From staying conservative to displaying naked aggression, from valuing cost cutting to hunting for opportunity cost, from playing by the book to writing a new playbook, new finance leaders are cut from a different cloth
From top left: Ramanpreet Sohl, Manohar Singh Charan, Aneesha Menon, Arpit Chug, Anita Kishore and Tyler Sloat; From bottom left: Vibhor Gupta, Priya Sharma, Dhiresh Bansal, Sweta Gupta, Ankuur Sharma and Deena Jacob
Rafael Nadal was two sets down. His fierce Russian rival, Daniil Medvedev, had three break-point opportunities in the middle of the third set of an intensely gripping Australian Open final on the penultimate day of the first month of the year. The prospects for the Spaniard looked bleak. His past performance in similar pressure-cooker situations—since 2007, Nadal hadn’t won a best-of-five sets match from two sets behind—meant that the chances of the champion winning his 21st Grand Slam were less than slim. Everybody knew the inevitable outcome.
Back in India, in Bengaluru, Anita Kishore didn’t want to jump the gun. The 34-year-old maths teacher, deep in her heart knew it’s not over till it’s over. “AI (artificial intelligence) predicted a 96 percent probability of Nadal losing,” recalls Kishore, chief strategy officer at Byju’s. “But we know the outcome. Don’t we?” laughs the die-hard tennis fan. “Wasn’t he fantastic?”
The magical outcome can be explained by 4 percent, and not 96 percent. Probability, she explains, gives a sense of how likely or unlikely something is. But that’s where its role ends. “It’s good to look at probability, but you can’t make a decision on the basis of it,” stresses Kishore, who also happens to be the head of finance at Byju’s. Even if the odds are against you, you know how to overcome them, adds the new-age finance leader whose aggressive buyout bets have matched the rapid scale notched up by the online edtech giant. “The biggest risk you are taking is not taking enough risks,” she adds.
Meanwhile, some 2,100 kilometres from Bengaluru, in Gurugram, Manohar Singh Charan was trying hard to explain the bloated losses of ShareChat. The six-year-old vernacular social media and short video entertainment platform had posted its first operating revenue of ₹9.4 crore in FY20. The loss column read ₹676.85 crore. “New-age consumer tech businesses require a different approach to financial management,” he stresses. And even within new-age businesses, the chief financial officer (CFO) underlines, content and social media businesses require a longer gestation period. “We are not dealing with factories, machineries and inventories,” he maintains, adding that amassing a loyal consumer base is the capex equivalent for consumer-tech businesses.