I'm More Than My Surname: Parth Jindal On the Road Less Travelled

Claim to Fame: Son of Steel Tycoon Sajjan Jindal

Right after coming back from Harvard post finishing his MBA in the month of May, Parth Jindal took charge of JSW Cement as Managing Director in June. Cut back to 2013, when Parth finished his Graduation at Brown University, JSW Group bought the Bengaluru Football Club. His father, Sajjan Jindal asked him to run it. Football and Squash lover, Parth became the CEO of Bengaluru FC. The Club won the I-League in its debut season, was runners-up in its second season and won the Federation Cup in 2015. JSW Sports also supports around 36 athletes since 2012 and 12 of those athletes have gone on to qualify for the Olympics. It is alsobuilding a high-performance training center in Vijaynagar for India's top 300 junior athletes. "Currently I am raising funds from various corporate to help run that facility," informs Parth.

Heading the 550 employees strong JSW Cement Parth aims to raise its capacity From 7 mn tons to 17 mn tons in the next two years. He plans to do a listing before 2020 and enhance its product range of Slag cement. Parth is also initialising a new business segment for JSW, which is paint. "We are going to start building our first facility this year. Hopefully by 2018 the company will be up and running," shares Parth.

Besides Sports and Cement what excites Parth is startups. "If you look at the next source of wealth that is going to be created in this country it is going to come from startups," opines Parth. It all started with Parth making some initial investments personally. However, there was no real structure to it. In 2012, Parth funded a sports science Physiotherapy Company called Heal. In the words of Parth, "Whenever I would like a company I would invest. It was very opportunistic." He felt the need thatas a group they should get into something like this. Sharing how he pitched this idea to his father, Parth says, "It was a big challenge to convince my father that we should get into something like this where we are promoting new businesses, new ideas and it's also diversifying riskaway from the family because we are entering spaces that are not linked to commodity pricing." In June, JSW Ventures, the venture capital arm of the JSW Group, received SEBI's approval to begin investing. After the fund has been started the group made two investments. One is Overcart, which is into refurbishing, reselling the returned inventory from all the big ecommerce platforms. The other one is Purplle, which is into beauty products. Its criteria remain new-age businesses driven by technology. According to Parth, a million dollar is the average investment and the aim is to make 15 investments over three years. The 100 crore fund will be deployed over three years and post that it plans to raise funding from outside.

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This article first appeared in the Indian edition of Entrepreneur magazine (August 2016 Issue).