Kuntal Shah is a partner at Oaklane Capital, co-founder at Needle.ai, and a board member at Flame University. An electronics engineer by qualification, Kuntal bhai is a first-generation entrepreneur, a business leader and a prominent value investor with three decades of experience spanning various aspects of the capital market.

I look up to him as a fountain of knowledge and wisdom, especially when it comes to investing, business analysis and the economy. I’ve had the opportunity to learn from him and his experiences, through his various talks and presentations, and I must thank him for all the wisdom he has shared over the years.

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William Green is the author of Richer, Wiser, Happier: How the World’s Greatest Investors Win in Markets and Life. Over the last quarter of a century, William has interviewed many of the world’s best investors, exploring in depth the question of what qualities and insights enable them to achieve enduring success. He has written extensively about investing for many publications and has been interviewed about the greatest investors for magazines, newspapers, podcasts, radio, and television. He has also given many talks about the lessons we can learn from the most successful investors, not only about how to invest but about how to improve our thinking.

Born and raised in London, William was educated at Eton College, studied English literature at Oxford University, and received a Masters degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

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Vinod Sethi served as Managing Director of Morgan Stanley Investment Management, until February 2001 and served as its Chief Investment Officer and Portfolio Manager for 12 years. He is a graduate in Chemical Engineering and holds a degree in B. Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology Mumbai and an MBA in Finance from Stern School of Business, New York University.

Vinod has maintained a low public profile all these years, but he is a veteran in the Indian equity investment space with an experience of more than three decades. The little I have read and known about him, I find a man who has not been just a multidisciplinary thinker but also a true Karmayogi who has combined his inner voice at a number of times with mindful decisions and rightful efforts.

When I was studying about Vinod’s life and experience, I could remember a 1910 speech delivered by the former US President, Theodore Roosevelt and which was titled The Man in the Arena. Roosevelt said and I quote, “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.”

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Radhika Gupta is the Managing Director & Chief Executive Officer at Edelweiss Mutual Fund. Radhika started her career with McKinsey and later switched to Wall Street, joining AQR Capital. She then moved to India in 2009 to start Forefront Capital Management, the first registered hedge fund in India, which was acquired by Edelweiss Financial Services Limited in 2014. Radhika is a graduate in Management and Technology programs from the University of Pennsylvania, with joint degrees in Economics from Wharton in addition to Computer Science Engineering from Moore School.

Radhika was born to a diplomat father who was an Indian Foreign Service official. With her family, she moved across continents. She was born in Pakistan, where she had complications at birth, and ended up with a broken neck which she describes is a “weird tilt” to her head.

While researching about Radhika for this conversation, I went back again and again to this beautiful thought from Haruki Murakami’s book Kafka on the Shore, where he wrote and I quote –

“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step. There’s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That’s the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.

And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. But once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”

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Mohnish Pabrai is the founder and Managing Partner of Pabrai Investment Funds and the author of two amazing books – The Dhandho Investor, and Mosaic: Perspectives on Investing. He is an engineer by training and was running an IT services firm in the 1990s before starting to manage money.

Mohnish is an outlier in the world of investing given that he is a rare investor who has chucked ego out of the door as he calls himself a shameless cloner. He has in fact been quoted as saying, “I’m a shameless copycat. Everything in my life is cloned…I have no original ideas.”

One of his favourite investors is Nick Sleep of Nomad Investment Partnership who, as Mohnish has said, has transformed his investing style. In one of his letters for Nomad Capital, Sleep wrote, and I quote, “Investing is a wonderful, thoughtful, adventure but it can also be self-centered, a tendency that can be reinforced by the wealth that can follow. We think it is true that, once past X-amount, real meaning comes with reinvesting in society through charitable giving, which can also be a thoughtful, challenging, wonderful adventure, but with the added bonus that it feels like the world working properly.”

This description fits Mohnish to the tee, given that he also runs the Dakshana Foundation that provides comprehensive scholarships and support for very impoverished and very bright kids to undergo 1-2 years of intensive coaching before taking the IIT entrance exam in India. In short, he is transforming the lives of countless kids pulling them and their families out of poverty by giving them opportunities that might otherwise be unthinkable.

In today’s show, among other things, we are going to talk about the biggest lessons Mohnish has learned from the people with whom he has been the closest in life – like his father, Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Nick Sleep, and Guy Spier.