Latest / Beyond Fulfillment Podcast / Investors Pulled The Plug: He Electrified 150,000 People, Then Investors Forced Him Out - Nikhil Jaisinghani

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Investors Pulled The Plug: He Electrified 150,000 People, Then Investors Forced Him Out - Nikhil Jaisinghani · Beyond Fulfillment Podcast

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  there was more to life than what I was experiencing and I had
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  to do something different.
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  those types of adventures are the adventures I want to fill my life with
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  it was a ridiculous idea.
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  first-time entrepreneurs, neither one of us had ever run a business.
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  and our pilot project was gonna be a hundred million dollars.
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  back in the early days of Android iOS.
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  I built a financial model on the flight home.
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  And by the time I'd landed, I'd invented the world's lowest cost
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  solar microgrid.
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  I've been making steady progress.
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  we aren't off to the races and yet we aren't dead.
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  So whether it was a good day or a bad day,
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  just kind of keep an even keel so that I could just keep a vision
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  on that future that I was focused on.
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  All right, Nikhil Jaisinghani.
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  Welcome to Beyond Fulfillment.
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  Thank you, Dave. Thanks for having me today.
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  Yes, sir. Thank you so much for being here.
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  So, Nikhil, you've been an entrepreneur for the last 17 years,
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  and you've had a wide variety of different industries you've been involved
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  in before you landed in finance with your current company.
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  So just to set the stage for our audience,
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  can you talk about how you became an entrepreneur and and how you got here?
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  Yeah. ~ I was a math and physics major in college and now run Titan Strategic Income
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  Fund.
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  Which is an investment fund I I founded and we began last year.
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  and and so if you had just told you those two points,
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  you'd probably draw a line and say,
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  I can kind of figure out everything in between.
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  but I I didn't follow that line at all.
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  my path
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  from math to finance was very circuitous.
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  I came out of college and started writing software for a
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  a mathematical and scientific consulting company and I found myself sitting
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  in my office looking out the window at the woods ~ surrounding our office,
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  just wondering what the heck I was doing there and
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  thought to myself there was more to life than what I what I was experiencing
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  and I just had to I had to do something different.
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  so I ended up joining the Peace Corps and moved to a village about
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  a two-day walk from the nearest road and taught math in a in a little school
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  for two years. it was difficult,
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  but it was also incredible and it was life-changing and and I came back thinking
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  to myself, those types of adventures are the adventures I want to fill
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  my life with in one way or the other.
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  and at the time I thought of adventure as
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  is
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  like exploring the wild, seeing new countries,
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  putting myself in in culturally different situations.
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  But I think over time that idea of adventure has has even incorporated
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  ~ starting a new business, entering a new field.
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  You know, even parenthood is an adventure.
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  And I think I've I've really learned to love and and cherish
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  all those challenges and all of those adventures in whatever form they've appeared.
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  I came back from Peace Corps, went to grad school,
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  joined the U.S. Agency for International Development,
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  which two years of ago no one would have known anything about,
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  but everyone knows about now. I was in Nigeria for four years,
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  after a year or so really began to start ~ exploration of
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  the idea of intrapreneurship, being an employee within an entity,
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  but pursuing an idea kind of in
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  Independently and creatively. after a few years,
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  I realized it just wasn't replicable.
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  It wasn't something that I was going to be able to do again within USAID.
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  And so I left to start my first business then.
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  what drove me to it was that need to be creative,
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  that need to be adventurous.
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  I think that was really just what drove me to entrepreneurship.
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  So you had this diverse path once you got out of school and ultimately
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  you realized you had this desire and this need to just express your creativity
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  and being in the box of working for someone wasn't cutting it.
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  So what was that first business that you started?
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  So that first business, that was an oil and gas industry business in Nigeria.
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  And the goal was to take flared gas in Nigeria ~ from the oil and
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  gas sector in night in the Niger Delta region and and process it into products
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  and services for the local populations.
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  it was a ridiculous idea.
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  Because first off, first-time entrepreneurs,
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  I joined hands with another a colleague of mine,
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  Brian Schad. And neither one of us had ever run a business.
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  We'd never even worked really in the private sector.
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  we had never done anything in oil and gas.
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  and here we are. The oil and gas sector is itself complicated enough,
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  but here we were in the Nigerian oil and gas sector.
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  and our pilot project was gonna be a hundred million dollars.
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  And so that was I think an you know,
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  Yeah.
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  it's it's
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  a kind of challenge that just ~ is is unreasonable to expect any success.
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  That said, we actually made way more progress than we should have.
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  we had an offer of of gas and price sorted out.
