What Sets First-Generation Family Offices Apart from Legacy Wealth

In the early 1980s, when GSK Velu wanted to study pharmacy at Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) Pilani, his mother sold her gold mangalsutra, to pay his admission fees. This was the closest he would come to his dream of becoming a doctor.

Four decades later, Trivitron Healthcare, the company he founded, is valued at around $265mn. Velu is now one of the biggest names in Indian health care.

Like Velu, Kris Gopalakrishnan wanted to become a doctor but could not achieve that dream. Raised in a middle-class home in Thiruvananthapuram, Gopalakrishnan went on to co-found Infosys, one of the companies that put India on the global technology map. His net worth today is estimated at around $3bn.

Across India, similar stories have been playing out in different industries and different cities. Liberalisation created opportunities that had never existed before, allowing a new generation of Indians to build wealth from scratch across fields like technology, entertainment, sports and health care. For many, they would be the first wealthy person in their family’s history.

Both Velu and Gopalakrishnan represent this new class of wealthy Indians. But creating wealth is not the end of their story. It is the beginning of a new challenge—preserving that wealth and passing it on to future generations. For this, they are increasingly choosing to set up family offices.

History is filled with examples of individuals who experienced a meteoric rise to riches only to lose much of their fortune because of poor decisions and inadequate financial planning.

Morgan Housel, investor and author of The Psychology of Money, has also highlighted this challenge. He recalled a session he conducted with American professional basketball league rookies, many of whom had grown up in poverty and were suddenly earning millions of dollars as teenagers.

The purpose was to help them avoid the well-documented pattern of professional athletes going bankrupt. “A very significant percentage of these people who make millions of dollars are bankrupt by the time they’re 30,” noted Housel.

So, the crux of the matter is that wealth is fickle and an individual requires an institutional mechanism to manage it efficiently. Hence, first-gen wealth creators are increasingly choosing to set up family offices over other means of investments.

For first-generation wealth creators, it is particularly complex as they are not just managing money. They are creating structures, governance mechanisms and family institutions that future generations will inherit. For them, the memory of scarcity never fully disappears. It simply changes the way they think about money, risk and legacy.

Money and Meaning

In the late 1980s, when Ronnie Screwvala wanted to start a television production house, UTV, he had his parent’s support. But he came from a lower-middle-class family, and his parents told him bluntly that they cannot bail him out financially if anything goes wrong.

“When you have that kind of an equaliser sentence, your sense of entitlement goes to zero and the fire in your belly goes up to a hundred,” says Screwvala.

This is exactly what sets many first-generation wealth creators apart from those born into wealth. For people who have experienced financial uncertainty firsthand, money is rarely just money. It means security and freedom.

In contrast, for people born rich, money is more likely to be a baseline condition of life rather than proof of survival or success. They place greater emphasis on preserving wealth, managing responsibility and carrying forward family legacy rather than earning it, as per research published by the Financial Planning Association and Columbia Business School.

For Velu, money initially meant survival, but having wealth changed that view. “Money, after a certain extent does not make any sense...and then just passion remains. You go after passion and not money,” he says.

This echoes in Gopalakrishnan’s journey too—from carefully managing money growing up to seeing wealth more as a responsibility. “Today, the concept of money is, I don’t have to worry about money. I see having wealth as a responsibility,” he says.

A responsibility, he adds, to deploy capital thoughtfully and contribute time and resources to solving larger societal problems.

This difference in the concept of money for a first-generation wealth creator also reflects in their outlook towards setting up a family office.

These individuals often look beyond the traditional use cases of a family office of preserving fortunes, managing complexities beyond a single operating business and separate personal wealth from commercial assets.

Why Family Office?

For Gopalakrishnan, the family office began with two simple goals: grow wealth and give back. Both objectives required a structure that could outlast any one individual.

“I need an institutional mechanism,” he says. “Everybody’s life is limited, so now, you have to think about how you institutionalise.” That thinking led to the creation of Pratithi Investment and Pratiksha Trust. One focuses on growing wealth. The other channels capital into philanthropy and research.

A first-generation wealthy individual typically sets up a family office to centralise and institutionalise the management of their wealth. They do not have an existing family system to handle complex finances. This makes a dedicated office essential for coordinating complex investments, managing tax and legal compliance, and mitigating risks.

Family office also serves as a controlled framework to train heirs, run charity projects and smoothly pass wealth to the next generation.

