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For a magazine, selecting a venture capitalist or a private equity man as a super-performer is a brave thing to do. At least in India. Consider the odds against such a choice: for one, private equity (PE) is a young industry, approximately just 10 years old. For another, it's a highly secretive industry; few PE firms disclose their investments and fewer, the returns they make on these investments. Worse, ChrysCapital's Senior Managing Director Ashish Dhawan doesn't run the largest PE firm in the country (ICICI Venture's Renuka Ramnath does) or even the most profitable one. So why did our judges (see Methodology on page 82) have no trouble zeroing in on him as the winner of this year's Young Super Performer in the entrepreneur category?
To appreciate that, you have to go back in time. To 1998, to be precise, when India was not quite the hot story it is today, and BRIC was something to be found in the mason's dictionary (well, you know what I mean), not the fund manager's. So, imagine getting up one morning in your apartment in New York and deciding that you are going to chuck up your cushy job in Goldman Sachs and turn venture capitalist. It doesn't seem odd to you that you are all of 29 (sure, you have a Harvard Business School degree to boast of) and have no conceivable reason to think that global investors will actually cough up millions of dollars just for your asking-especially when there are vastly bigger institutions with a proven track record to compete against and the story you are trying to sell is a country called India.
On that day, Ashish Dhawan may have as well chosen to try flying from the top of the Empire State Building. Except that he didn't, and instead chose to pack his bags and come home (with co-founder, but now estranged batchmate, Raj Kondur) to make a new beginning. Since then, a few others have emulated Dhawan (Sumir Chadha and K.P. Balaraj of WestBridge Capital Partners are one, and, more recently, Rahul Bhasin of Baring Private Equity Partners India is another), but without, at least, the money-raising power (see The Entrepreneurial Funds). After five years of its founding, WestBridge still has...