Who is “Pankaj Jain” besides being the founder of Invest Stream and Founder Craft What came before?
If you’ve followed my erratic writing over the years, you might have some idea. I’ve been a risk manager at the largest hedge fund in the world, Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), operator, product manager, entrepreneur, community builder at BarCamp Delhi, co-founder of HeadStart Network Foundation and Startup Weekend India.
My friend and former colleague, Ritesh Bansal, suggested interviewing me on the show to bring out more about who I am and what my journey has been. Naturally, I couldn’t refuse an invitation to be on my own show. Get ready for a frank and open discussion between an old friend and I. This is going to be Ritesh’s first time being visible on any social media channel, so please be gentle with him. It’s an #AMA so feel free to ask me anything.
I’m looking forward to seeing you for the AMA-style chat on July 28th, 2020 at 9:30am PDT / 12:30pm EDT and 10:00pm IST. If you’d like to RSVP and have a calendar invite, click the button. Otherwise, head over to YouTube with your questions.
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After landing in India, I realized the bureaucracy was going to make it really difficult to get started. I won’t bore you with the details but it took me eight months from the day I landed in India to having all of the required papers in place in order to setup a Private Limited company (or corporation). I’m sure the process is much easier today to set up a company but it is definitely not easy to shutdown a company in India.
The view from my balcony
Once I got the company registered, I started looking to hire a few people. I used headhunters, job boards, and, of course, asking people I had been meeting in Delhi. I tried pretty much everything under the sun that I could think of. I hired two interns, one of which was the younger brother of another founder I had met. A few weeks went by and I hired my first full-time hire.
To be honest, though my long-term vision for a reverse auction platform serving the labor force in India was something clear, I had no idea what the magnitude of the problem was and the kind of people I needed to hire. I thought I needed developers so that’s what I tried to hire before anything else.
I interviewed anyone that was desperate enough to to work at a startup (in 2007 working at a startup was definitely not where the cool kids were). Finally, I found another developer who was a Microsoft dev and didn’t quite have the technical background in LAMP technologies. I made a bunch of mistakes in the interview. I should have asked more in-depth technical questions but, instead, I was satisfied with theoretical answers to my questions. I wound up letting this developer go on their first day, partly because of my own mistakes in interviewing and hiring and, in part, because the developer only had theoretical knowledge and wouldn’t be able to contribute to building the product for a long time.
A few months later (probably around April 2008), I was out of town for a funeral. The two interns were working on an important piece of the project. Unexpectedly, I got an email that they were both quitting. Together. Effective immediately.
Most interns didn’t get paid in India back then. I was paying them from day one and relative to what other recent college graduates were getting paid, these college students were getting paid very well. Needless to say, I was furious and shocked at the lack of professionalism by these two interns. They quit right in the middle of an important deadline with an email while I was out of town. I have the email they sent me and my response. Perhaps I will redact some of the emails and share them.
At this stage, I was completely and utterly dejected. I had no idea what I was doing. I was beaten down and there wasn’t a day that went by where I didn’t want to throw in the towel and head back home, to New York City.
I Kinda felt like this truck…or what was left of it.
I still had enough money left to continue bootstrapping this small company, so I continued to push ahead (completely uncertain in which direction I was actually going). The same acquaintance whose younger brother bailed on me was working out of small incubator in Okhla, Delhi. I went to check it out and see if I can get some space. I moved in with my sole developer. I was more confused than ever about how to build out a team that could build the product I needed. I dusted off the cobwebs and started teaching myself PHP while looking for a designer to join us. Eventually, I found a designer and hired him. He wasn’t too thrilled about using Gimp instead of Photoshop but I wanted to see what he could do before spending the money for a product no one else knew how to use. I never really got the chance to find out. After multiple absences during his first week of work (on one instance, his mother called to tell me he wasn’t feeling well), I had to fire him as well.
I’m a little hazy on the time lines now but somewhere around the middle of 2008, I got involved with organizing BarCamp Delhi and that eventually led me to co-founding the HeadStart Network and launching Startup Saturday Delhi. My initial reason for getting involved was to broaden my network and find good people to hire. Also, around this time, I met two people from IAN (Indian Angel Network). They both wanted me to come and pitch IAN but I wasn’t ready to raise money. I viewed raising money from outsiders as something I should do only after I figure out the basics of building this business.
