Vatsal Nahata - The Power of Persistence

Welcome to Compound Ideas, hosted by Ken Majmudar of Ridgewood Investments. This podcast will feature exceptional individuals to uncover deep insights into business, entrepreneurship, personal growth, investing and multidisciplinary thinking so that you can learn how to improve your finances, find better investments and pursue authentic lifelong growth, wisdom and happiness. Learn more and stay up to date at compound ideas. Show.com.

On today's episode, I'm delighted to welcome Vatsal Nahata, a Yalie who currently works at the IMF in Washington, DC. I had the pleasure of meeting Vatsal through my wife's introduction. Listen to our episode today as Vatsal shares his inspiring story of how he utilized the power of social media, networking and hard work to secure a job at the height of the pandemic when virtually no one was hiring. To connect or message me, follow me on social media. I'm Ken Majmudar on both LinkedIn and Instagram, and my YouTube channel is Investing with Ken Majumdar. You can also follow me on Twitter @KMajumdar. That's Kmajmudar on Twitter. Thank you.

Vatsal, thanks for being on the podcast.

It's my pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting me. I am really looking forward to this.

We usually start with a little bit about your background and growing up. Tell us how you grew up, what that was like, where and what your early life was like.

I was born in the city of Calcutta in India and grew up in a middle class business family, Marwari upbringing, And for those who don't know, the Marwaris are basically a business community back in India, where traditionally the only craft that has been practiced was business, grew up in that family and was always very motivated by seeing my grandfather and parents in terms of how they conducted their lives, how they always strive to inculcate good values. The upbringing was simple in terms of just a regular household happy childhood, played a lot of sports, played cricket for the Bengal under 16 and under 19 team. So that was also a big formative experience. And did my schooling also in Calcutta in a convent school, and again, very focused on values and the right ethics. The upbringing was not religious, but it was again focused on more the right values and of doing good things.

So what led you to leave India and when was that?

Leaving India was honestly never a conscious choice, so I left in 20 19th August, so it's roughly about three and a half to four years for me here in the US. And it happened in a very accidental manner in the sense that basically towards the end of my final year in undergrad I had job offers from Bain and Company and had a couple other job offers. I had applied to a few master's courses at Oxford, Cambridge, LSE and Yale, and Yale was the only place I applied to in the US and I applied for economics, but I decided that I wanted to pursue civil services. So I took a gap year, didn't take up the job, deferred my master's admits by one year and I sat for the civil services exam. I could not clear it, which is when I decided to come to the US and actually take up my Yale master's at MIT and I chose the US over the UK to pursue my graduate studies because the US just seemed more suited for someone like me, more gregarious, outgoing, ambitious, multicultural, more dynamic. So I thought it's a place where I would want to be.

And where was your undergraduate schooling? What did you study?

I majored in economics and I went to Shri Ram College of Commerce at the University of Delhi. So the University of Delhi is around 7080 colleges and SRCC is what the acronym for Shri Ram College of Commerce is, is considered amongst the top five. So majored in economics over there, but absolutely loved my experience in college.

And as a side. What's it like to be growing up in that region in India and what do you think of what's going on in India right now? Obviously, most of our listeners are probably going to be here in the US, may not be as familiar with what the latest and greatest is, so maybe give us a quick 1 or 2 minute summary of your views on India.

I would say generally it's it's a place beaming with a lot of energy right now. And I think the most fundamental shift that I see is the fact that people like kids my age when they're graduating from college, they want to go now and create their own startup versus, say, working for a big multinational company or getting a safe, stable job.

So there's a lot of entrepreneurship and interesting things happening back home where people are trying different things. The economy is doing well, and just the idea that 750 million people are below the age of 25 in India, that just states the kind of youthful energy and the youthful nation it's now become, if you're more specific, could give you views on specific topics.

Well, it's certainly it's been corrupt and that's held up back the growth and the development. So what do you think is the state of progress on that front now? Because that held back the progress of the country, at least in my view.

