Late 80sThe family business finds its feet. His grandfather died two months before he was born, leaving a father of about twenty-one and an uncle to carry seven siblings, five of them daughters to be married off. Hand-me-downs, and a car the boy loved that was gone one morning to cover a loss. By the end of the decade the stockbroking arm was established. In the era he describes, income tax could reach 97%, so traders chased volume.
1991The economy opens. A good decade follows for the business, and it is still pre-computer work: share transfer forms signed at home until dawn, cash counted at home and carried to the exchange because much of the money never went through the banking system. He sets that against a demat account you can open in thirty minutes, settling T+1.
2008The best year of his working life. A five-year national rollout with Suez had built the outfit into fifteen offices selling fixed-price power hedges into a Texas market where prices were climbing 20 to 25 percent a year. Damani took about 160 flights, one every two days, and spent one day at the airport from nine in the morning to a ten at night departure on back-to-back calls.
2009Suez stops selling, so he buys the company. The choice was shut down or go bankrupt. Damani and two friends put their savings in and bought it, then had a week with four dollars in the account against a seven-thousand-dollar rent cheque already written and the credit cards maxed out. The same year in Texas: beer on Monday, company documents Tuesday, a $150,000 bank credit line on Wednesday, in the middle of a financial meltdown.
2009-10The stack he would later miss. They ran Microsoft Dynamics from 2009, custom built for fifty thousand dollars, and had a CRM by 2010 tracking five hundred salespeople closely enough to read who was on a hot streak and who was gaming the system. The call-handling software of those years is what he recognised later in Exotel.
2012-13A clean exit at thirty. Three years of turnaround done, twelve years in the US behind him, and two partners five to ten years older who wanted no more risk. He had been coming to India from 2011 for renewable-energy consulting, into a country where you submit six proposed company names to an official you never meet: Vishal waited six months for one. The MCA portal sat dead for six to eight months while the contract changed hands.
2016-19OYO rewires who takes startups seriously. Damani was part of the OYO exit, the largest in the history of Indian angel investing. By 2019, he says, the one company was worth more than every listed Indian hotel business combined, about ₹66,000 crore. In 2009 an editor had spiked a story about a startup; now industrialists praise them on Twitter. The money that followed would back any eighteen-year-old with an idea, and the write-offs run from 2016 onward.
2021The party runs late. The IPOs at the end of the year made it look as though the funding could keep going, and companies took too much money too quickly. He describes one that went from twenty people to twelve thousand in a quarter. Several ended up in regulatory or legal trouble.
TodayThe fix is boring and weekly. Artha asks its companies for numbers every week, and a new analyst spends 18 months with portfolio founders who do not need his money before he is trusted near a cheque. A founder who will not report is a pilot flying a dark cockpit with a stick, and the correction is as small as reading your trial balance every Friday. Venture funds back under one percent of businesses and manage under one percent of capital.