I can’t find any screenshots but we did a soft launch of Semblr in August of 2009. It was a rough and rocky road getting there but we got there. Building a two sided market was much harder than I thought. I quickly found that not having background checks in India was going to be a problem and scaling the process of doing “police verifications” across the city was going to cost a lot of money.
By December, I was almost out of money and I decided to start doing some services to generate a little cash to pay my employees (I had hired a few folks again). That didn’t work out so well. Our first client didn’t pay me for the work we did and instead, hired away my employee that was working with them.
That was pretty much the end of Teknatus Solutions. More or less, that day, I decided to shut it down. I told my last employee (also my first full-time hire) that I would help him find another job but I was done. He was the last person to walk out of the office and turn off the lights. I still try to see him whenever I’m in the same city.
Running a startup in India was an incredibly difficult and it forced me to reexamine a lot of what I had learned about doing business and running operations over the previous 10-15 years. It was more importantly, extremely adventurous, exciting, and educational experience. I wouldn’t trade it in for anything. I learned a lot more about doing business in India than I ever would have in a MBA program or at a job. The experiences gave me a lot to digest and learn about myself which I may not have had the chance to learn had I not taken the leap. The opportunity for introspection that “failing” in a startup gave me has been invaluable but most of all, the people I met and the relationships I built over the last twelve years is something I will always cherish.
March 11th 2019 marked the twelfth anniversary of the day I landed in New Delhi with my family with the intention of starting a company. It was a complicated, difficult, enlightening, fun journey and I thought it would be nice to share some details of how I decided to move to India, the challenges I faced, the failures I dealt with and all of the different adventures I had over the last twelve years.
I had been pretty lucky having gotten a job at JP Morgan & Co right out of college and two years later, landing a highly coveted job at Long-Term Capital Management which then turned into being one of the founding employees at GlobeOp Financial Services (a fintech startup that wasn’t called that in 1999, which went public in 2007 and was eventually acquired by SS&C in 2007).
After leaving GlobeOp in late 2004, a friend of mine from high school and I started working on our first tech startup. It was a social network before social networks or social media became a thing. My friend and I both weren’t developers but we started coding away furiously in Perl to get the first version of the application out the door. Unfortunately, we never actually launched the network. With LinkedIn and Facebook gaining ground rapidly, we really weren’t sure how just the two of us could keep up. We both wound up getting new jobs but continued working on this idea at nights and on weekends.
Trust me, this is incredibly embarrassing ( a la Reid Hoffman) but here are some screens circa 2005:
I think we finally stopped all further development of the project around the end of 2005 but we open sourced all of the code. While working on this project, I developed an insatiable appetite for all things tech entrepreneurship. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much happening in NYC in 2005. I became an avid listener of Podcasts in 2005 and 2006 (specifically tech podcasts like John Furrier’s PodTech.net and Greg Gallant’s Venture Voice). Between TechCrunch and these podcasts, I had the entrepreneurial itch – again. I just needed to figure out how to scratch that itch.
I began thinking of my problem. I loved listening to podcasts about tech entrepreneurship. However, this was before Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify, Google Podcasts, etc. The only way to find podcasts was using Google. Unfortunately, Google didn’t index and make audio very searchable.
The Problem: Podcasts are hard to find
The Solution: Offer podcasters a service which will transcribe their podcasts for them and allow them to post the text on their blog/website with the podcast audio in an RSS feed.
I left the job I was at in middle of 2006 and started working on learning about the transcription industry. I found out that medical transcription was a huge business and a lot of it was run out of India. I started investigating and talking to companies that ran transcription businesses as well as offshore “development” shops that I could work with to build out an MVP for a marketplace. The solution above would be a reverse auction platform where podcasters can specify the length of their audio and put out an amount they would be ready to pay to have that transcribed. Transcribers in India, the Philippines and other places would be notified of these projects and could come in and bid on them. Payment would be helped in escrow by us and upon completion of a project, payment would be released to the transcriber and of course, both sides could rate the other (much like eLance, upwork, etc.)
As I started talking to these offshore development shops, I began realizing that most of them were a couple of friends moonlighting. I tried out a couple of them with very small work and was thoroughly annoyed but not surprised when things weren’t done. Notice, I never said I spoke to any actual podcasters.