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  We had an operations and
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  maintenance company, we had a company that's gonna do the all
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  the engineering and construction.
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  and we even had ~ project development money from the global environment facility.
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  unfortunately what happened is that money had to go to another multilateral
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  and that multilateral took the money and diverted it to another project
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  and and the the project quickly fizzled out at that point.
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  But I think what what it was clear at that point was that this is something
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  I really was excited about. I mean,
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  I loved the challenge, I loved the the odds against me.
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  I had that first taste of doing something crazy and and I realized I I just
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  had to do it again. I moved to to India.
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  My wife was still working at USAID and we moved to India.
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  I didn't have a didn't have a job,
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  ~ didn't have a work permit, so whatever I was gonna do,
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  I was gonna have to create myself.
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  and after nine months of staring at my computer I had an idea of
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  of starting an off-grid energy company and going into rural villages
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  and electrifying them some way.
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  ~ I didn't know how. ~ that was,
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  you know, it was really as much as I'd figured out was some way.
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  I got invited to a conference and I attended and I presented this idea
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  and at the end of it there were no questions,
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  no comments. It was clear that everyone knew that I didn't know what I was doing.
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  I fully acknowledge that. But I sat down and I was I was,
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  you know, there for the day and I was just like,
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  I'm gonna sit spend the rest of the day listening.
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  And then in the afternoon a guy got up ~ who was running a solar lantern company
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  called Greenlight Planet, and he was talking about how
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  These one watt LED lights were bright enough for his customers.
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  And as soon as he said that, everything started working itself in place.
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  I'd already run some financial models of different technologies.
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  but as soon as he said that, it was really clear what I was going to do.
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  And I got on the plane. this was back in the early days of Android iOS.
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  I had one of those phones, like a flip-out keyboard,
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  and I built a financial model on the flight home.
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  And by the time I'd landed, I'd invented the the world's lowest cost
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  solar microgrid. Didn't know it at the time,
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  but that's what I had invented.
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  And got on the phone with my business partner and said,
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  let's run this back and try it again.
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  and that venture started with a lot of frustrations,
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  no traction, had to raise money,
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  had to prove the technology out,
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  but we we worked on it, built it out for 10 years to serving about 150,000 people
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  by the time we stepped away
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  and we we
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  Had some conflicts with our investors,
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  so we stepped away, and that's where we left the company.
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  But we were really excited about that,
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  and it was just phenomenal to have 10 years where every morning I was getting
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  up and saying, if I do my job well today,
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  a thousand people can be receiving electricity tonight that didn't have
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  it last night. that idea just was so incredible.
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  And at the end of the day, you get the numbers and there's either crushing
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  disappointment that you only electrify 200 people or there was this ecstatic
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  static feeling of of you know success from having having achieved the goal that
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  was 10 years of that entrepreneurial journey ~ and when I left I
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  was trying to figure out where to go and and ended up into finance not because
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  I was looking for the money but because I had found a nice mathematical challenge
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  that I really thought I could throw myself into
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  Okay. All right. Well, so a lot to unpack there.
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  So first of all, the first venture,
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  was it? Flare
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  Flared gas, yeah. when ~
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  oil companies are digging up oil,
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  there's oftentimes this associated gas that comes up with it.
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  And in the early days of the oil and gas industry in Nigeria,
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  no one knew what to do with it.
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  So they they either just released it or they burned it.
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  just they started these gas flares.
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  And so it's just a massive amount of energy that was being wasted because
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  oil and gas companies didn't know what what to do with it.
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  Okay. All right. And so you admit that was an absolutely insane idea,
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  right? But
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  Yeah.
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  you're like first time entrepreneur.
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  You're so excited and you have this math and physics background,
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  which I'm sure lent to maybe a better understanding of what maybe could potentially
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  be done. ~ and you and your partner are all in on this.
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  did people look at this when you're presenting this business and
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  say you're like you're out of your mind?
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  no one ever actually said that out loud.
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  but I'm certain that's exactly what people were thinking.
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  And I do remember speaking with somebody at the Global Environment Facility when
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  we first pitched them and just looking at the smile on his face,
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  like I can't believe I'm in this meeting.
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  ~ ultimately
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  Yeah.
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  they ended up
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  funding the project but but at the very beginning I you know it was just clear that
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  he he thought this was the wrong person coming up with the wrong project.
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  you could see it on his face. but yeah,
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  I think there's a lot of people who who looked at this and said this is crazy.
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  But fortunately they didn't they either they didn't say it out loud enough
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  to us or or we we just weren't listening because we we kept going with
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  it anyway up until that money kind of got diverted away from the project.
