Masters in business with Barry Ritholtz on Bloomberg Radio

Sunaina Sinha, Global Head of Private Capital with Raymond James

This is Masters in business with Barry Ritholtz on Bloomberg Radio.

Barry Ritholtz: This week on the podcast. Yet another extra special guest. Is there any other kind? Sina Sinha is the Global Head of Private Capital Advisory group for Raymond James. The Raymond James platform manages $1.6 trillion in total assets and advises on a whole lot more. Sina had stood up her own private capital group, Siebel Capital, which was acquired by Raymond James, and she's been there for the past three and a half years. She works as an advisor for a number of LPs and GPS and pretty much everybody in between. If you're at all interested in the growth in private equity and private capital and how this sector of the investment world is changing and where it might go, I think you'll find this to be a fascinating conversation. Ena has a unique perch in the world of not only venture and angel investing but most especially private equity and private capital. I found this conversation to be fascinating and I think you will also, with no further ado, my conversation with Raymond James. Ena Sinha, Ena Sinha, welcome to Bloomberg.

Sunaina Sinha: Thank you very much for having me, Barry.

Barry Ritholtz: Well, thank you so much for coming. So I was delving through your background and I had to first ask being BS in management science and a master's in engineering in chemical engineering from Stanford where you were a Mayfield fellow and then an MBA from Harvard. What was the original career plan?

Sunaina Sinha: Well, the original career plan very much was to go into the biotech industry, which is what I did after I graduated from Stanford hence the master's in chemical engineering, which was an unusual master's to get after doing your undergraduate in industrial engineering, which was then relabeled as management sciences and engineering at Stanford. But it allowed me to go into the healthcare vertical straight out of Stanford. I worked for two small and medium sized businesses owned by the same investor group and cut my teeth on those. And then realized as a result of that experience, firstly it was phenomenal experience. I was working directly with the CEO and president of both companies, but I realized that the biotech vertical was not my playing field for the long term hence the MBA at Harvard to find another career path and, and that led me into asset management.

Barry Ritholtz: So the really interesting thing I, for reasons between Stanford and the fact that you're here via San Francisco, I just assumed you were living out there, but you're not. You're London based. Yeah. Tell me, how did you end up picking Stanford? How did you end up in California? You

Sunaina Sinha: Know, I grew up all over the world. They call people like me third culture kids.

Barry Ritholtz:Well, when you say all over the world, what I often hear is, you know, India to London, to Boston, New York, California. You seem to have traveled a little.

Sunaina Sinha: Up. So my dad was a diplomat for the World Bank, grew up in Nigeria, in Lagos, in Harare, Zimbabwe, and then in Hanoi, Vietnam. I applied to universities from colleges in the US and also in the UK from Hanoi. There were no places to take the SAT in Vietnam back then, so we flew to Bangkok. My, my dad flew me to Bangkok to take my SAT ones, and then we flew back a few weeks later to take the SAT twos and flew few back. I flew back again to do interviews and I was blessed enough to get into a number of, of great US Ivy Leagues, but ended up choosing Stanford because even then Barry, I knew I was an entrepreneur at heart. I wanted to build businesses, scale businesses, and help other people scale their businesses. And Stanford had that rag magic between entrepreneurship and technology and, and the nexus of, of starting to grow things, which is what I wanted to learn most.

Barry Ritholtz: We always pay attention to regions where there is a pool of capital, a world class educational institution and a, a private sector that can combine all three. There's no doubt Silicon Valley and Stanford is, is one of the leading places. So if that's what you wanted to do, you certainly picked, well, how did you end up back in London as, as where you wanted to live?

Sunaina Sinha: Yeah, so I had the most incredible experience at Stanford. Ended up working in the Bay Area straight after that, still very close ties to Stanford, was still teaching a class there over even after graduation and, and working with a bunch of professors out there at the time. When it came to picking where I wanna do my MBA again, I had the choice between the Stanford of the East as, as I call Harvard Business School, but also to go back to Stanford. And I knew that if I didn\u2019t leave then I may never leave the Bay Area. It\u2019s such a special place and such a special bastion and ecosystem of entrepreneurship and, and technology and growth and ideas. Made the decision to leave just to try something new at that point, went to Harvard for my MBA and then had made the ch his choice at that point to switch out of biotech and interviewed with a whole bunch of of firms and ended up getting into the hedge fund world, doing capital raising for two large hedge funds. And one of them Brevin Howard would, was headquartered in London. So moved over to London back in 2009 and the rest is history. Have been a resident of London. My family would argue with you, Barry, and argue with anybody who asked them that I live on a plane \u2019cause I manage a global business over seven offices, sixth of which happen to be in the US. So I\u2019m stateside a lot and also travel the rest of Europe, but home very much is London today. So

Barry Ritholtz: I wanna rewind a little bit bit, I, most people, I would imagine, think of angel investing very different than private equity investing. One is you're betting on a team, you're betting on a founder and some innovative new idea where there may not even be a market for that sort of thing yet, as opposed to taking existing company and management team and product and saying, here's how to level up, here's how to make this more productive, efficient, and really reach your potential. What's the overlap or what's skills you bring from one to the other?

Sunaina Sinha: Well, I think the most important skill I bring is the fact that I\u2019ve started my own business, grown it from scratch and sold it to a Fortune 300. So I\u2019ve, I\u2019ve seen all legs of this journey.

Barry Ritholtz: So not just an investor, but an operator

Sunaina Sinha: As well by an operator and a grower of, of her own business. So that\u2019s the first thing. The second thing is, you are absolutely right Barry. The muscle it takes to grow from zero to 10 or revenue or zero to 10 of EBITDA is very different from the journey that takes 10 from 10 to a hundred and a hundred to a billion. These are different muscles and these are different levers in the business, but also levers in mindset. I\u2019ve done zero to 10 quite a few times. So in my angel investing businesses, it was very much that, hey, how do we get from zero to 10 of ebitda that takes a certain amount of nimbleness, hunger, agility, scrappiness. And I love that, having done that myself, I know what that feels like. I can relate to the entrepreneurs, I can help them duck and weave through whatever\u2019s coming at them.

Barry Ritholtz: I'm, I'm sensing the word pivot coming.

Sunaina Sinha: I'm not gonna use it \u2019cause you used it already, but you've gotta be able to figure out what I call the incomings. It\u2019s, life is throwing a lot at you. The market throws a lot at you and what are you gonna ignore and deflect and what are you gonna say? Okay, that\u2019s the signal from this noise. That\u2019s where I double click. That takes a pattern recognition that I have now that said, over the last few years, once I\u2019ve sold my business to Raymond James, I\u2019m doing that other sec, second leg of the journey. How do you take something that\u2019s established, growing, proven and really scale it? And that\u20