ThangamCapital

Patient capital for hard problems.

A family office · The Kerala coast

The founder

Chris Philipose

Formed by a flat in Mumbai, a hill behind a lake, and two parents who never kept score.

He has built companies and sold them, run engineering inside very large ones, and been wrong expensively enough to write it down. This office invests his own money and sends his own engineers, for reasons that begin in that flat.

I · Four hundred miles from home

Chris grew up in Mumbai, the only child of a civil engineer and a woman who was writing her doctoral thesis when he was born. The family had come to the city the way lakhs of families come to it: with a job, a language that was not the one on the street signs, and no relatives within four hundred miles.

What they had instead was a flat, a telephone, a kitchen, and a habit older than any of them. The telephone was the only one on the landing, and the neighbours came to use it. The kitchen fed whoever was ill, whoever was sitting an exam, whoever had turned up. Nobody called it anything. In an unknown land, friends become family, and he watched that happen in real time through his whole childhood. It remains, he says, the most useful thing he knows about human beings.

That flat was the first family office he ever saw.

II · The two chairs

An engineerand a scholar.

His father

The engineer

He built the parts of structures that nobody photographs. He came home from a full day, most of it standing, and sat down to check the mathematics the way he checked everything in his working life: completely. There was no partial credit in that house, because there is no partial credit in a structure.

When the neighbours came to use the telephone in the hall, he let them, every time, without once making anybody feel the size of the favour. For years he drove his son to meetings and waited outside, and it was never discussed as a favour either. A favour that is felt is not a favour. It is a debt with better manners.

His mother

The scholar

She was at the desk in the dark when he was four, writing her thesis longhand. She did not send him back to bed and she did not stop working. She pulled up a second chair, gave him a blank sheet of paper, and they both worked. She taught him at night after her own day, and a chapter was finished when she was satisfied, not when he said so.

And she fed people. Neighbours, friends, anyone ill in the building; people who had not asked and could not repay. Out of what she had, never past her own floor, and never keeping score. The instruction, he says, is to stop keeping score, not to stop having a floor.

III · The hill

“In an unknown land,friends become family.”

Behind the lake at Powai the ground climbs past the IIT campus and keeps going, and in about forty minutes the noise of the whole enormous city drops away. He first went up it at eleven, because he had won something and could not tell anybody about the part of it that frightened him. He went up every time something broke afterwards, and came down each time with one sentence. The rules of this firm are mostly those sentences.

IV · The formation

What it tookto get here.

  1. Eleven

    A school strung with lights.

    The Dr. Homi Bhabha Young Scientist award, the first in his district. The principal had the whole school decorated with lights, the way you do for a festival. He learned what accomplishment feels like on the far side of work, and has chased that feeling, correctly, ever since.

  2. Engineering

    No godfather.

    A startup joined in the second year and left six months after graduating. No uncle in the industry, no family friend who made a call. Whatever he has, he got by working for it and by watching other people very closely: slower than his peers, and harder to knock over, because nothing under him was ever borrowed.

  3. The building years

    A second company, then the very large ones.

    Built from nothing and eventually let go of. Then years running engineering inside very large companies, learning how enormous things actually work, which is not at all how they are described.

  4. The move

    An investor’s confidence is not a commitment.

    A small company with a very large investor behind it; assurances that were sincere and were not a structure; a whole family moved across the country on them. It came apart within months. His father, unwell, prayed for him anyway, and died four months after he left.

  5. The medal

    Topping the stream, carrying all of it.

    Eighteen months later he topped his stream and took a gold medal from the hands of the Governor. The last time he had stood in front of a dignitary for something he had worked at, he was eleven, and his father was in the audience.

  6. Now

    His own money, his own engineers.

    Research in artificial intelligence in a lab he funds himself, and this office, which invests his own capital and sends his own engineers. Real money, and not all of the money: sized so that if it goes to zero nobody’s life changes, and he can try again.

V · What it made

Every rule of the firmwas paid for first.

An investor’s confidence turned out not to be a commitment.

Our commitments are written down, our own money goes in first, and we are on the register before the round has a shape.

A door somebody else opens has somebody else’s name on it.

Every account, every key and every line of configuration belongs to the company from the first day.

He had no godfather.

We make the call. Introductions that are meetings, not names in a spreadsheet.

The flat fed whoever came.

A company we back gets a place to work, people on the ground, accounts and law, engineers at the stand-up, and a seat at the table for as long as it needs one.

A risk you can survive is an investment. A risk you cannot survive is a wager.

Every position is sized so that a loss changes nobody’s life. The book is small on purpose.

Inheritance is not a bloodline.

Whoever carries this firm forward will be whoever is most capable of carrying it, and that will not be decided by a surname.

VI · How the family comes together

Whoever needs itis looked after.

Three generations, one habit. It was never written down because it never needed to be. It is written down here because a founder should be able to hold us to it.

I

The grandfather’s table

Whoever sat down was fed. Not a story about generosity in this family; simply what is done.

II

The parents’ flat

A telephone lent without a ledger, and food cooked for people who had not asked and could not repay. Friends became family, four hundred miles from home.

III

The family’s office

For centuries the family gave the Saint Thomas Christians their archdeacons: the people who looked after everyone’s everyday affairs.

IV

The firm today

An office, people on the ground, accounts and law, engineers at the stand-up, introductions, a board that turns up, and partners who take a founder’s call.

Sit down

Not a holding?Write anyway.

We read every note and answer every one within a week. If we are not the right investor, we say so, and where we can we say who might be. That is not a policy. It is the flat with the telephone, and it is simply what is done.

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