I decided to take a trip to India in late 2006 and meet some dev shops in person as well as attend some conferences. The first entrepreneur in India I met was Amit Ranjan, author of Webyantra and co-founder of Uzanto (which eventually became Slideshare). I went to TieCon Delhi and a few other conferences but one thing really stuck out while I was in India. Every one of my relatives kept complaining about how they couldn’t find domestic help – a nanny, a cleaning person, a cook, a chauffeur, etc. I didn’t really know anyone in India other than relatives but as I was meeting people I started asking more questions about domestic help. I started seeing a pattern. It’s hard to find good help. It’s hard to retain help. It’s a word of mouth business, e.g. your cousin can ask their driver if he knows of a good driver and he will send someone to you (of course, your cousin’s driver will get a cut for helping him get a job).
It’s hard to find digital pictures from the pre-iPhone/smartphone days
I thought, this whole situation really could lend itself to a reverse auction platform so instead of focusing on transcribing podcasts, why not create impact by helping people to get jobs. With this idea and this alone, I convinced my wife that we should move to India and I should start a business to do exactly this.
Not many individuals other than some of the partners from Long-Term Capital Management have spoken or written anything public about their experience. I happened to be up in Greenwich, Ct a couple of days ago to meet with one of the partners from LTCM and I realized that it’s almost 20 years since I started working there.
This isn’t a story of what happened at LTCM. This is a reflection on how I arrived at LTCM 20 years ago, some of what I did while I was there, and what I learned.
The Liar’s Poker Influence
Upon graduating from NYU, there were only a few things most students from Stern did. We went to Wall Street, Madison Ave., or, at the time, the Big Six consulting firms. I chose Wall Street, primarily, because I read the book Liar’s Poker as a Sophomore in high school and was completely convinced I wanted to be a mortgage trader when I grew up.
Plans changed by the end of college. Kind of. While I was in college, I was lucky enough to get an unpaid internship at Merrill Lynch. I picked up writing Excel macros and working with Microsoft Access 1.0. That was my first real experience working with technology and I loved it. I decided to do a double major in Finance and Information Systems.
At the end of my junior year, a friend of mine, Anil, shared my resume with a recruiter at JP Morgan & Co. I got the paid internship. After the internship was over, my boss, Paul, asked me if I’d consider joining after graduating. I was ecstatic and agreed.
Job Hunting
Fast forward a few years and I decided it was time to move on from JP Morgan. I had interviewed at a few places before getting called into LTCM. Once the interview was over, I immediately decided that I wasn’t going to interview anywhere else. Working at LTCM would mean an opportunity to work with John Meriwether (someone I first read about in Liar’s Poker six or seven years prior) and some of the smartest people in finance. That’s where I wanted to be. If you’re in tech, it was the equivalent of getting a job at Google, Uber, 500 Startups, Facebook or Twitter when there were less than 50 employees.
Weeks went by and I hadn’t heard a thing. Weeks turned into over a month. I was sure that I didn’t get the job and it was probably time to start looking elsewhere. Before I started sending out my resume, I got a call. LTCM wanted to see me again. I was very surprised that when they told me I was being considered for an analyst position in the US fixed income risk management group. It was a Friday afternoon and I got a call giving with a verbal offer. A written offer would be faxed over to me shortly. I had to make a decision by the end of the day.
Here I was, twenty-two years old, excited but also scared about going to work for this company that no one had ever heard of. This up-start in finance. This startup. I laid out the pros and cons to my dad and he said to me, “I don’t know anything about your line of work. I’ve heard of and know what JP Morgan is but I can’t tell you what you should or shouldn’t do. You need to trust yourself and decide what you think is right.” I made a decision to take the job. After having been at JP Morgan for two years, Monday morning I handed in my resignation to my boss, Jack (who had been a lifer at JP Morgan).
Long-Term Capital Management
Two weeks later on June 10th, 1996 I started working at Long-Term Capital Management. I was now the youngest employee at the firm, much to Howard’s chagrin. Up until I came onboard, Howard had been the youngest employee at the firm. Being at LTCM was an incredible experience. It turned out to be a lot more than what I had expected. In good and bad ways. A few months after I had started working at LTCM, during the summer of 1996, I suggested to my boss, Lawrence, that we should consider evaluating technologies like the Netscape browser and a web server to build an Intranet. Back in 1996, not many knew what an Intranet or the Internet were. The few that did, mainly used it for email, Yahoo and a few other things. My boss was pretty excited at the prospect of bringing new consumer technologies into the firm. He spoke to two of the partners, Greg Hawkins and Eric Rosenfeld. Greg asked me some detailed questions about my suggestion. At the end of the conversation, he told me to get a prototype ready in a month. I was perplexed. I knew nothing about setting up and creating content for an Intranet. I just knew how to use Netscape (Thanks Marc)!