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  Okay, all right. So you even had some funding l initially committed before
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  it went elsewhere, and that basically killed the deal.
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  what do you think is the most important lesson you took from that experience?
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  Yeah, I think the most important thing was that we had a project that
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  was incredibly complicated. it was just a little bit beyond what we could do.
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  thereafter you move to India you're at this meeting,
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  your initial pitch doesn't go well,
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  you get inspired by this guy that has these solar light bulbs it is,
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  and then on the plane home, the wheels start turning in your head.
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  And you invented
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  The world's lowest cost solar micrograde.
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  And you didn't even know it at the time,
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  but that's basically what you would come up with with an Android phone
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  on a plane home from India. what happens next?
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  so the reason this microgrid was so cheap is because we had figured out
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  a way to transition from being a supplier of electricity
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  To a supplier of electric services.
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  So the first thought was these villages that we were we're looking at,
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  they're off grid, they have no access to electricity,
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  ultra poor communities. You know,
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  the average income was in the area of about 30 cents per day per person.
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  So we needed to be able to get something really cheap,
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  but also really important to them in order to make this business effective.
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  And the lighting was was my based on my time in Nepal,
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  where I had lived off grid for two years,
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  I knew how important.
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  lighting was. I knew how hard it was to try and read from a solar lantern
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  ~ at night. And so I knew this was gonna be ~ the core of what we
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  we were gonna provide was was electric lighting.
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  So instead of being an electricity supplier,
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  we ended up being a lighting supplier.
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  So we built infrastructure within villages
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  that would provide lighting to households for a fixed fee every month using solar
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  and these LED lights. And so we the first project I I had worked through
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  an NGO to identify a village and it was a complete disaster.
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  we were trying to get goods across the state border.
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  we're having trouble with bureaucrats who didn't want us moving solar panels across
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  state borders. We were dealing with train issues.
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  But somehow at the end of the day we got all of our equipment out to where
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  we were going and we built the microgrid and as we were building it
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  I was thinking to myself, I really should have tried this first at home
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  to make sure it would work. Before I before I brought my business partner
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  out here to India and spent a week getting all this equipment out here.
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  So was thinking I really, really hope it works.
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  And we built it out according to the design
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  I laid out and turned it on. And that night the the lights were working
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  and people were getting electricity and it was just this rush of
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  of energy and excitement that,
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  we had built something and it worked.
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  and so now the question was how do we do it again?
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  And so we built a few more pilot projects with the money that we had,
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  and then ultimately raised money.
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  first it was a grant.
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  we'd received a grant of three hundred thousand dollars and I
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  I had anticipated being able to build
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  maybe tw ten or twenty microgrids and we ended up building over a hundred with that
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  money. and so was able to take that experience and that footprint and we're able
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  to lure in equity investors. So I raised a round of equity from
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  an impact investor and that was another infusion of capital that just allowed
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  us to keep growing ~ and it was a kind of a cycle of solve problems,
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  build, raise more money, solve more problems
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  problems,
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  build, raise more money. ~ that,
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  you know, it was a cycle that took us,
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  you know, about ten years. And of course there were hiccups all along the way.
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  some ups followed by a downs, followed by more ups and more downs.
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  it was a roller coaster ride. But ten years of building this out to
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  the point where we were serving 150,000 people at the end of
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  it with with electricity at the end of the day.
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  So now let me ask you too, right?
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  Because as a new entrepreneur in like a new industry in a place like India Different
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  set of rules than the US. And then you're raising capital to fund these ideas
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  to where, the first time you built it,
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  you're just hoping it worked. And there's all these challenges,
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  right?
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  How'd you handle that challenge of being a new entrepreneur with
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  a very challenging job and then raising that type of capital to fund everything?
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  You know, it was overwhelming.
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  it was exactly what I wanted to be doing,
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  but because the goal that we were trying to achieve was so important
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  to us and the obstacles were large and the pathway was unclear
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  that passion is also complemented by a lot of frustration,
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  a lot of doubts. are we gonna ev ever raise money to prove this
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  at a larger capacity? are we gonna be able to ever gonna raise commercial capital?
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  ~ are customers gonna be able to pay us and willing to pay us?
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  there was all kinds of questions that we were gonna have.
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  We're gonna figure out the logistics to the point where we can move
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  our goods across the country without disruption.
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  but at the same time every every little challenge that got solved,
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  at the end of the day when you solved that problem,
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  there's so much activity going on in your brain.
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  And my my brain was just going a hundred percent.
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  trying to solve these problems and then being excited when we
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  did solve these problems. But it was overwhelming.