At the Velu family office, succession is already a live conversation. Velu’s daughter, Kavya, has joined the business and is learning directly from her father.

“My dad is clear about succession. So, it’s me and my sister. We feel confident enough to let him guide us on that journey. Wherever he feels our personalities and skill sets would work well, I think that’s sort of what we’ll do,” she says.

But succession is only one part of the story. Family office also gives founders the freedom to pursue ideas that may never fit neatly inside a business plan. Scientific research, health care, sports, education, content creation or social-impact initiatives often find a home here because the founder no longer has to justify every decision to external investors or boards.

That freedom is particularly meaningful for people who spent much of their lives constrained by the absence of capital. A family office does not simply preserve wealth; it gives founders a vehicle to deploy it on their own terms.

Gopalakrishnan has been supporting science, health care and advanced research in India.

Through Pratiksha Trust, founded with his wife Sudha Gopalakrishnan, he has funded initiatives such as the Centre for Brain Research at Indian Institute of Science, focusing on neuroscience, dementia and brain-related diseases, while also supporting artificial intelligence and scientific-research infrastructure.

“If ₹100 is generated in a year, ₹50 goes into growing wealth and ₹50 goes into the philanthropic side, which is into research. So, this way, I have a sustainable mechanism to support research on a long-term basis in an institutionalised way,” explains Gopalakrishnan.

Portfolio Personality

The portfolio of any family office is a reflection of its promoter’s personality. It is often much more than a financial allocation strategy; it is a personal signature. The businesses, asset classes, themes and causes a family office back usually reflect what the promoter has lived, learned and valued over time.

Cricketer Hardik Pandya, who set up his family office recently, has backed a number of consumer and lifestyle brands. His investments include omnichannel fashion brand The Souled Store, kids’ footwear brand Aretto and peer-to-peer lending platform LenDenClub.

More recently, Pandya has also been linked to the gaming industry through his investment in LightFury Games, suggesting that entertainment and gaming may be areas he is open to exploring.

As for KA Enterprises, the family office co-owned by veteran badminton player Prakash Padukone and his daughter and actor Deepika Padukone, the focus has largely been on consumer brands and consumer technology.

They have made selective bets in high-growth sectors such as electric vehicle mobility, space and clean tech. Deepika has also built a parallel social-impact platform through the Live Love Laugh Foundation, making mental-health awareness an important part of her portfolio.

Fashion designer Anita Dongre’s House of Anita Dongre Family Office also reflects her personality through her investments in fashion retail, sustainability and social-impact tech.

These portfolios reveal deeper priorities beyond money. Some lean towards sectors that match the promoter’s sense of purpose, like education, health care, sustainability, sports or cultural preservation. Others may prefer businesses that allow influence, legacy building or generational continuity.

Cricketer Yuvraj Singh, who played a major role in India winning the 2011 Cricket World Cup while battling cancer, invests heavily in the health care/medtech sector through his family office YouWeCan. He also provides direct financial assistance for cancer treatments via his non-profit YouWeCan Foundation.

Similarly, the cricketer MS Dhoni’s family office has invested in digital-insurance platform Acko and multi-specialty hospital Superhealth, among others, signalling his inclination toward health and well-being.

Kuber Bhalla, executive director at wealth-management company InCred Wealth, notes that first-generation wealth creators tend to have significantly higher exposure to private equity and start-up investments, often driven, in part, by a desire to give back to the ecosystem.

“There is typically less inclination toward physical real estate beyond primary residence, a stronger preference for global investments and generally simpler family structures, which reduce the immediate need for complex estate planning. They also exhibit a higher risk appetite and are more open to working with boutique firms,” says Bhalla.

For instance, Screwvala continually invests in sports and storytelling through his family office Unilazer Ventures. He states that when it came to the context of passion projects, his idea was to make sure that it doesn’t become a vehicle where he has to go out and raise money.

“For me, it was primarily going back to creating content and movies after my non-compete with Disney got over. So, my non-negotiable was that I would like to have complete freedom and my own capital. That to me defines passion projects, where you can say no 99 times and yes only once,” says Screwvala.

Over time, the portfolio can show whether the promoter is driven by control, curiosity, impact, prestige or experimentation. That is why family offices are often so revealing: they are not just investment vehicles, but expressions of identity, worldview and ambition.