Whatever somebody says about corruption, most of them, in fact, 99% of them would be saying it's based on what they read in the media, what they read in reports. From my understanding, I think it's become much better. But again, this is purely conjecture and this is purely what I've read in the media. I have a lot of friends in the bureaucracy back home. So people who are officers in the IAS or the IRS and the IFS.

The civil service.

Exactly.

You wanted to do that yourself?

Exactly. And that's how I built that network. And I keep in touch with them. What they tell me is that things have definitely improved on the ground because of more digital tools and better tracking systems. Corruption will always be there in some form or the other in myriad ways. But think on the whole, it's progressed much better as time is going by.

Do you see yourself going back into that track at this point?

At this point, no, because the weird thing with me is now I know way too many bureaucrats in India, so when I tell them that I may want to think of entering government again. No, no, no, you're good where you are. Do a good job there. And then later on, when you're in your 40s or 50s, you can come at a much senior level. They advised me to not pursue the government track right now because anyway, what I did at the World Bank and what I'm doing at the IMF is at the intersection of government policy and economics and designing policies and stuff, giving policy advice. So I'm very fortunate that I'm getting a good deal in terms of intellectually growing as well as doing government or policy work.

Why were you interested in going into the Indian government in the first place? What was the nature of that interest?

So the nature of that interest was an internship I had done in my undergrad where I was interning under the Chief Economic Advisors office in the Ministry of Finance back home. And over there I got to interact with a lot of very senior bureaucrats who were in the Ministry of Finance in India and joint secretaries, additional secretaries, secretaries and seeing them share their stories of the impact they've created, the diversity of jobs they've worked at, and generally their satisfaction really drew me in. Secondly, I've always been a bit of a contrarian in the sense that because I came from SRCC, all of my batchmates are working in private equity or venture capital or investment banking or the NBPs. My roommate from college is currently at BCG. He's a consultant there. So the attraction of the lure of these corporate jobs also wasn't there for me because I wanted to do something that was different. And thankfully I am passionate about economics, so I felt like pursuing it further. So my interest for the civil service, to summarize what you asked, was born by my experience during the internship and my passion for economics and felt I could merge the two going forward.

Now some people have a view that, hey, government is inefficient and it's challenging and bureaucratic. You referred to the people working there as bureaucrats, which is interesting. You saw it from the inside and you saw the Indian government. One part of it, the Ministry of Finance from the inside. Obviously, you were drawn in, as you said. Tell us about why that was. There's obviously another side of the coin than what maybe most people who aren't in government perceive.

I think what I saw and why I have a great deal of respect for bureaucrats and government officials is that they're very well intentioned and they're very motivated, well-meaning people. And compared to the typical image or the typical visualization we have of government bureaucrats, I think they're far removed from that. A lot depends on how the system is set up and how the rules of the game are and how regulations are formed. But in terms of the people I met, they were very well-meaning people, very hardworking, very intelligent people. That was more in the Ministry of Finance. Even when I go back to India every year and I meet up with more junior bureaucrats who are, say, the CEO of a district, or they're leading government programs on the ground. They tell me their work schedule and they tell me how strapped they are of resources and how they have to optimize to do so much work with such little resources monetarily and staff wise that I just have a lot of respect for them. They're doing very good work and they're actually on the ground trying to get things done.

So if you had gone that track, what do you think you would have gone into?

If I had gone into that track, I think I wouldn't have come to the US. To be honest, or I would have immediately went back after Yale, back to India, and definitely tried that out and then seen what to do, because I think it's a fantastic job and I think it's a great way to serve people and impact people's lives. But again, we can all talk in retrospect, but I'm happy how life has panned out so far. But I would definitely, want to serve in the government once in my life, probably when I'm in my 40s or 50s for sure.

