The thrill-seeking gene is embedded in Megha Jose’s DNA. She admits to being a huge adventure junkie. “I love anything adrenaline-pumping, be it skydiving or bungee-jumping. I try to find adventure in everything I do.”
Now the 27-year-old MBA student is embarking on her next white-knuckle ride: launching her company, Tender. Targeted at young professionals in India, it is an investment advisory firm that aims to make investing profitable, engaging – and fun. Farewell, corporate world
Megha, who grew up in Tamil Nadu state in southern India, already had a successful career before coming to LBS. In 2016, she was a project manager at Cisco, helping to build its private cloud. But after three-and-a-half years, boredom with the corporate world set in.
“I knew exactly what every day would hold,” the computer science graduate recalls. “I didn’t like the monotony. It got very comfortable and I wasn’t challenging myself. So I left to join my dad, who’d been managing his own stockbroking and wealth management firm for 30 years.”
Joining her father’s company was more of a culture shock than Megha imagined. It was a traditional, boutique-style firm, where everything was “very manual”, even the accounts were done in books. So she decided to shake things up.
“I told my dad I needed to form my own team, do things on my own,” she says. “He gave me the opportunity to do that. I started off with what I knew, the tech side, and revamped the digital architecture, making it more online. Then I looked at the core business – wealth management and broking.
“I grew up in a family where each day we’d have conversations about what to do with our investments and savings. So I grew up thinking everyone knows how to invest. But then I realised my friends and colleagues – who are on the upper echelons of talent in India and earning a decent amount – didn’t know what to do with their money. They’d park it in a savings account and earn nothing from it.” The lightbulb moment
Megha told a few of her friends to come on board as clients to her father’s company, and that she would manage their money for free. “I’d WhatsApp them recommendations to buy and sell different equities, send them Excel sheets, show them their returns,” she says, “and they were really happy. They’d start telling their family members, who came on board, too.”
It was at this point that Megha had her lightbulb moment: that there was a need to make investment accessible to all societal classes.
“India is a great platform to trade if you know what to buy and sell,” she says, “but if you don’t know the stock market, you’re lost and end up losing money. I wanted to fix this. My dad was helping rich, high-networking individuals invest. I wanted to bring that down to the masses and help anybody invest.” A charity for stray dogs
Megha had already had a taste of entrepreneurship by then. In her spare time, after leaving Cisco, she had formed an animal welfare NGO for stray dogs called The Pawsome People Project.
“I’m a big dog-lover, and I saw so many dogs on the streets of India dying of disease and injuries. I wanted to rescue them, rehabilitate them, and give them homes. So I started my ‘passion project’. My goal was to train these street dogs as service dogs to help differently abled people. My older sister is hearing-impaired and I grew up as her emotional-support animal; I’d go everywhere with her. I knew these dogs could transform lives.
“I started recruiting volunteers. It was then I realised that starting something from scratch and building a team gave me so much happiness. I knew entrepreneurship was something I should explore.”
Being new to the industry, Megha had to acquire her own network in core finance, but she felt she lacked credibility. “In India, degrees have extremely high value,” she says. “So the moment you tell someone you have an MBA from a reputed school, you gain a certain level of respect and they’ll trust you automatically. So I came to LBS, with a very definite goal.” Highs – and lows
This April, nine months into her MBA, Megha achieved a huge boost to her Tender project:. she won the first prize of $100,000 after pitching it to an incubator called Olam Ventures. The competition was a live streaming, watched by 1,000 people. “I was the only sole founder out of 30 teams pitching,” she says, “so […]
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