CEO CHEF DE CUISINE

Cvent CEO Reggie Aggarwal is a certified phoenix who has brilliantly risen from the ashes of failure. He tells us his story to never back down… Rajeev or Reggie Aggarwal’s life is worthy of being made into a movie by a film director like Mira Nair who likes to dabble with different subjects and stories. But it’s not going to be a too good-to-be true tale full of Bollywood masala. It’s a story of patience, passion and perseverance and a well-deserved victory. His parents immigrated to the US in 1965. His father went to Kansas State University for a Master’s in Mechanical Engineering followed by a job at the Department of Commerce. His mother, a Masters in Sitar, became an executive with the US Government after moving to the States. Reggie has two siblings — a sister called Manjula; she worked at Cvent for 15 years as Senior Vice President, Client Services — and his brother Sanjeev is a cancer specialist. While still young, his family moved around a lot and lived in seven to eight different cities before settling down in Alexandria, Virginia, where his parents still continue to live. Growing up in the US was initially difficult for the family. “My father came to the US with very little money and went for his Masters. To make ends meet, my father worked at a fast food restaurant and my mother cleaned houses and sold Avon door to door. It was tough living during our first decade in America. But once my family adjusted they got more professional careers and ended up working for the US government,” says Aggarwal. The Aggarwal household was a middle-class environment that gave all three siblings a happy childhood despite the struggle. From the beginning, their father was involved with them and ensured they played a lot of sport including basketball and soccer. Since Reggie was slightly shy as a kid, he challenged that through debating; it instilled confidence in him and enabled him to truly enjoy academics. It also gave him the self-assurance to become the student body president. That’s also the time he started to develop leadership skills. “I became comfortable with who I was. As I grew older and went to college, I began to embrace being Indian and began to understand the Indian culture. It came full circle when I graduated from law school and became president of the Indian American Bar association, met my wife at the network of South Asian professionals and started the Indian CEO Technology Council. I fully embraced my Indian heritage and maybe went overboard,” he recalls. It seems like he was born with an entrepreneurial streak. He learnt how to cook at the age of seven and started engaging in small businesses from removing snow, lawn mowing to painting when he was all of 14. “I was always entrepreneurial,” he says. During college breaks while all other students headed for internships, he would run businesses with his friends. As a Finance major from the University of Virginia,

India’s greatest showman – Subhash Ghai and his daughter Meghna Ghai Puri speak to us about jointly running the film school – Whistling Woods International, the unique father-daughter bond, the Indian movie industry and how the senior Ghai still breathes films, like no other… Even though it has been 40 years since Subhash Ghai stepped into the big, competitive and fabulous realm of Hindi films, the memory of his tinsel-town blockbusters is still very fresh in our minds. Whether it was the rebirth theme in Karz, the serious goofiness of Jackie Shroff, Anil Kapoor and Naseeruddin Shah under the strict tutelage of the legendary Dilip Kumar in Karma, the budding romance between Mahima Chaudhary and Shah Rukh Khan in Pardes or the undying love portrayed by Akshaye Khanna in the unforgettable Aishwarya Rai-starrer Taal – Ghai’s movies were a mix of everything that an audience ever wanted. There was a solid central theme, strong characters with distinct personalities, music that continues to occupy air space on radio stations even now and lots of adventure, fun and life. The reason Ghai was able to give us such cinematic gems is because he started honing his skills to become a complete filmmaker from an early age. “I was always more attracted to dance, drama, and music than textbooks. I never missed a chance to participate in extra-curricular activities in school. Once, I even bunked a class with friends to watch Ten Commandments,” he says. His mother, a teacher also greatly contributed in making him the man he is. She had a habit of making him read and summarising moral stories from The Ramayana and The Mahabharata. She introduced him to mythologies that fascinated him as a child. He used to love watching the ever-popular drama Ramlila at Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan. During his days at Vaish College, Rohtak, he optimised every opportunity to broaden his horizons as a playwright, actor and what not. He started singing and acting and was crowned the undisputed “hero of Punjab University!” By doing so, Ghai was trying to kill two birds with one stone. On the one hand, Ghai was regaling everybody with his histrionics and zest for drama. On the other, he was silently putting all his energy into creativity, turning every failure to his advantage. He even received a gold medal in dramatics at college. Armed with such a passion for drama, Ghai like the happy, heroic protagonists of his movies used any hardships that came his way to create value via the medium of acting, humour and song. His parents decided to separate when he was 12. But there’s not an iota of self-pity about the incident in him. Speaking about it, Ghai says, while growing up, he got a chance to experience a unique childhood and spent time with different families with a different set of values, views about life, rules, and regulations. “If I grew up in one family, I would have been a reflection of my parents! However, my whole upbringing

