Family Offices Compete with VCs at Entry. They Win at Exit, says SSV’s Shrishti Sahu

My path was deliberately different from how most second- or third- generation people enter. My father's view was firm: earn your experience outside, prove yourself in industry and only then contribute to what the family has built.

I studied at Warwick, took a dual degree in engineering and business management, and came back wanting to be in technology, not in the legacy businesses.

My first company gave artisans in rural communities a platform to sell online. It became a fintech, Aqaya, which ran from 2013 to 2017 and was acquired by one of the NBFCs [non-banking financial companies] we had worked with.

After that I joined Lumis Partners, a $250mn fund, and was then headhunted to lead Meta's start-up initiatives across South Asia. By December 2019, I had built enough credibility outside the family's shadow to step in. Only then did I go full time into the family office.

In 2017, right after my exit from Aqaya. That was the first time I understood, as an entrepreneur, what liquidity actually feels like. I began consolidating the family's holdings under one umbrella, SSV. The thesis was simple. Our roots are in the automotive, real estate, hospitality and financial services industries. Could we also back the cutting-edge businesses being built around us, and become part of their growth story?

The name Swadharma comes from the Bhagavad Gita: the duty that is uniquely yours to do. I did not want to run the traditional businesses, but through the family office I could do my own duty, making the family's capital more forward-facing.

In 10 years, we have made about 60 investments, with some clean exits that have already returned the principal deployed. Only 10–12% of our capital sits in private markets; the rest is in public markets, for diversification and risk mitigation.

A family office is built on a different instinct from a fund, preservation first rather than creation at any cost. We do not answer to LPs [limited partners], and that changes everything.

A great deal. When I started, family office was barely a term in India. I would introduce us as investors and then spend the next five minutes explaining the second layer.

The very first investment we made from the family office went to zero within two years, and the question in the room was the obvious one: does she actually know what she is doing?

Today my father simply directs everyone who asks him about investing to me. It also takes years to internalise the venture playbook in India. It is not obvious to a 24-year-old fresh off a liquidity event that if you make ten investments, seven or eight may die, and one or two will carry everything. You learn, slowly, that ten years is nothing in this game. You have to think in decades.

Three or four years in, we were clear: pre-seed to pre-Series A, a valuation of ₹100cr or below was our sweet spot on the private side. As the portfolio matured, we began following our winners into Series A and B.

Most of our holdings were in public markets. Through and after Covid, many of those private companies filed to go public, which opened the pre-IPO [initial public offering] window for us.

Today we invest across every stage. We have also formalised the machinery. A four-member investment committee sits on decisions. We get around 3,000 proposals a year, roughly 200–250 a month.

Analysts and associates filter them against a scoring system and a checklist, and only four or five reach the committee in a given month. There is a committee, but the final call rests with me. 

In any ecosystem, in any quarter, only a handful of deals will ever generate a genuinely exponential outcome. Those are the deals you want to be in, and for those, the markup is almost always justified.

Think about Anthropic. At a $100mn valuation, people would have said it was absurd, that AI would never make money. For the earliest backers, that price was a gift. The premium is justified for the very best companies, and not for the other 990.

The trap is that in venture you often cannot tell who your winners are until year five or seven, so plenty of markups accrue to companies that will go nowhere, simply because they keep raising second and third rounds. People start to believe a company is doing well when the reality may be very different.

Increasingly, investors compete for deals, and that now includes family offices. I do not really see other family offices as my competition; rather the ecosystem today allows for healthy collaboration depending on round size and structure.  

So, the question becomes, how do we help a founder in a way the other funds cannot? That is why I launched my podcast, The India Opportunity Show, two years ago. A surprising amount of our deal flow now traces back to something I said on it.  

Funds began investing seriously in content and brand over the last two years; family offices are next. You have to be on top of founders’ minds for them to think of you at all.

We are playing a different game. VCs [venture capitalists] have to return capital to LPs on a clock. Info Edge's stakes in Zomato and Policybazaar only became enormous after 12–15 years. No fund can hold that long. We may compete with the VCs at the point of entry, but only a family office can win the exit race.

If your investing arm sits only in India, you are restricted to the LRS [liberalised remittance scheme] route and the quantum it allows, which will never move the needle for a family office. So, many of us run an arm out of Singapore, a more open structure for accessing global securities, US equities and international start-ups.

The uncomfortable truth is that this is also why capital leaves India. A more tax-efficient structure at home would make it far easier to keep that capital here. Increasingly we’re seeing a big outflow as family offices are also trying to participate in AI [artificial intelligence] and semiconductor stocks globally, specifically the US, Taiwan, Korea.

The signs are already visible. Most people read India's record monthly SIP [systematic investment plan] inflows as a purely retail story. The quieter shift is how much long-term domestic capital family offices now marshal, a pool that barely registered a decade ago.  

I believe the next generation of business building will happen with family offices. A second- or third-time founder increasingly prefers a backer with strategic and operating DNA, someone who understands that real businesses take ten, twenty, thirty years.  

What a founder needs most is customers and revenue, and family offices sit on networks deep enough to become customers themselves. We have done exactly that for companies we have backed. It is a strategic unlock founders are starting to choose.  

In the end, it is the risk-takers who will find the next generation of Indian businesses.

There is a lot of resentment toward family-business children, the assumption that we are spoilt, privileged, untouched by real life. My own path ran through villages, autos, the actual grind. I grew up in Lucknow, where money was never worn on the sleeve, nothing like Delhi, where families can size you up on the spectrum within minutes of meeting you.  

My mother's parents had come over from Pakistan during Partition. My father lost his own father at fourteen and built the business from nothing. His line to us was always, education is what we provide, everything else you fill in yourself and find work that fulfills you.  

My mother's was just as firm: whoever you marry, whoever's daughter you are, you need your own financial independence.  

So, I see money as freedom, the freedom to decide how I spend my day. But from the family-office seat, it is mostly responsibility. You are a steward of capital, not the owner who is meant to enjoy it. We are not on yachts in Greece. We are building businesses, day after day.