Doglapan by Ashneer Grover

Author:Ashneer Grover [Grover, Ashneer]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2022-12-10T00:00:00+00:00

10

Souring Relationships

‘Keep It at Thirty-Six Lakh’

In keeping company costs under check, the one place where I did not make any exception was to keep my own salary low. After months of unrelenting work and delivering growth, and having drawn next to nothing as salary, I wrote to Harshjit Singh at Sequoia, wanting to increase my own salary. To my proposal of increasing my salary to Rs 60 lakh per annum, I was advised to keep it at Rs 36 lakh. It was the first reality check for me that while VCs draw millions of dollars as salaries themselves, they are loath to see founders get their due. It’s absolutely perverse logic, which is driven by their own false belief that money does all the hard work and they can, therefore, treat founders as unpaid slaves.

What I did have from Sequoia, along with the closure of Series C in January 2020, was a written commitment on email to buy founder and ESOP shares in secondary of $3 million, of which $1 million were to come from Beenext and $2 million from Sequoia.

‘I have an investment committee meeting on Monday, and I will have the secondary approved—it’s just a formality,’ Harshjit promised me over a weekend. I waited until Wednesday to call Harshjit. I knew something was wrong the moment he started to speak to me in formal English. ‘There has been some issue with our investment structure, because of which we cannot commit more capital from our existing fund,’ was the vague, unconvincing excuse thrown at me. Clearly, I was being lied to—something that I don’t take lightly. After all, it was on Harshjit’s commitment on behalf of Sequoia that Teru San had bought $1 million of secondary. What bothered me besides the fact that they were going back on their commitment, was that in a round of $75 million, in which Harshjit had me push all the incoming investors on the valuation ask, Sequoia did not feel the need to participate even optically. I would rather be told that despite all my hard work his seniors hadn’t agreed to the secondary, or even that they had found the proposition risky. To be dishonest and to pass the buck to some restructuring operation, in true banker style, was demeaning to my intelligence. In hindsight, I lost faith in Harshjit and Sequoia that day. Not only did I stop taking his calls, I also told Bhavik, who was getting married around the time and for whose wedding we were all flying to Bhavnagar, that he shouldn’t expect me to engage with Harshjit during the wedding. This episode was clearly an early sign of their malicious intent.

Yes Bank Ltd Placed under Moratorium

Not deterred by this event, I was in Pune for a rather audacious task in March 2020. We needed someone experienced and driven to lead our lending operations, and I had decided to interview the most touted senior team at Bajaj Finance. Not only did this team have years of experience, they were also drawing crores in salaries and ESOPs, and had an amazing lifestyle in tony Pune.

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