Challenging conventional thinking has been our north star In 2009, when Anand Mahindra acquired the scam-hit Satyam Computer Services — the IT major whose founder B Ramalinga Raju had cooked its books to the tune of $1 billion — he handed over the momentous task of bringing the company back from the dead to CP Gurnani, then heading the international operations at Tech Mahindra. Within a year-and-half, the company that most industry pundits predicted would not survive, now christened Mahindra Satyam, was back on track. In the next several quarters, it reported a ten-fold increase in its year-on-year profits. Gurnani had taken the bull by its horn, turning around the crisis-hit company into an opportunity. He had then said, “We knew that as Tech Mahindra, we were hugely into the communications space and we wanted to saddle the ICT (information and communications technology) industry. We had to find some kind of a game changer and Satyam was an opportunity.” Satyam brought with it customers in the banking, healthcare and retail industries. In 2013, Mahindra Satyam merged with Tech Mahindra, and it is today the fifth- largest IT services company in India with $4.05 billion in revenue and $477 million in net profit (March 2016), and over 100,000 employees. Gurnani, the CEO and managing director of Tech Mahindra and chairman of Nasscom, is today the poster boy of the Indian technology industry, known for his outstanding leadership abilities, be it transforming businesses, developing international business, handling mergers and acquisitions, or nurturing start- ups and responding to disruption. Most of all, he stands out as a people’s manager, who always leads by example and tends to focus on people’s strengths to bring out the best in them. His leadership style encourages entrepreneurship and empowerment, rewards and recognition, open communication, and transparency. In an interview with Amit Ranjan Rai, Gurnani speaks on his priorities for Tech Mahindra and how he plans to keep it ahead of the game in this age of disruption. You started your career as a chemical engineer, you have not done an MBA, and yet today you are leading one of India’s top IT companies and are responsible for one of the biggest turnarounds in corporate history. How do you see this journey of your life? What do you think have been the defining or key moments/decisions shaping this journey? My childhood was fairly nomadic as my father was in a transferable job. This required me to change schools and places in every few years. Strangely, living out of suitcases and sleeping on beds made of trunks didn’t seem odd actually! While that meant fewer friends forever (this was pre-social media… social and media had different meanings), that also meant that we learnt to fend for ourselves and survive swiftly in any given situation. During my days as an engineering student at REC Rourkela, I got to experience cultures and explore multiple opportunities, be it through Rotaract or through campus programmes, and experiment with several new ideas. And that

Ananth Narayanan came to Myntra with little experience of fashion but he is well on his way to making the online retailer a force to reckon with. In 2015, when Flipkart hired Ananth Narayanan, then a 38-year-old director from McKinsey, to run its newly-acquired fashion retailer Myntra, the young CEO set up a herculean task for himself: To make Myntra India’s  first profitable large e-commerce company. At a time when the top e-commerce companies in India, be it Amazon, Flipkart, or Snapdeal were bleeding, such a proposition sounded quite far-fetched. Discounts to lure customers and keep sales volumes high were piling up losses for most e-commerce players. Myntra wasn’t an exception. A little over 2 years later, Narayanan’s mission, while not achieved yet, looks well on track. In August 2017, the company declared its private label business, called Myntra Fashion Brands (MFB), profitable. MFB makes for 23% of the company’s business. Myntra now expects to turn EBITDA pro table soon, perhaps in a month or two. “We are ahead of target in turning EBITDA positive and will announce that soon,” says Narayanan. How did Myntra’s young CEO manage to get his company on track? He certainly got his initial priorities right — to cut costs, streamline processes, and shift the focus on higher-margin businesses. Through careful inventory management, Narayanan was able to cut discounts and supply chain costs by a few percentage points. While discounts were slashed on popular products that customers were willing to pay full price or near full price, supply chain costs were brought down by increased use of technology and economies of scale. A big boost to profitability came from Narayanan’s drive to reinvigorate the private labels business. The company owns 13 in-house brands, or MFB, whose margins are higher than those of third-party brands. In the past, these brands contributed a decent 14% to the platform, but weren’t scaling up. Narayanan felt their potential was not fully tapped and there was room for growth. “One reason they weren’t growing was lack of importance. The moment you declare them important, people pay attention to them. Shining a light on MFB was one big reason it started growing. Second, we genuinely improved the products,” he says. MFB is today a profitable business and the company expects to grow it to about 30% of sales in the days to come. The strategies Narayan implemented at Myntra have been geared to the rapidly growing e-commerce market. “My initial objective was to build upon the strengths and offer greater value, which I knew would help us have a large set of repeat customers, along with a steady focus on acquiring new customers. I focused on improving unit economics, improving the NPS and bringing more brands, which has helped us on our journey to becoming the first profitable e-commerce company in India,” he says. How does Myntra position itself in the larger fashion space, a burgeoning market expected to grow manifold in the coming decade? “From a macro perspective, brands are