Each has a commercial rationale. And each…
For a long time, I believed speed was a virtue in itself. Not a tactic, not a response to market conditions, but a default setting. If we were not moving faster than the competition, we were losing. If a decision took more than a day, we were overthinking. If a hire took more than a week, we were being…
There is a particular kind of quiet that comes with building before the world has anything to measure. Around year three, you start noticing the contrast more clearly. Friends announce funding rounds, teams expand, milestones appear online, and your own progress still looks too early to explain neatly. I spent four years in that phase. Not four months, not one difficult…
Every February, the same ritual plays out. The Finance Minister rises. The markets hold their breath. Within minutes, the conversation narrows to one question: did the income tax slabs change? If yes, by how much? If no, mild disappointment, and the document is shelved for another year. I find this ritual fascinating and its narrowness…
I have sat through a considerable number of panel discussions, business dinners, and industry gatherings over the years. The conversation about wealth, how it is built, how it is protected, how it is lost, comes up reliably. What strikes me, every time, is how little of what is actually true gets said out loud. There…
There is a question I get asked often, usually by someone who has just had their first real win. They’ve backed the right founder, or stayed in the right position long enough, and now they’re sitting on a number that would have seemed fictional five years ago. The question is always some version of: “Should…
Ask yourself a simple question: What is money? It seems almost embarrassingly straightforward — the kind of question a child asks, and an adult deflects with a rehearsed answer about purchasing power and legal tender. But sit with it long enough, resist the textbook scaffolding, and the question begins to unspool into something considerably more…
Selling a winner feels like a betrayal. When youve spent years in the trenches with a founder, watching them turn a whiteboard sketch into a market leader, the narrative becomes intoxicating. The press is calling them a visionary, the latest internal deck shows a hockey stick curve, and your peers are telling you how lucky…
For a significant portion of my career, I have lived and breathed the clinical world of institutional finance. Whether I was building the structured corridors..