OUR TEAM
Our team and those of our affiliates have over fifty years of combined experience in India investing and investment research. We bring a range of professional experience in fields such as private equity, investment banking, equity research, management consulting, corporate management and business journalism to inform a far-reaching, fundamental approach to investment.
Dan Tennebaum
Managing Principal
Dr. Jon Thorn
Director, ICF
Uday Saripalli
CFO and COO
Piyush Goyal
Vice President
Saket Yadav
Vice President
Akshay Jain
Associate
Parang Trivedi
Senior Analyst
Tanisha Chandhok
Analyst
Harsh Vidhani
Analyst
Ritik Shah
Analyst
Mahesh Ambokar
Vice President, Technology
Asha Salokhe
Information Technology Analyst
Waheedali Shaikh
Manager, Administration
Our Directors
Kapil Dev Joory
Director, ICF
Nancy Orr
Director, ICM
Win Bennett
Director, ICM
Couldip Lala
Director, ICF
Ameet Parikh
Director, ICR
Christopher Brader
Director, ICM
Raju Jaddoo
Director, ICM
Sudesh Lala
Director, ICM
RESEARCH Research is the core of our investment process. It takes us to nearly every corner of India, from executive offices and government conclaves to factory floors, construction sites and agricultural cooperatives. India’s more than 3,000 publicly traded companies are not always well understood by traditional market intermediaries, nor is comprehensive data readily available from secondary sources in many cases. As a result of these inefficiencies, interactions with customers, competitors, suppliers and regulators can yield a genuinely distinctive view of a business. Comprehensive research allows us to identify opportunities that are not widely understood and construct a concentrated, high-conviction and non-consensus portfolio.
Conference
Professor Tarun Khanna
Tarun Khanna is the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at the Harvard Business School. Since 2010 he has served as the director of Harvard’s university-wide Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute. For the past decade, he has also overseen HBS activities across South Asia, anchored in Mumbai.
At HBS since 1993, after obtaining degrees from Princeton and Harvard, he has taught courses on strategy, international business and economic development to undergraduate and graduate students and senior executives.
Dan Tennebaum,
Managing Principal
Dan has over twenty years of experience in Indian business and finance, eighteen of them at India Capital. He was previously a Principal at The View Group, a venture capital firm focused on the Indo-US corridor. Prior to View, he was Vice President of business development at India Life, which was acquired by Hewitt Associates. He began his career at Bain & Company and since then has spent more than half of his professional life based in India.
Dan holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BA from Brown University. He has spoken about India at the Kennedy School of Government, the Indian School of Business and in interviews with the Indian and international financial media.
This video is taken from a “fireside chat” I recently had with Professor Tarun Khanna at Harvard’s annual India conference. Professor Khanna leads Harvard’s university-wide South Asia Institute and oversees Harvard Business School’s activities in India. Many years ago, I was his student. More than two decades later, he and I held a wide-ranging conversation about how much has changed since then.
In the intervening years, India’s capital markets have grown thirty-fold and delivered among the best long-term equity returns of any major market in the world, second only to the United States. And yet, there have been painful flameouts of some of India’s highest profile companies and institutional asset managers that have left many investors with permanent losses of capital and returns that failed to match the scale of India’s growth.
During our conversation, Professor Khanna asked me to reflect on what it takes to survive and thrive as an investor in India over time, which disciplines will be essential to generating strong returns in the future, and how the best opportunities today are often found in surprising places.
Ours was one of several sessions over two packed days at the India conference. Speakers this year included policymakers, entrepreneurs, scholars, journalists and Bollywood luminaries. The discussions, and more than a few spirited onstage debates, were a vivid reminder of the wildly disparate points of view India’s prominent thinkers hold, their enthusiasm for arguing them, and the love of country that ultimately unites them.
On a personal level, I was struck by how much the conference attendees themselves revealed about today’s India. When I was an MBA student, I had several classmates from India, but there were only three in my cohort who had worked in India (me among them) and I can’t recall many wanting to return after graduation. This year, I met students from the business school and the Kennedy School of Government who already had deep experience in India as entrepreneurs, in the civil service, and even teaching in government schools. They, and many others who have trained at top organizations overseas, are now eager to build careers back home.
The decisive reversal in the flow of India’s human talent, hungry to invest in their country and themselves, is the surest sign I know of the scope of the Indian opportunity and the energy, ambition and intellectual resources its young people are bringing to meet it.
Warmly,
Dan
PODCAST
MAY 2024
The Case For India At India Capital
Dan Tennebaum’s interview with Ted Seides on the Capital Allocators podcast.
From Ted: “Dan Tennebaum is the Managing Director at India Capital, a thirty-year-old investment firm focusing on public equities in India. Dan moved to the country twenty-five years ago and spent time in the start-up world and venture capital before pivoting to the public markets in 2007.
Our conversation covers Dan's path from a U.S. Midwesterner to India and the case for public equities. We turn to India Capital’s perspective on sourcing, research, management, regulation, valuation, portfolio construction, risk, and misperceptions, colored with some examples along the way.”
Listen to the full conversation
Listen to highlights
Our investment philosophy
Key risks and common misperceptions
Preventing permanent loss of capital
The case for Indian public equities
Investing in India Vs. China
What we're most excited about now
EXCERPTS FROM OUR MID-YEAR INVESTOR CALL
Indian Macro
Highlights
CURRENT RESEARCH
RESPONSIBLE INVESTING
The India Capital Fund has had an ethical investment policy for more than three decades that mandates, among other things, refraining from holdings in armaments, tobacco and alcohol.
We believe that approach has enhanced our focus on sectors central to India’s responsible growth and strengthened investment performance. Portfolio companies include:
Renewable Energy. One of India’s largest green energy lenders, financing 17 thousand megawatts of renewable power capacity.
Job Creation. India’s largest private sector job creator, with more than 500,000 total employees.
Financial Inclusion. Institutions serving more than 150 million newly banked households and 14 million farmers.
AWARDS
PHILANTHROPY
We and our affiliates are pleased to support a number of organizations that work to improve health and society in India and around the world.
Ajit Deshpande Medical Center
The Ajit Deshpande Medical Center serves more than 24,000 low income patients per year, providing free care in the areas of pulmonology, dermatology, dentistry and more.
The Hospital For Sick Children
The Hospital for Sick Children is recognized as one of the world’s foremost paediatric healthcare institutions and is Canada’s leading center dedicated to advancing children’s health through the integration of patient care, research and education.
In Defense of Animals India
In Defense of Animals India is a grass roots animal protection organization based in Mumbai. The organization provides medical care and adoption services for more than 10,000 stray animals per year.