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  it was a lot to process, a lot to take in,
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  a lot to manage.
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  couple that with not receiving a salary for for multiple years and
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  you know living off of of no salary and the complications that created.
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  But every day at the end of the day,
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  whether it was a good day or a bad day,
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  I had to step back and say, let me just focus on what I'm trying to build
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  and the fact that over the last month,
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  three months, one year, I've been making progress,
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  making steady progress. we aren't off to the races and yet we aren't dead.
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  So h whether it was a good day or a bad day,
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  just kind of keep an even keel on our pace and and where we were going
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  and and how far we'd gotten ~ so that I could just keep a vision on that future that
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  I was focused on.
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  while you're on this journey, you're going through all these ups and downs
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  and these challenges and these roadblocks did you think about giving up?
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  yeah. you had another guest who said something something along the lines of,
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  you know, when you get into entrepreneurship you gotta commit and
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  you just gotta say, I'm making the decision,
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  I'm not backing out. But for me it was almost the opposite.
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  I almost had to give myself permission to say
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  I don't have to make a decision today.
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  I'm gonna give myself another day.
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  I'm gonna give myself another week.
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  I can still change my mind in a week,
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  that allowed me to get over these really awful days,
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  where I just was thinking to myself,
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  there's no way this is gonna work or this challenge is too big or we just lost
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  a whole bunch of money and that was our only money.
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  anytime there was one of these challenges,
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  I just I just had to say, I'm not gonna
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  make a decision about what I'm gonna do for the rest of my life today.
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  I'm gonna sleep on it and give myself another few days,
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  let myself focus, think about it,
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  and and I I gave myself the freedom to push off a decision,
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  any decision to quit to a later point.
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  that for me I always know if I can if I can push off the decision to quit,
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  I'm not gonna quit. And it's always important for me to have that tool
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  in my bag mentally just to to be able to pull it out and at the end of
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  a really bad day say, I'm gonna think about this tomorrow.
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  and that allowed me to overcome both the mental and the actual complexities
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  of the business. And you know,
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  whatever was challenging me yesterday,
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  maybe maybe I'd solve it tomorrow.
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  And and that would allow me to get over that and focus again on on how
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  how excited I was to build this business again.
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  there's such a mission driven business you had and when you're providing electricity
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  to these ultra poor villages and communities all throughout India,
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  like how important do you think that mission was to to keeping
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  you going throughout these hard times?
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  Yeah, it was really the primary thing.
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  I was looking at this technology that we developed and I'd come up with ideas
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  for for interesting things in the past.
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  but this was one that I couldn't let go of because I knew that if I let go of it,
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  the potential impact, that potential benefit
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  that could be provided to people would be lost.
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  And so it almost felt like an imperative of me to be the custodian of this idea
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  and take it forward and and achieve its potential.
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  it almost felt like an obligation to some extent,
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  but it was what made me feel good about the the work at the end of the
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  day it wasn't the money coming in,
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  it was the number of people
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  that were getting life changing service because of what we were doing.
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  And then as you mentioned, you had to step away from this business after
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  ten years and a hundred and fifty thousand people served because
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  of some conflict with investors.
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  how do you go from there to founding Titan Strategic Income Fund?
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  You know, it was a tough period.
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  it was just very close to my heart.
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  And so stepping away from it, particularly when I knew my investors wanted
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  to transition to a different business model,
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  something that would be easier,
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  was quite frankly heartbreaking.
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  and it took me a long time to get over that,
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  that feeling. still that when I think back on it,
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  I have I have good memories, I have bad memories,
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  but at at least I'm thinking about those good memories now.
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  At that time, all I could think about was anger and disappointment
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  and the shame from not having taken it to its full potential was really crushing.
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  it took a lot of long time to get over that,
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  but in the meantime I also needed to keep busy.
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  a colleague of my sister's called and said he was looking for someone to help
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  him on some math for a financial model.
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  and It was exactly what I knew I could do.
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  And in the process, I discovered options.
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  And so I was looking at options a few years into it and
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  I ultimately started managing my own money with it pitched it
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  to another colleague who wanted to start a fund.
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  So we started a fund with it last year using options to deliver equity type returns
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  with fixed income type volatility.
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  I mentioned earlier in the in the conversation that adventure doesn't have
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  to be all about running across rooftops to North India
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  The adventure of starting up an investment fund when I know the investment side,
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  but I don't know the capital accumulation side of the business at all.
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  it's another adventure. I have to figure that out.
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  It's a challenge that I have to figure out.
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  And so it's really exciting to me to be able to take this mathematical idea that
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  I feel really strongly about. And now learning the complementary side
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  of capital accumulation, marketing,
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  pitching, and trying to merge these two.
