Alok Sama could well make a second career as a writer. After spending a lifetime in high finance and venture capital, working alongside the high priest of venture funding, SoftBank’s iconic and maverick founder, Masayoshi Son, hopping in and out of private jets and zipping round the world, like one would commute on the London Underground, Delhi-born Sama has penned a racy and entertaining saga, at times reflective, of deal-making in the arcane world of finance and deep tech.
Sama, a former President and CFO of Softbank Group Interntional, worked earlier as an MD of Morgan Stanley and been steeped in finance for over 30 years. An MBA from the Wharton School with an MFA in creative writing from New York University, Sama straddles both worlds with ease – finance and writing. Usually, business dons have someone co-author their autobiographies but in Sama’s case he has churned it out himself with drama, anecdote, wit and humour with some self-deprecation, expletives and loads of introspection and irony thrown in.
Along with Nikesh Arora, who was also a President of Softbank, Sama experienced the high life and deal making round the world. Both hail from middle class Delhi. As Sama writes... “the Venn diagrams of our respective lives had a comfortable overlap. Our roots were middle class, which in India meant ceiling fans rather than air-conditioning. We both attended high school in Delhi. Like many of our peers, we arrived in New York in the mid-Eighties with $ 500 of American Express Travelers cheques and started a life where an off-peak three-minute phone call to India was our biggest indulgence.” Both would go on to soar to great heights.
Stories, insights and ironies
Sama’s writing is riveting, descriptive and anecdotal with lots of little stories, insights and ironies thrown in. Like this para, for instance: I had left Morgan Stanley some time ago, the Zegna suits and Hermes ties hanging in my closet like sloughed-off skin from a prior incarnation! Investment bankers are like martlets – birds without feet, condemned to a life of continuous flight. Many self-destruct, while others get shot.
As one of the world’s top billionaire investors, Son had access to the top world leaders and corporate chieftains. And Sama had a ringside view of this. As he writes, if you can get a private audience with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, the PM of India and the president-elect of the US, “you know you are a player. And, if you can meet all three in Riyadh, New Delhi and New York within the space of five days, it’s a world record.” Sama writes too about his encounter with PM Modi, a moment implanted, he says, in his hippocampus!
Sama’s writing gives us a glimpse of the high life led by global deal makers. His description of his jetting round on Softbank’s Gulfstream G550 is vivid. As he writes: She was a sleek twin-engine beast...a beauty like this needed a name, something feline of reptilian. Like Cougar or Viper. But Cougar was redolent of middle-aged sexual frustration, so I settled on Viper. Soon “Wheels-up at 10 a.m.” rolled off my tongue the way “I’m taking the Jubilee line to Canary Wharf” had in a prior incarnation!
After writing about Viper’s luxurious interiors, he says being dropped off and picked up at the aircraft was the highlight, typically by a shiny black long-wheelbase S –Class Mercedes. “I felt like Jagger, bounding up the stairs, waving at my adoring groupies gathered on the tarmac.” However, keeping him grounded was his wife, Maya, who “tormented me with visions of my carbon emissions choking off emperor penguins in Antarctica, but I assuaged my guilt by committing to a lifetime of electric vehicles.”
Arm’ed and dangerous
Perhaps the most audacious of takeovers that Son mounted was on British chip designer Arm Holdings Plc in 2016. Arm’s software engineers design the microprocessors which go into chips, essential for a variety of devices. Sama not only had a ringside view of the deal but was hands on. In 2016, over 95 per cent of smart phones contained multiple Arm-designed chips. Son’s bet was that in future, Arm’s technology would dominate a world of connected devices, the IoT, as we know it today. Sama says that Son was able to envision a future that others couldn’t. “A year earlier we had dissuaded Masa from making a move on Arm, on the grounds that a $30-35 billion acquisition was unaffordable, but with $ 20 billions of sale proceeds from Supercell and Alibaba, Masa was Arm’ed and dangerous,” Sama writes.
There’s a whole fast-paced chapter on the Arm takeover, and on the cloak and dagger stuff that stalks the deal. The high stakes deal sees three private jets converging in Turkey, three days after a terrorist attack in Istanbul had left 45 people dead. The meeting happens in a restaurant in the port town of Marmaris from where Arm’s chairman Stuart Chambers is all set to sail in his yacht. The deal goes through many tortuous twists and turns till Softbank and Son emerge victorious. Owning Arm would give him unique insights into global technology trends. Its revenue streams would provide clues as to what types of processors were gaining traction, and therefore which technologies to back.
Sama also writes with feeling about what is virtually a parallel universe from the life he led. Coming back to Delhi to be beside his dying father with his mother and two brothers, the subsequent cremation at the Lodhi road cremation ground and the final journey to Rishikesh to immerse his father’s ashes. “I have not experienced a greater cathartic sensation than gently and lovingly, fragment by fragment, releasing those burnt and washed bones into the icy cold streaming water, watching them gradually disappear,” he writes, overwrought with emotion.
The book starts with Sama writing about how someone wants him out of the way, just when Son has launched his huge $100 billion Softbank Vison Fund, and his stalkers think Sama controls the billions of dollars. His family is stalked and photographed, and he feels his home and office are bugged. Later the WSJ would write a story about the “dark arts campaign of personal sabotage” directed at Nikesh Arora and Sama. But Sama comes through all that with sanity intact. And later joins a writing course. For a book which deals with the clandestine world of high finance and deal making in billions of dollars, Sama’s book is written as an honest and gripping narrative, at times self-deprecatory, offering the reader a ringside view of the world he lived in for several years. A jolly good read, indeed.
Check out the book on Amazon.