Living Your Ikigai: Pointers From Raja Ganapathy’s Passionate Life

Most of us struggle to find an ikigai – the Japanese term for work that melds passion and skills with what the world needs and more critically, is willing to pay for. Raja Ganapathy belongs to the fortunate minority who can claim to have lived a passionate life, marrying his personal mission with the world’s demands. For those setting out to seek their own ikigais, Raja’s journey offers inspiring pointers.

Root Yourself In Surroundings That Radiate Your Persona

Though Raja’s school life alternated between Mumbai and Chennai, with his father’s Central Government job requiring shifts between both cities, he always thought of himself as a Chennaiite. The modesty and small-town feel of the South Indian city appealed to him. Married early, he and his wife started out with few possessions: “We had almost nothing to be honest.” No air-conditioners, no fridge, not even a dining table and chairs. “We used to sit on the floor and eat. But it was great fun.”

Though, in later years, from a professional perspective, the Maximum City (Mumbai) exerted its tugs, Raja resisted the move for a long period. Eventually, when compelled to shift, he was able to do it on his own terms.

Use Courses To Determine Your Personal Interests

During his MBA in Marketing, Raja had been captivated by the intricacies of consumer behavior. In particular, a textbook by Leonid Schiffman and Leslie Kanuk seemed to lay out the complex forces that lured buyers towards particular brands. Wrangling with his own choices, Raja felt like his heart lay in Advertising. He was intrigued by the manner in which visuals and words could prod particular actions. Fortunately for him, soon enough, he landed a job at Ogilvy.

Since then, he still retains his college-day fascination with language, and its impact on behavior. “Advertising is the purest form of the application of that principle,” he says.

Remain Attentive to Market and Cultural Shifts

Landing at Ogilvy, soon after college, was like being inside a vast and pedigreed University, where Raja had a ringside view to client and market changes. He was also sharply attuned to the morphing culture of the Indian Advertising industry.

In the early 90s, soon after liberalization, the sector seemed to reflect the mores of the Mad Men web series, with some of its lush excesses. While Raja himself was too junior to enjoy the perks – indulgent three-martini lunches, languid networking strolls across golf courses – he chuckles when he recalls the similarities between Madison Avenue in the 1950s and Bandra in the 1990s. It was the era that gave rise to the swashbuckling Piyush Pandey, who is currently the Executive Chairman and Creative Director of Ogilvy India; who ended up changing the shape of the entire industry.

Over the next decade, the industry, along with the country, started going through a cultural upheaval. Like a caterpillar sloughing off its shell, the nation gradually shed its colonized psyche. The tiny English-speaking sliver at the top realized that they could not penetrate the larger market unless they spoke in India’s manifold tongues. “The demand for Indian insights, for penetrating the Indian market became far more important.” Importing American ads was no longer conceivable; besides, such ads could not compete with desi swag.

Take Calculated Risks to Explore Other Careers

Five years into his Advertising career, Raja was tugged by the buzz surrounding dotcom enterprises. Quitting his steady job – a decision that may have been considered impetuous in his cohort – he joined a start-up called Avigna Technologies. He watched the company grow from a five-person garage operation to a 150-person large office, with multiple onsite projects in New York and Washington. Raja himself was deputed to run an intranet project for McKinsey in New York.

Then the dotcom bust brought their business to a crashing halt. Raja recalls being shocked at how quickly everything shut down. One morning, he was headed to the client site to run his project, and by that evening, all had collapsed: his project, his job, his company.

Be Willing To Re-enter Your Earlier Organization or Industry

After the shutdown of Avigna, Raja was one of the fortunate few who was hired back by his previous employer. He credits the late Ranjan Kapoor, the then Chairman of Ogilvy, for his farsightedness and tolerance. Kapoor reached out to Raja and said: “At your age, if you hadn’t done this, I would have held it against you.”

Yet, Raja himself, being a product of previous cohorts, “felt quite foolish. For a long time, I actually hid it from my profile. I was not comfortable saying that I took this step.” It was only later, when he worked at Sequoia, and realized that failure was inevitable in most start-up journeys that he started disclosing his Avigna experience.

Leverage Your Entrepreneurial Drive

Raja was keen to leverage his entrepreneurial drive at Ogilvy. In his second stint with the company, he was made a Founder Member of a new enterprise. Brand David, a spin-off from its parent, was created to handle Indian businesses that the older company could not engage with because of international conflicts.

The David team was asked to grow everything from scratch. Ogilvy only helped with broader inputs and with infrastructural support. Everything else was thrust on the founder team: the cultivation of a distinct philosophy, the forging of a specific culture and brand, the acquisition of new clients.

The big question the team had to answer when meeting new clients was “Why David?” As Raja puts it: “Why Ogilvy was easier. The great David Ogilvy’s principles still operate in its parts. But David was a nothing organization. We had no legacy, no meaning, no clients. We were really starting out small.”

While taking on the Goliaths, the team quickly realized that they needed to stand out, create the kind of “super sticky” impressions that would compel customer recall.

Turn Perceived Weaknesses Into Strengths

Riffing on their smallness, they decided to center their brand identity around their fledgling status: “We bring the perspective of the six-year-old’s innocent eye into the world of communication and marketing.” To clients who dwelt on their lack of experience or customer testimonies, they emphasized their ability to “look at everything from first principles.” The lack of a legacy would liberate them from old ways of thinking and doing.

To reinforce the brand’s character, they created visiting cards that had photographs of each of their six-year-old selves printed at the back. When they walked into a room, to meet with an impatient CEO, whose first question tended to be “Why am I giving you time?”, they laid their visiting cards on the table with the photographs face up.