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  to
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  with a skill that I still have to perfect.
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  and that's what I think makes it exciting on a daily basis to wake
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  up and start working on Titan Strategic Income every day.
• 20:29
  Okay. And you were in some tough situations.
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  sounds like you made it even tougher with some of these ideas and some
• 20:35
  of the challenges and risks you chose to pursue,
• 20:37
  but yet so much growth came through that,
• 20:40
  so much fulfillment, particularly with your last company when
• 20:43
  you were electrifying all these villages.
• 20:45
  How do you think
• 20:47
  That experience has prepared you for something like this,
• 20:50
  where it's a very different idea,
• 20:52
  and it sounds like you found a formula that yeah you really believe in,
• 20:55
  but yet now that you have to go and prove it to the market and get people to buy in,
• 20:59
  how's your previous experience helped you for this role?
• 21:02
  Yeah. ~ that's that's a great question.
• 21:05
  And there are some very clear differences between the businesses,
• 21:09
  and therefore a lot that doesn't translate.
• 21:11
  But some of the things I've already mentioned before,
• 21:13
  like that tool bag after a bad day,
• 21:16
  what do I do to make sure that I get up in the morning the next morning going
• 21:20
  a hundred percent to building this business again?
• 21:22
  those tools of overcoming the ups and downs of entrepreneurship,
• 21:26
  those have been developed and are stronger,
• 21:28
  much stronger now than than they were obviously early in my career.
• 21:32
  so I'd say that's that's probably the most important one.
• 21:35
  But also I think, you know, these previous businesses were complicated.
• 21:39
  ~ they had challenges, and that's what I that drew me to them was
• 21:42
  the complexity of some of them.
• 21:44
  but at the same time I also know that is what made them less likely to succeed.
• 21:50
  And so taking those lessons and applying them to Titan Strategic Income Fund
• 21:54
  to build a business that doesn't
• 21:56
  doesn't have those same complexities and pitfalls that could stop
• 21:58
  me from achieving my goals. that was definitely another lesson that I
• 22:02
  I learned from those previous experiences.
• 22:04
  But you know ultimately I also know that what drew me to those previous businesses
• 22:10
  may sound different, but it's that desire to conquer the unknown that
• 22:15
  is still getting me inspired to work on this investment fund,
• 22:19
  even though the business model and the social goals are different.
• 22:24
  Okay. All right. And when you look back at your whole journey,
• 22:27
  right? From starting in a software job right out of school,
• 22:31
  being unfulfilled, taken off across the world on the Peace Corps,
• 22:35
  and then all these other businesses and this wild ride as an entrepreneur you had,
• 22:39
  and now coming back and you have this new challenge of alternative investment fund
• 22:44
  that you're you're growing now.
• 22:45
  Looking back at your whole journey as an entrepreneur,
• 22:47
  what's been the best part of it for you?
• 22:50
  it's definitely not been the financial side.
• 22:53
  you know, I gave up a lot of money by switching out of software and then again
• 22:57
  out of working for the US government.
• 22:59
  but I think what I gained was decades of my life that I was excited about
• 23:04
  I you know woke up excited and enthused.
• 23:07
  and had a mission and had a purpose.
• 23:09
  so I think that has clearly for me been the best part of of that journey
• 23:13
  is I'd identify this need to be adventurous and I've added adventure into
• 23:18
  my life over the last twenty, thirty years as a result of that.
• 23:21
  so I think that's really the best part of that journey for me.
• 23:23
  It's very specific to me. Some people that wouldn't be interesting.
• 23:27
  That isn't what they would want.
• 23:28
  But for me,
• 23:29
  it was exactly what I needed in my life and I'm able to continue
• 23:32
  it through my current job which is great.
• 23:34
  And so that's really what I've I've gained the most out of that journey.
• 23:39
  Okay. All right. And Nikhil if people want to connect with you online
• 23:43
  and and learn more about Titan's strategic income fund,
• 23:45
  where's the best way people can find you?
• 23:47
  The website for the fund is Titanstrategic Income dot com and you can reach
• 23:52
  me at Nikhil N I K H I L at Titanstrategic Income dot com.
• 23:58
  Okay. We'll link all that in the show notes for everyone.
• 24:00
  All right. Well, Nikhil, thank you so much for taking the time to
• 24:03
  be here and sharing all this incredible wisdom from your journey with our listeners.
• 24:07
  We greatly appreciate it.
• 24:09
  Dave, I really appreciated the time and enjoyed the conversation.
• 24:12
  All right, thank you.