After work, I hit a few bookstores and tried to figure out whatever I could about  Intranets, HTML and CGI apps. Roughly a month later, with the help of our SysAdmin, Avi, we had the Netscape Suitespot web server in production, hosting all of our US fixed income risk reports. That set off a push over the next 18 months and the little proposal to create and Intranet turned into a team of people dubbed the “ATI” or “Advanced Technology Initiative” building a platform for all reporting and some applications being moved to the browser or Java.
LTCM office in Japan
In early 1998 I moved out of the fixed income research group and ATI into the “systems” group. Here, I took on more of an infrastructure role. My job would morph again to focus almost exclusively on data over the coming months. I had just been given a project that would essentially rip out the whole market data infrastructure of LTCM and replace it with a new PC product from Reuters called Kobra. Essentially, everything affecting trading, research, risk and operations that required prices for various securities would need to be replaced. Every Applix Spreadsheet macro, every Perl script and module, every C library, every MarketVision screen would need to be re-written by December 31st 1998 – the last date the existing MarketVision infrastructure would operate. Then August 1998 rolled around and Russia defaulted and all hell broke loose in every corner of global capital markets.
The Collapse
By September, an offer from Warren Buffet to buy the assets of LTCM had come and gone. The hemorrhaging continued unabated. I kept working on replacing the market data infrastructure, unsure if there would be a need for the infrastructure at the end of it all. The partners took steps to ensure that all of the employees would not need to worry about our salaries. All we needed to worry about was sticking together and getting thru this. Within a few weeks, fourteen of the largest banks on the Street bailed out LTCM. Tough decisions were made by the “Oversight Committee” which was comprised of representatives from each of the fourteen banks. LTCM was scaled back considerably but by December 31st, thanks to everyone pulling together, we had a new market data infrastructure running on Reuters Triarch and Kobra.
LTCM Tokyo Trading Floor
The Aftermath
All of us were in maintenance mode at LTCM for about a year. We were kept around by the OC to keep the place running and fix problems if they occurred.
My friend Ritesh and I caught the startup bug and began working on plans for world domination. I don’t remember what the idea was but we made a trip to Boston to meet with Perot Systems. It didn’t work out but I had my first taste of a tech startup. Looking back, it was convenient that in October 1999, I got laid off from Long-Term Capital Management. It bothered me. A lot. Fortunately, though before the end of the year, I was back to working with Hans, Tom, Ira, Jim, Ritesh, Peter, Nandini, Marek, Rob, Claudette, Kin, Graham and many others on GlobeOp Financial Services.
I frequently tell people that I’ve been very lucky and fortunate in my life. My time and experience at Long-Term Capital Management has a lot to do with it. I was privileged to work with some of the best and brightest in the industry and lucky to learn some very important values very early on in my career at LTCM – humility, integrity and most importantly loyalty.
As I continue working on 500 Kulfi, I hope to build something that embodies these values as well as our core values at 500 Startups with Dave, Christine, Bedy, Khailee, Soaib, Shalini and everyone else in the #500STRONG family.
Up until I came onboard, Howard had been the youngest employee at the firm. Being at LTCM was an incredible experience. It turned out to be a lot more than what I had expected. In good and bad ways. A few months after I had started working at LTCM, during the summer of 1996, I suggested to my boss, Lawrence, that we should consider evaluating technologies like the Netscape browser and a web server to build an Intranet. Back in 1996, not many knew what an Intranet or the Internet were. The few that did, mainly used it for email, Yahoo and a few other things. My boss was pretty excited at the prospect of bringing new consumer technologies into the firm. He spoke to two of the partners, Greg Hawkins and Eric Rosenfeld. Greg asked me some detailed questions about my suggestion. At the end of the conversation, he told me to get a prototype ready in a month. I was perplexed. I knew nothing about setting up and creating content for an Intranet. I just knew how to use Netscape (Thanks 
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