What's the view of the bureaucracy of the job that right now the Prime Minister is Modi. He has a controversial reputation in some respects, and then I think he's got his fans as well. What's the view if you have a pulse of him as a leader so far? He got re-elected, obviously. So that's one metric. But in terms of the actual bureaucracy, the civil service that works for him.

This is something I've only read in the media and being an employee of the IMF, it's not correct for me to take positions on client countries, positions and stuff, but from what I've read in the media, it's definitely compared to, say, previous administrations, it's much more run by, say, the bureaucrats. There's a big focus on having very good bureaucrats compared to, say, what was in the previous administrations. But again, I'd be constrained and you should take my opinion with a pinch of salt. It's what I read in the media, basically.

So you graduated from Yale. What did you think of Yale Management School?

I was in the Department of Economics.

While economics. Okay. So you have a master's in economics. Tell us about that experience. And then fast forward to what you're doing after that.

Yale was a very different experience in terms of how broadly the US education system is compared to India, where it's much less focus on rote learning, much more focused on research and conceptual understanding. So that's something I really enjoyed. To my surprise, people at Yale weren't as competitive as, say, how people are very competitive back in India because there's much more of a positive sum approach rather than a zero sum approach. And just the focus on basically learning for learning's sake rather than learning because you want to get a job. Those things were very refreshing. The faculty was amazing. I got to work as a research assistant, got to do some cool research with the professors in the Econ department. It was just very life changing and very formative in how I started thinking about career and how I started thinking about education.

You were graduating, so what were your options and what did you do after Yale?

Something hit me that completely wasn't prepared for, which was that I was graduating May of 2020, which is when COVID had really hit the labor market in the US and when Trump was president. So it became very hard to get jobs. It became so hard to get jobs in the US. I remember this one time just curling up in my bed and just crying for him because I'm not getting a job, I'm not getting anything. There was also this moment of my ego getting completely crushed because my earlier conception was, Oh, I went to Yale, which is supposedly one of the premier Ivy leagues in the US, and I'm doing a fairly technical degree. I'm doing economics, which is fairly sought after and can't even get a job. What's the point? But then the circumstances were such that everybody went on a hiring freeze because of COVID. Companies weren't willing to issue visas because of Trump. Everybody was more on a wait and watch mode and they wanted to retain their existing employees rather than hire new ones. So it was a really bad time.

This better be in the beginning, middle of 2020.

Yeah, this was March, April of 2020.

Okay, So your timing was literally as the pandemic started.

It was super difficult. And for one week I was in this zone where I was entitled with ego because I'm from Yale. This shouldn't be that hard. In the other hand was I do need to get a job. I can't go back to India, but if I've been given the opportunity to come to the US, at least want to work here for 1 or 2 years, I just went completely crazy with networking and I've written a LinkedIn post about this, which went decently viral on social media, which is I stopped applying to any job portals and I just I sent six 700 cold emails on LinkedIn and Gmail conducted a lot of cold calls and networked my way to finally land a job with the World Bank. But that process was extremely humbling and taught me a lot.

Tell us about that, because I haven't read your LinkedIn post yet and I think that'll be interesting to people listening to this. First of all, why did you do that? Obviously out of necessity, But once you set up a, gosh, this normal thing isn't working, obviously you could have given up or you could just say, I'll just head back to India. But you were motivated not to. How did you figure out what to do next and how to overcome those challenges? And then what did you do and what did you learn from that?

This was basically March of 2020 when I really started seriously applying for jobs and when I really started going deep. And what I'd figured was no matter how many job application portals I applied to, there would always be a question Would you need a visa sponsorship? Or they typically ask a question where they ask for your immigration status. So I figured that would automatically throw me out of the candidate pool. And even the companies that did not ask that, they would never just respond. So I'd sent in about 60-70 job applications and heard from none of them. And the strategy clearly needs to fundamentally change. And I was always very comfortable with LinkedIn and with reaching out in terms of reaching out to people. And during the fall semester at Yale, I had also accidentally sprayed this thing where I wanted a research assistantship. And what I basically did is I dropped 50 cold emails to all the professors at Yale in the Econ department, and by the next morning I had five research assistant jobs. So I was like, Wow, Like this thing clearly worked. So taking a leaf from that book, I just thought generally from the networking experience I had in terms of cold emailing these professors, what I thought was, let me try the same thing with actual jobs.

