A pioneer of the Indian angel financing ecosystem, Mirchandani founded the Mumbai Angel Network in 2006 to support early-stage ventures. Through the years, the platform claims to have made over 200 investments and over 100 exits
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It was the 1965 romance-war classic Doctor Zhivago that inspired Sasha Mirchandani’s mother to bestow on her son the homely variant of a most illustrious name. In Russian, ‘Sasha’ is the somewhat informal shorthand for the Greek name ‘Alexander’—literally, the defender of men—that has historically been most well-borne by Macedonian military commander Alexander the Great. A modern-day chief, Mirchandani today heads early-stage investment fund Kae Capital as its managing director: assessing tech geniuses’ business ideas, raising money from wealthy investors, and consulting a team of partners before closing deals form the order of his 12-hour work days. True to the unaffected majesty inscribed in his name, he appears to do it all with passion unalloyed with the kind of ceremony that sometimes accompanies his rank. “Too much self-importance in life is a recipe for disaster. Anyway, it’s the entrepreneurs who build everything. I just give them the money to live their dreams,” says Mirchandani.
The duality suggested by his name plays out in other aspects of his identity as well: Having begun his career at father Gulu Mirchandani’s 80s and 90s aspirational TV brand Onida Electronics, he is an established family business’ direct beneficiary who gradually struck out to pioneer the country’s angel financing ecosystem, consequently becoming an entrepreneur in his own right. Similarly, Mirchandani’s business acumen owes as much to his immediate social ethos—the Sindhis are one of the world’s largest trading communities—as to his cosmopolitan life, first as a college student at Strayer University in the US and later as a professional travelling across the world.
Much like most astute businessmen, Mirchandani uses these binate influences to his advantage; a case in point: restaurant reservations are made under his last name in India and first name abroad, sparing many a host from a night-long struggle with syllables.
An Angel Is Born
In 1996, US-returned Mirchandani joined Onida Group, his father and uncle’s company, as an ordinary salesman in the Mumbai branch, selling television sets and washing machines to various local electronics stores as he went head to head with competing salesmen. In stark contrast, most of his peers had returned to India after graduating overseas to join their large family businesses at senior positions, such as directors and CEOs.
“I thought it’d be the same for me but dad had different plans. He wanted me to go through the grind,” says Mirchandani, recounting his early experiences of riding the infamously jam-packed local trains in Mumbai and learning to acquiesce to the hustle involved. Accustomed to the gentile manners of the moneyed class in Washington, D.C., he claims to have spent the next few years at Onida as an ordinary employee with limited resources, working to climb up to more managerial posts and appreciating the struggle involved. “If I hadn’t seen such a life first-hand, I could never empathise and respect what people working for me bring to the table. I wish more parents would put their kids in lower positions for years of training rather than just making them the boss from day one,” he says.
It was over a coffee with his father in 2001—after some five years of working in the family business and observing India’s entrepreneurial ecosystem—that Mirchandani first expressed his dissatisfaction with the unavailability of capital for businesspersons in the country. “My father, who graduated from BITS Pilani in the 60s, had taken a great risk to start a business from scratch at a time of no external funding—venture capital or private equity. Twenty years later, the situation hadn’t changed,” he explains as he recounts convincing Gulu Mirchandani and another board member at Onida to invest some of the company’s money into a venture run by young graduates from IIM Ahmedabad. “Dad, it’s 2001; we’ve got to support entrepreneurs,” he had said then. Mirchandani with parents Geeta and Gulu Mirchandani and other family members
Between 2002 and 2005, the Mirchandanis made several more investments under a new entity wherein the father acted as the limited partner (LP) providing capital and the son acted as the general partner (GP) managing funds. Angel investing is a risky business, much riskier than lending money. Naturally, it wasn’t easy to get onboard the family patriarch, one who had made his […]
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