Founders: Sumant Sinha's bet on a greener India

**Leanna Byrne** (0:01)
Welcome to Founders from Business Daily on the BBC World Service. I'm Leanna Byrne, and today I'm talking to Sumant Sinha, the founder of Renu, one of India's largest renewable energy companies. And he's been reshaping the nation's energy future one gigawatt at a time. Welcome to Founders, how are you doing today?

**Sumant Sinha** (0:19)
Thank you so much, Leanna, for having me on the show. I'm doing terrific, thank you.

**Leanna Byrne** (0:24)
It's a pleasure having you.
You are one of those founders whose work touches millions of people's lives, even if they don't necessarily know your name. You began your career in finance, working in New York and London, before walking away from the corporate world in your 40s to make a bet on renewable energy. In 2011, you founded Renew with the ambition of helping transform India's energy system. Today, it's one of the country's largest renewable energy companies, generating 1.8% of India's electricity and playing a major role in one of the world's biggest clean energy transitions. How do you feel listening to all of that?

**Sumant Sinha** (1:01)
It's actually a pretty surreal thing to listen to it because when we started off, our ambitions were a lot more modest, but it's really good to know that over the last decade and a half, we've been able to have some impact in a positive sense.

**Leanna Byrne** (1:16)
Is it right to say you didn't come from an entrepreneurial family? Your father was a civil servant and later a politician, and then your mother built a career as a writer. Was business ever discussed around the dinner table?

**Sumant Sinha** (1:27)
No, it wasn't, Leanna. That was really interesting. In my family, I was the first person to do an MBA, or even consider therefore a job, not in the government.
When I started off thinking about doing something on my own entrepreneurial, then it was something which was quite new, quite novel in my family. Nobody would have been surprised if I had chosen a career in the civil service, or if I had decided to become a politician. In my father's footsteps, that would have been entirely natural. But I wanted to really follow my own path, and becoming an entrepreneur, I felt was something that could take me in that direction.

**Leanna Byrne** (2:02)
Was there anybody who taught you about money as a child, and making money, and that kind of entrepreneurial spirit?

**Sumant Sinha** (2:10)
Yeah, not really. Now that you asked me that question, not really. I think I learned it along the way as I went. Of course, in my corporate career, and in my investment banking career, I came across a lot of people running corporations, doing it successfully, and that really taught me what it took to create value, why people invest in companies, why investors invest in companies, what it took to create value in them, and how to do that. So getting that exposure during my corporate life was actually very useful because it taught me how companies actually get into business areas, how they run businesses, and how value is truly created.

**Leanna Byrne** (2:49)
Now, your dad, he became a finance minister. Did that teach you a lot about leadership?

**Sumant Sinha** (2:56)
In some ways it did, but in some ways also not because in my family, everybody pursues their own path. Most of the time that my father was the finance minister, I was actually not in India. I was actually outside of India at the time.

**Leanna Byrne** (3:11)
It's interesting, sometimes people rebel against what their parents are doing because you see what perhaps politics or being a writer is doing and you say, actually, I don't really want to go down that path, maybe that made you more or less interested in government.

**Sumant Sinha** (3:25)
In some ways, yes, but in some ways, it was also very attractive because obviously I'd seen my father's very successful political career. And secondly, obviously he had a lot of connects and so on. So it might have been easy for me to, it might have been easier for me to get into politics.
But eventually I thought it's somebody else's path. And I wanted to follow my own path and create my own journey. And that to me really was the most exciting thing I could do with my life.

**Leanna Byrne** (3:51)
Tell me about when you enrolled in university. It's quite an interesting story there that you were about to go somewhere and then ended up going somewhere else. And actually that was one of the luckiest accidents of your life.

**Sumant Sinha** (4:02)
All of these things sometimes play out, and I've just said it in a bit.