It was literally as linear as made a list of 20 companies I aspired to work at, bought a LinkedIn premium subscription, went on LinkedIn, sent as many connection requests to as many people as I could from those 20 companies would have sent like at least 1000 or 1500 connection requests within 1 or 2 weeks, about five 600 of them accepted it, then framed a nice cold email message like all five, 600 of them, that this is my profile, this is who I am. Can we get on a 15 minute call? I want to learn about your work experience and basically conduct an informational interview. Out of those five 600, I got on about 80 to 90 phone calls, and these were people from the junior most people to the senior most people. I even spoke to Alex Liu, who was the managing director of Kearney Worldwide back then, just dropped him a email on LinkedIn and he replied, I spoke to all levels of people in all companies, and out of those 80 cold calls followed up with about 2025 of them who actually told me that, okay, we can include you in the interview pool and we can go about hiring you from those 1520.

I then got five, six interviews and then I ended up with 3 or 4 jobs. So that funnel from sending thousands of connection requests, sending emails, getting on calls tenaciously, following up and sitting through that whole grind completely on my own. And it was extremely rewarding, but also taught me a lot about human nature, human psychology, how to talk to people, how to present yourself, how to become fearless in a completely new country. Because either I'm doing this or I'm heading back home. It thankfully worked and and it's always stuck with me. Now it's almost become second nature to me where if I want to accomplish anything or if I want to set out to do anything cold emailing or just reaching out to people is like my first instinct. And that's helped me very much. My job at the World Bank, my job at the IMF, making friends in DC, anything and everything has just been a lot of cold emailing and so far it's really worked well for me. Even reaching out to Ali, for example, was just a cold email, so that experience was rewarding. It was dark March, April, May, but thankfully I emerged out victorious.

Congratulations for figuring all of that out. So young. How old are you now?

I'm 25. About to turn 26.

Yeah. Most people don't figure. That out till much later. And obviously one of the reasons is it just takes work. It takes a good amount of work and determination, which a lot of people, they just throw out resumes and just say, well, whatever replies back. They end up in a career maybe for the next 30 years, just based on the chance of who is hiring at that time. Instead of saying, Well, what do I really want and let me drive that result. It's a fundamental shift that I guess if you make it the earlier you make it, the more it serves you. It pays dividends probably for your whole life. Tell us about working at the World Bank and working at IMF and what you're doing now.

I worked with the World Bank for about 22 months and I was a consultant there and I was in the Education Global Practice. So the team was assigned to was basically the South Asia team in the education practice. And our team was basically lending money to the Bangladesh and Nepal governments to execute education projects on the ground or build technical government capacity there. Part of my work was operations where the World Bank would have lent money to Nepal or Bangladesh, and we would try to get projects executed on the ground using economic principles, using sound economic logic. And the second part of my job was pure research. So I got to co-author a paper with the director of research at the World Bank, who's the number two economist on using machine learning techniques to analyze student learning data. We had 1500 variables on teachers and learning outcomes of students, and we basically ran surveys in Tanzania. We'd gone to about 1000 schools. We ran surveys on many thousand teachers, and we got very minute data on them. And then we were basically trying to see, okay, if the teacher is teaching a certain number of students, what is it about a teacher that predicts student learning outcomes? Self-taught myself, decent levels of machine learning picked up R and Python on the job and did that project. That was very rewarding. World Bank was writing research papers and doing operations work, but purely in the education domain. And then I shifted to the IMF because I wanted to do more macro related stuff. So at the IMF, currently I'm in the Asia Pacific Department with the Thailand, Myanmar and Hong Kong teams. And here again, I'm doing more macroeconomic research on inflation, on fragmentation, on corporate market power in these economies, and also helping IMF surveillance for these economies and for these countries. So that's currently what I'm doing now.

