2003A Reliance dealership in the eighth semester. He left NITK Surathkal in a year when entrepreneurship was not remotely sexy, having already hired staff, run out of cash and borrowed from an uncle and aunt to keep a mobile-phone dealership alive. He paid them back and took the campus placement as a backup.
2004Quits Infosys for a startup nobody had heard of. Proteans, at a time when leaving a services job for a startup was not a thing people did. Three of its four founders would later start LeadSquared.
2012Writes a cheque into LeadSquared's first round. Part of the money came from a Mysore flat bought at 24 and sold seven years later for four times the price. By then he was in New York on Citigroup, Bank of America and Bloomberg salaries, with a BMW convertible and, in his early thirties, something close to depression.
Nov 2014One hundred seats in a Koramangala villa. He had lived a building away from WeWork's Fulton Street headquarters and missed that ecosystem badly enough to build one for his own startup. Indiranagar followed in December, HSR Layout in January, and he says those three micro markets are still the ones that matter.
2015A co-founder, then the flood. A calmer partner joined about a year in and is still there, still asking the questions employees never will. In the years after, roughly 300 co-working centres opened and shut around him, the quality diluted completely, and he concluded the product was never the interiors but the people he could put in one room.
2019MG Road is funded by friends and family. Private equity in New York had told him to own the real estate or come back when he could absorb $50 to 100 million at a time. So he went to cousins sitting in fixed deposits and friends in US banking holding six figures in zero-percent checking accounts. The centre paid returns straight through the pandemic. Institutional money had stopped believing in co-working twice: first because WeWork was coming to India, then because of what happened to WeWork.
Oct 2021BHIVE Alts opens for business. Deals presented one at a time, Koramangala this week and Whitefield the next, each in its own SPV where an investor owns a stated percentage and the manager decides. His argument is that Bengaluru families have split property for three decades and drowned in khatas, deadlock and litigation, and that corporatising it is the part that was missing.
Oct 2022₹400 crore approved, ₹10 lakh tickets. A SEBI-approved Category II fund, AUM set to cross ₹100 crore within a year of launch, and a pub financed at ₹10 lakh a ticket where it used to take six or seven people writing crore-scale cheques. On the workspace side, 17 centres and nine lakh square feet. He targets 20 to 30% IRR and concedes nothing is risk free. His one line of advice: own real estate as an investor, not as the landlord who takes the 11pm call about a leaking bathroom.
2030Two hundred thousand startups. The projection Vishal puts to him for the end of the decade, and the demand sitting under both halves of the business.
