New Delhi: Alok Sama’s life, in his own words, is mostly a series of fortunate accidents.
After a decade in investment banking, Sama found himself at Pacha, a popular nightclub on the Spanish island of Ibiza with a group of friends. David Guetta was playing that night, but the famous DJ was yet to take the stage at 1 am. A friend surreptitiously slipped him a pill to stem the tide of boredom—which led to a night of intense dancing and ended with a potential job offer at Japanese telecom giant SoftBank.
The incident had such an impact on Sama that he even toyed with calling his book, ‘I Took a Pill in Ibiza’, after the title of American singer Mike Posner’s hit song. He finally settled on The Money Trap: Grand Fortunes and Lost Illusions Inside the Tech Bubble.
At The Quorum, a glitzy private member’s club in Gurugram, Sama pulled back the curtain on the opaque world of high finance in conversation with Sanjeev Bikhchandani, the founder of Naukri.com.
He was promoting his novel to a packed audience wearing blazers, buttoned-up shirts, brown oxfords and cocktail dresses. Glasses of champagne and white wine floated around the room as the two old friends took the stage for a candid conversation about Sama’s meteoric rise.
With him on the Ibiza trip was his friend Nikesh Arora, who at the time was the president of SoftBank. Arora offered Sama the job of chief financial officer, a position that involved investing hundreds of millions of dollars into Indian startups such as Ola Cabs and OYO Rooms.
“Alok was a dude in school. He had this fantastic hairstyle – which he has referred to twice in the book,” said Bikhchandani, who was with Sama throughout his school and college years. “There were several dudes in school, but Alok was the only one who was a topper. He got 90 per cent in class 12, when there was no grade inflation.”
Sama graduated from the prestigious St. Stephens College in New Delhi and broke the academic record, which stood for the next two and a half decades. He was also one of the first people to get into Wharton Business School from India without any work experience. He “stumbled into the world of finance” with a job at Morgan Stanley, one of the top US investment banks.
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A house next to JK Rowling
The 1980s were a different period on Wall Street.
“Nobody asked you how to pronounce your name. They just mispronounced it,” said Sama. There was pressure, he said, to assimilate, look like them, dress like them.
“I joined Morgan Stanley—which at the time was a completely Waspy [white male Anglo-Saxon protestants] firm—where an Indian partner took a liking to me and gave me my first leg up,” said Sama, highlighting how his career trajectory was serendipitous.
By all accounts, Sama did well for himself at Morgan Stanley. He even bought a house next to author JK Rowling in Kensington, London.
“She bought it first,” Sama said, after confirming with his wife Maya, who was sitting in the audience.
A restructuring at the bank resulted in Sama spending some time in the “financial wilderness”, where he set up a Dubai-based investment fund. It was around this time his friend Nikesh Arora offered him the role of CFO at Softbank.
“Masa was crazy in a very smart way,” said Sama, referring to Masayoshi Son, the legendary Softbank founder and CEO. “At times there was almost an element of posturing. When you have a monumental amount of money to get behind a company, people think you’re crazy.”
Masa and Softbank made headlines in 2017 when they raised a $100 billion Vision Fund for investments in technology startups.
“Who wants to face off against a guy with an unlimited amount of capital?” Sama rhetorically poses a question to the audience. He went on to explain the implications of a large financial war chest.
“When we invested in Ola Taxi, there was one competitor called Taxi For Sure. They were both bleeding money, starting up new. Once we got behind Ola, literally in two weeks Taxi For Sure came to us and said they are up for sale.”
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The money trap
There is also the “curse of too much money”, an idea that strongly resonates with Sama —hence the title of the book. He holds this both as a personal and investment philosophy.
Sama took the example of Ritesh Agarwal, founder of OYO Rooms, who originally had a “capital-light business model” but raised too much money and started expanding in foreign markets that were vastly different to India.
“It’s a classic case study on how having too much money isn’t a good thing,” Sama warned the audience, many of whom were start-up founders and venture capital analysts looking for pearls of wisdom.
Hands shot up in the air when Sama opened the floor to questions from the audience.
“Why did you write the book?” asked Bikhchandani, taking advantage as moderator to get the first question in.
“I don’t read non-fiction books, I find them excruciatingly boring,” replied Sama. He then revealed that his book was the thesis for his Master of Fine Arts degree at New York University. “I experimented with different things and found a way to write this book as a story, it reads—hopefully—like a novel.”
One audience member—an owner of a bookstore in New Delhi—asked Sama about how he looks at life after writing a memoir.
“That’s a really good question. I keep getting emails and letters from people who have read the book—a disproportionate amount from India—and that changes the way you interact and communicate with people.”
It was a question right at the end, before the discussion broke up that brought the conversation full circle.
“How has your equation with money changed over the last 20 years?” asked a young, bespectacled college student.
Sama took this as an opportunity to promote his book, referring the audience to the subtle messages littered throughout his novel.
“Money doesn’t buy you control, it buys you a nice coat,” said Sama with a smirk.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)
Sama, Bikhchandani, Arora and others are from elite families of Delhi/Noida/Gurgaon. They study in fancy schools (usually IB curriculum) and are able to get into colleges like St. Stephen’s because of their connections and social capital. The same connections and social capital lead them onwards to Wharton Business School and other such prestigious institutions.
Their lives are an example of how being born into privilege, in rich and well connected families makes a person’s life smooth.