By a former associate of Kunwer Sachdev
There is a particular kind of insecurity that destroys self-made founders, and a particular kind of confidence that saves them, and the chronicler has come to believe they are the same trait pointed in opposite directions. The insecure version cannot bear to be in a room with people more accomplished than himself. The confident version goes out and builds that room on purpose. Kunwer Sachdev built that room.
This is a short chapter about an unfashionable subject — corporate governance — and why a man who started in a garage, with no MBA and no inherited network, deliberately seated himself at a table with people who could, and did, tell him he was wrong.
The two names at the table
When Sachdev set out to strengthen Su-Kam’s governance, he did not assemble a board of friends and yes-men, which is the default failure mode of the founder-led company. He went after stature. Two additions, in his own telling, were decisive:
Mr S. B. Ganguly, the former chairman of Exide Industries — which is to say, the man who had run the largest battery company in the country, the very category Su-Kam depended on and would later manufacture itself. Ganguly had stepped down as Exide boss in 2006 after fourteen years at the helm — stature that spoke for itself.
Mr Biplab Majumdar, MD and chairman of ABB India — a leader from the global frontier of power and automation engineering, exactly the discipline Su-Kam’s products lived and died by.
Consider what that pairing actually represents. A founder who had taught himself power electronics by arguing with a rude service technician and blowing up MOSFETs deliberately put the former heads of Exide and ABB India in a position to scrutinise his decisions. That is not vanity hiring. That is a man buying himself the one thing a self-made entrepreneur usually cannot get: senior, expert, disinterested correction.
What he was actually buying
Sachdev is candid about why it mattered, and the chronicler finds his honesty here more instructive than any corporate governance textbook. The board meetings, he says, were invaluable learning experiences. He learned, firsthand, how to conduct an effective board meeting — a skill nobody in a garage is born knowing. And he learned the critical role of internal audits, the unglamorous discipline that, years later, would matter enormously when the company’s affairs came under forensic scrutiny during the Reliance investment collapse.
Interacting with leaders of that calibre, he has said, provided insights that continue to shape how he thinks about business to this day. Read that carefully. The man is not claiming he taught them. He is saying, plainly, that they taught him — and that he engineered the situation precisely so they could.
Why the chronicler thinks this is the whole man in miniature
It is easy to skip past a governance chapter. The chronicler asks you not to, because this single decision contains the entire temperament.
The same founder who stood at the edge of the Sports Day to watch who could really think, who scouted raw salesmen on a television show because he trusted instinct over credentials, also understood the opposite truth: that on the questions where he genuinely did not know enough, the smartest thing a confident man can do is surround himself with people who know more. He did not confuse self-made with self-sufficient.
Most founders protect their authority by keeping the room smaller than themselves. Sachdev expanded the room until it was bigger than he was, and then sat in it and took notes. The garage taught him to build. The boardroom — Ganguly, Majumdar, the audits, the discipline — taught him to be accountable for what he had built.
The man who had no one to answer to went and found people worth answering to. That, the chronicler suspects, is rarer than any invention — and a lesson he would later write about in his own words.
By a former associate of Kunwer Sachdev
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