#44 Eric Savage: Impact in India, the land of entrepreneurs

Eric Savage sees India as the land of the entrepreneur. A place where business can flourish, and where there is a huge potential for positive impact.

Eric is CEO of Unitus Capital, and he’s spent more than a decade living in Bangalore. When he arrived, he helped to found the impact investing firm that works to make capital available to a range of businesses, that have a big potential for positive impact.

He shifted his career from Wall Street finance, to help India’s poorest people have access to basic services. And that’s what Good Future is all about.

On this episode…

We dug into capital controls, the history of microfinance and we then wound back to Eric’s early days when he was working in finance in the US at Salomon Brothers. This is the Wall street firm was the subject of Michael Lewis’s first book, Liar’s Poker, and it was the prequel to the book The Big Short.

Eric ended up at Salomon Brothers only a few years after Liar’s poker was published and we discussed this timeline, the evolution of finance towards the Global Financial Crisis and the new era of conscious capitalism that I’m so interested in.

My key takeaway this week…

“The financial markets have proven to be bad at self-regulating. Solomon Brothers was instrumental in this, unfortunately, in a bad way. In the early 80’s they shifted from being a private partnership, to being a publicly traded company.

I think that was a big moment in the history of capital markets.

It led a big firm from investing its own money, to investing other people’s money. And most importantly, from people getting rewarded as a long-term partner in the firm, and instead, to becoming rewarded on an annual basis in bonuses. So it bred a culture of short-term rewards, rather than long-term.”

Good Future’s Good Books

How Money Became Dangerous

By Chris Ferelus

“This book was published recently. Chris actually worked with me at Salomon brothers many years ago. It’s in the style of Michael Lewis and it captures some really amazing stories. It talks about finance across the last 30 years, and how the financial markets have developed. How these problems have crept up, and it does it through really engaging stories. It’s a fun read. He shares lots of lessons. And I recommend it highly.”