Former Princeton roommates Randolph Altschuler '93 and Sumir Chadha '93, who each founded multi-million dollar companies by exploiting India's undeveloped potential, shared their secrets to business success in a panel discussion in the Friend Center yesterday afternoon.
The talk, sponsored by the Princeton-Jumpstart Lecture Series on Technology Entrepreneurship and hosted by electrical engineering professor Ed Zschau '61, focused on entrepreneurship, particularly in India — where Chadha said "every sector is booming."
Altschuler and Chadha represent two sides of the same coin in the world of entrepreneurship: Altschuler created a business, while Chadha provides the funding for startups like Altschuler's.
Altschuler, who started his company Office Tiger in 2000, sought to "use labor arbitrage and outsource work to Indians."
"Watching as banks moved back offices to less expensive locations," in Manhattan or New Jersey, Altschuler wondered, "why not move the back office all the way to India?"
Altschuler and classmates Joseph Sigelman '93 and Ravi Srinivasan '93 left prestigious Fortune 500 firms to try out their experiment: a company that performs professional services like data entry and accounting for leading banks. "We really just started from scratch ... we didn't know anyone in India," Altschuler said.
As they developed their business plan, the three classmates began searching for the millions they would need to get their brainchild off the ground.
When Altschuler first told Chadha about the plan for Office Tiger, Chadha, then working for Goldman Sachs, told him that it was a decidedly "terrible idea."
Today, Chadha has not only followed Altschuler into Indian entrepreneurship, but he has invested in Office Tiger.
After leaving Goldman Sachs in 2000, Chadha founded WestBridge Capital Partners, intending to create the "first cross-border fund ... [with] operations that are India-centric but [has] most of the customers in the US," he said. Taking advantage of the technology boom, he raised $140 million for his firm before the bubble burst at the end of 2000. Goldman Sachs, his former employer, was the first investor.
Since 2000, Chadha had made a series of unique business decisions, such as avoiding investment in the Internet and focusing on outsourcing as opposed to on software.
Earlier this year, his firm merged with Sequoia Capital to create Sequoia Capital India, for which he currently serves as Senior Managing Director. Current investments include India's largest coffee chain — "the Starbucks of India, if you will," he said — along with India's first Internet search engine.
Altschuler and Chadha both discussed the importance of Princeton in their personal and business lives. Altschuler, who met his wife and his two original business partners at Princeton, named Office Tiger after the University's mascot and refers to the employees of his firm as "Tigers."
He proudly displays the company's orange and black logo, though he admits that the colors have seemed a little odd to clients.
Both Princeton and its alumni have also provided significant financial backing to Altschuler and Chadha.
Some of the original financing for Office Tiger came from the Bill Weaver '34 and Tom Tarantino '69, and Chadha's last fund boasted the "Princeton endowment [as the] largest and most important investor."
As Altschuler said, "Princeton people stick together."
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