Now, not everybody listening. Well, everybody has probably heard of the World Bank. Most people have heard of the IMF. You have 30 seconds on each what each one is and what it's trying to accomplish.

So the World Bank is a development lender where all countries of the world have a certain shareholding and the World Bank has its own capital. And the World Bank's goal of alleviating and eliminating poverty is basically through lending money to government ministries. The World Bank's clients are basically governments, and you execute development projects on the ground, or you give them technical expertise on education, health, all types of topics. The IMF is much more focused and much more purely founded on the principles of macroeconomic assistance and helping countries with their macroeconomic situation. And IMF is more an emergency doctor, whereas World Bank is more a family doctor. So only if a country is facing crises in their macroeconomic situation, whether it's the exchange rate or the balance of payments, will the IMF intervene? So a case in point being 1991, in India, when we had a balance of payments crisis and the IMF intervened. So the IMF is also heavily involved with climate change and more targeted assistance as well. So IMF is again a lender, but more from the macro point of view and created to ensure macroeconomic stability throughout the world.

I'm just asking for whatever comment or perspective you can give to people listening. There are these folks outside these institutions with, by the way, are based in Washington DC, so a big founder and backer of them was the United States and biggest funder is the United States, as far as I know. And most of the heads I think are American. At least one of them has had American heads, at least at one point. So some people are critical. They say, oh, the IMF comes in and puts these draconian corrective measures in and they keep people, you could say, in line by giving them this drug of money and funding and whatever. I think that's probably overly harsh. I know it wasn't the intention of these institutions, but given the counterpoint, what would somebody who's maybe more aware of the good give a balanced perspective on that.

Proportionate to their economic strength? Different countries have different shareholding patterns in both these institutions. Typically, the World Bank is headed by an American citizen, and the IMF is headed by somebody from Europe. So that's been the convention. But on the point of IMF or the World Bank imposing neoliberal agendas or imposing draconian conditionalities, there's obviously been a huge debate. But from the inside, what I see is there's a genuine demand from countries to get the technical assistance and the expertise of both the bank and the fund. And countries on the whole are very appreciative. There's a lot of value that. Both the bank and the fund adds to these countries. So whenever the fund or the bank intervenes now, specific cases will have their own unique constraints and will have their own unique situations. But on the whole, from what I've seen, the countries I've worked with or the countries I have been a part of, there's a deep appreciation and there's a lot of value that both the bank and the fund add to these countries. So when I was working on projects in Bangladesh and Nepal, the World Bank was doing very cutting edge stuff in education and really pushing the intellectual debate on what's the correct and what's the thing that makes sense. And even at the fund, when I'm working with the Thailand of the Hong Kong or the Myanmar teams, the IMF's analytical inputs are extremely important and extremely valuable for these countries in terms of giving them advice, shaping their policies or helping them with technical assistance. Again, it's the same analogy to government bureaucrats. People from the outside think that government bureaucrats are extremely inefficient and they don't have the best intentions or whatever. It's easy to bash the bank or the fund. You'll always see an article in The Economist. You'll always see an article written by somebody who's not deeply involved in that context, and pass comments were my experience. I think both the bank and the fund are doing amazing work and they've added a lot of value, a lot of positive value for the global economy.

So what I want to end on that last few minutes, I think you're kind of a social media maven now, looking at your LinkedIn, you have over 65,000 followers, which I think is pretty impressive, especially on a platform like LinkedIn. Tell us what things are you doing on LinkedIn, how you've built so much following, and then talk about what's next, What are you thinking about or what do you want to devote your life to if it's not the IMF, which it may be?