Even the edgiest of leaders were intrigued by the pictures of five six-year-olds fanned out on their table. A few minutes down the line, they would say: “What’s that? Can I look at it?” It was the kind of opening that the team intended to create. “If you’re able to intrigue the other person, that’s the beginning of a new relationship,” Raja says.

Raja uses such tactics even in his personal life. He often wears T-shirts with snappy one-liners that draw fascinated strangers into conversations. He has forged friendships, all over the globe, with that simple ploy. He has had folks on American streets stop and say: “that’s such a cool T-shirt.”

Trust Your Instinct When Making Career Moves

While at Brand David, Raja received an offer from Deutsche Bank, to head the Marketing function. He was hesitant to move from the relatively free-thinking and inventive Advertising environment to the more conservative confines of a bank. But a meeting with the bank’s decision maker dispelled his doubts. Frank Strauss, who was in his early 30s when he met with Raja, was determined to usher an offbeat thinker with a youthful, nonconformist outlook. Someone who would champion consumer interests above all else.

Raja’s three-year stint as Chief Marketing Officer of Deutsche India ended up being exhilarating. He has realized, in life, that one often has to take “leaps of faith” to challenge and stimulate oneself. He’s a big votary of the gut instinct. He cautions that educational drills and professional practices often disregard one’s intuition. “The most successful entrepreneurs and investors that I know – they listen to their gut.”

Ride With The Zeitgeist

Three years into his Deutsche stint, he was tugged into Sequoia by a headhunter. Eager to traverse a new frontier – Venture Capital was a relatively unknown terrain – Raja acceded to the new role. The CMO’s function in a Venture Capital firm was only skeletally described; even in the US, only a few VC firms fostered such roles. Besides, the Indian market held special challenges. Many of the tech and financially-savvy founders that signed up with Sequoia struggled with marketing. Raja was keen on playing a broader role: to help build Sequoia’s brand in India, and also help with investee brands.

Learn Intensely On the Job

Sequoia ended up being an enormously successful and bracing experience, with Raja staying at the legendary VC firm for more than ten years. He admits that his learning was immense. With increasing attention being paid to the Indian market, Michael Moritz, currently the Chairman of the firm, visited often: “I got to spend time with him, work with him on specific projects. Being exposed to someone like Mike had enormous impact on my thinking. Even today, I quote him ad nauseam – at work, even at home. ”

Raja also watched the Indian start-up landscape shift from old-world businesses – revolving around infrastructure, financial services, consumer and healthcare – to its digitally-powered, tech-intensive phase

Have Fun At Work

More than anything else, he ensured he was having fun. He recalls an offsite in the US, where team members were seated at various tables for dinner. Unbeknownst to Raja, Douglas Leone, who was the head of Sequoia (and still is) was seated to his right. As Raja was talking to his marketing counterpart in the U.S., describing the manner in which the Indian team was more involved in the portfolio, he added: “I’m actually getting paid to do something that I would absolutely do for free.” Leone tapped him on the shoulder and said: “We can absolutely fix that problem for you.”

Overall, during his Sequoia years, he ended up working with some incredible brands like BYJU’s, Freecharge, Cars24, 1mg, HealthKart, Faasos and Truecaller. He was usually engaged with these enterprises when the brand identities were not yet forged. He enjoyed discovering brand attributes with passionate founders, who realized, soon enough, that this wasn’t just about conjuring clever words or witty one-liners, but involved laying a framework for the future.

With BYJU’s, for instance, Raja and Arun Iyer (who was then the Chairman and Chief Creative Officer at Lowe Lintas and is currently a founding partner at Spring) worked with the company for seven years: “Everything you see with regard to the marketing of BYJU’s has happened with me and my partner, Arun. It’s been a great experience with a phenomenal founder.”

Leverage Your Experiences To Forge a New Enterprise

Eventually, all his experiences culminated in the founding of Spring. Partnering with Arun Iyer, whom Raja describes as one of the best creative minds in the industry, and Vineet Gupta, a digital marketing whiz who created 22 Feet, a digital agency that was sold to the Omnicom group, Spring Marketing Capital was set up by the trio with a singular purpose. To leverage the three founders’ combined marketing and brand building expertise and gain a position on the cap table of select start-ups. Instead of merely selling their knowhow for a fee, they felt that ‘a skin in the game model’ would offer greater value to founders and to the Spring team.

“We want to be investors in the most cutting-edge consumer companies of the future. And everything we’re doing is a means towards that end. Nothing like this has ever been done before,” says Raja. So far, Spring has raised a $20 Mn fund that they are deploying across curated investments. Some investments that they’ve already made include Purplle, an ecommerce platform for beauty and personal care, Bewakoof, a lifestyle platform for apparel and accessories, Juicy Chemistry, a young organic skincare and haircare brand and Mosaic Wellness, a community-first healthcare and wellness company.

Create A Distinct Vision

A strong advantage that Spring wields over other Advertising agencies or Marketing consultants is a delinking of their own incentives from higher advertising spends. They are motivated, as a result, to caution founders against inflated spends. Raja has been very galvanized by Nassim Taleb’s book, Skin In The Game. Taleb argues that when someone proffers advice, you need to step back and evaluate their skin in the game. As Raja puts it: “If they have no skin in the game, that advice is worthless. It’s worse when they have an agenda for that advice.”

Spring also has plans to raise different fund products for diverse consumer opportunities at various life stages of start-ups. The long-term vision for the company is that “if you are a consumer company in India, you should feel that having Spring on the cap table gives you an unfair advantage.” While Raja and his founders appreciate that the journey is going to be long and gruelling, they exude a zesty optimism. So far, most partners and interested founders have proactively called in to participate in the venture. So the Spring team is also “super grateful for the goodwill earned with founders and the investor community that has allowed us to build such a strong platform in so little time.”