Alok Sama On The Book That Wasn't

Alok Sama doesn't read non-fiction. The former President and CFO of SoftBank Group International finds executive memoirs “excruciatingly boring”. So, when the first chapter of his book, The Money Trap—that came out late last year—reads like the start of a spy thriller, it figures. It depicts a former Mossad agent meeting the narrator in secret, showing them proof of someone spying on them.

Can he tell me who this was, I ask Sama. Or can he not say? Did he have to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) with SoftBank?

“I did sign an NDA. My book is not a tell-all in that sense. My publisher doesn’t like it when I say it, but if you look at what I’ve told you about SoftBank, I can’t disclose non-public information,” he says. “This is not a book that says I’m going to spill the beans, that I’m going to tell you what you’ve never heard about SoftBank. I’m going to give you my perspective, and hopefully that’s interesting,” adds Sama, whose proximity to the renowned investor Masayoshi Son—founder of the $300 billion SoftBank—has piqued the interest of readers of The Money Trap.

Sama is a poster boy for the global Indian, a banker who could have stepped right out of the world of The Wolf of Wall Street. In the book, this New Delhi boy born to two doctors, enters the private equity world. It’s a world of private jets, golf courses, parties in Ibiza and million-dollar homes around the world. And Sama steps into it as if to the manner born. But be forewarned—despite having completed a creative writing course at NYU, Sama is a cagey and consummate banker. In short, he is the soul of discretion.

“So, I realise that it is very legitimate criticism of the book if you say look, you start off in a way the reader feels this is going to be a whodunit. I mean, call it a cheap trick, but you know it’s kind of what draws in the reader, right?” he ventures. He’s in Greenwich, Connecticut, at the time of our Zoom interview, and the plans are all indeed laid out, like in espionage plots. “We have a home here, a nice cottage in the woods. It’s where I like to be when I want to write. Later today, in the evening, we go to London, and we’ll be there for 10 days and then onward to Mumbai,” he says.

But moving on—Sama is a gold medallist in mathematics from St Stephen’s College, studied business at the Wharton Business School, worked at Morgan Stanley and SoftBank, and has houses all over the world. What’s the reason for all this success?

“That depends on how you define success. I’m not sure you picked up on this, but in my book, I have one of those pivotal moments. There is this bizarre smear campaign, and I have this investigative agency that presents me with this dossier that this other intelligence agency has put together on me. This was an attempt to dig up dirt on me, and they didn’t find anything,” Sama says. He’s referring to the highly publicised campaign to have him removed from SoftBank, which was later revealed by The Wall Street Journal to have been orchestrated by a rival executive.

“What really got my attention was… these guys have nothing, because there’s just nothing that’s interesting. And I point this out to students—when I went out to Harvard Business School and to Wharton (for my book promotion)—saying that, after three decades, if all you’ve done is do deals and make a little bit of money, that’s a kind of a report card in your life that brings a certain feeling of emptiness.”

So, he decided to do a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Creative Writing With his banking background, he must have been very different from other students—I can almost picture him walking to class from his Park Avenue apartment. “You’re close. I had a home on Fifth Avenue. So yeah, there was a difference. I wasn’t sure how to handle that, but I figured I had to just completely own it. You just have to google my profile to realise what my background is. My peer group demographic was late 20s, mostly female, mostly left-wing, frequently Communist. It was an interesting

environment to be thrown into,” Sama tells me.

And then he ended up writing The Money Trap? “Contrary to what a lot of people think, I did not go into an MFA programme with the idea of writing this book,” he clears the air, and continues: “I wanted to write fiction. I wrote this story in the voice of a dog, a dog who sees John Lennon being shot at outside his building.

“I also realised my experiences of being in this world of big money and deals and private jets, with $5,000 bottles of wine, was interesting for a lot of people. And that was my target audience. It’s not people who are in the world of banking or technology, but people in the world out there who haven’t seen this before,” says Sama.

He has three precise pointers of advice for young professionals entering the world of investment: “Pick your mentors and learn from them, because investment is an apprenticeship business. Second, don’t hesitate to ask for advice or engage—I love it when people reach out to me on LinkedIn. I respond to every query.

“Finally, read science fiction if you want to be in the world of technology investing. Like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or The Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald. It opens your mind to future worlds and to stretching the bounds of reality. A lot of what you pick up in business school goes out the door when you’re talking futuristic investing,” he says before wrapping up.