The LinkedIn thing happened by chance, but once it happened by chance, I very intentionally doubled down on it. So I think I am generally a much more serious person, a much more analytical kind of person. And compared to Instagram or YouTube or these other mediums, I find I can really express my voice on LinkedIn and I can really add value to people on LinkedIn. So the things I post about are very real, very authentic, and I think that's what draws people in. The number of followers or the engagement I get is purely because I'm able to bring out a very authentic, true, genuine stories and concepts and experiences to people. And that's what I think people are craving and that's what people really want. Whether it's helping students with resumes or college applications or networking or writing something on personal finance or economics or generally sharing any life experience anecdote. Linkedin is just a great place. And the other thing that's fundamental about LinkedIn, that is also arbitrage, which I think I've capitalized on well and understood early on, is compared to other social mediums, people are far more scared to post on LinkedIn because if I write something, what will my colleague think? Or I'll probably be judged by my colleagues or my batchmates and stuff. Whereas if you post something on Twitter or Instagram, it's more an entertainment narrative there. But LinkedIn, the good arbitrage is the competition is much less because people are inherently scared to post. And secondly, there's no trolling. There's very civilized conversations. People are putting out very credible information of themselves on Instagram or on Twitter or TikTok. People are putting out more what they want the world to see. They're putting more anonymized information. Linkedin, it's a much more civilized, credible social platform where most people are scared of posting. So if you have that urge in you to post, I encourage all my friends to post because I think all of us have amazing experiences to share.

So web formats work best for you? Just a written post.

I started off with written posts, but I saw in the middle that the people who were posting pictures of themselves and then writing were getting more engagement. So I tried doing that for some time and I still do that. But now I think my content is more 50% is just written posts, 50% is again, just posting a photo of mine that relates to the photo or just to catch the attention of the audience and also do a lot of free webinars. I started doing these webinars 4 or 5 months ago where I would just roll out a Google form and say that, Hey, at so-and-so time on so-and-so date I'll be having a free session on how to network with people. For example, about 400, 500 people would show up for these. And so that again, built a decent following because more and more people would follow me. Another thing I would really encourage and I still try to do is experiment a lot. You don't know what works, so run micro tests on all types of content, all formats of content, all topics you want to write about and see what sticks, see what direction you get pulled into. I still experiment and I still try to play around and see what works.

So what's next? What are you thinking about?

I want to definitely be at the fund for the next two three years, but longer term, I definitely want to try out build a startup of my own and be slightly more entrepreneurial is something I'm moving towards because I just think it's a life experience that is going to teach me a lot and it's a different perspective of seeing the world and being able to build something of your own is something that I feel is very internally satisfying. And I think because of my Marwari genes and because of the family I was brought up in and stuff, I do have the entrepreneurial genes definitely want to give that a try. And America being the best place to have a startup and stuff. I would definitely love to try that, but that's something much more longer term.

I can relate to that. I'm Gujarati, so it's similar business type community and obviously I'm the founder of Ridgewood, which has been now more than 20 years ago. I started it after a career in investment banking. That's when you're ready for it. It's definitely something I'd encourage anyone to do. Well, thank you for taking the time. It's been a fascinating conversation. Thank you for sharing so many insights. We appreciate it.

Thank you so much, Ken, for firstly giving me this opportunity. And I hope your viewers got some interesting stuff from this. Lovely talking to you. And thank you so much for inviting me.

For more episodes of Compound ideas, visit our website at Compoundideasshow.com. For more insights like these and to contribute to the conversation, go to my firm website at Ridgewoodinvestments.com and click on the link to insights, at the top of the page. Also, please follow me on social media. I'm under Ken Majumder on LinkedIn @KenMajumder, Twitter @KMajumder, Instagram @KenMajumder, and on YouTube. We have a new YouTube channel Investing with Ken Majumder.

Ken Majmudar is the founder of Richwood Investments and several other affiliated companies. All opinions expressed by Ken and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Ridgewood Investments or any of its affiliates. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as basis for investment decisions. Clients of Ridgewood Investments and its affiliates may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.