A successful organization is one that leverages technology not only to deliver a sustainable business model but also bring about environmental impact at scale !
Kapil Suhane, our next pathbreaker, currently works at ACE Green Recycling, a lead and lithium-ion battery recycling technology company, where he is responsible for end to end Supply Chain Business for battery materials.
Kapil talks to Shyam Krishnamurthy from The Interview Portal about running a deep tech startup in the Waste Management Sector (right after his graduation from ISM Dhanbad) to bring trust and traceability across the Supply Chain.
For students, the art of connecting the dots forwards and backwards is an extremely underrated skill but it is the single most important skill to be a leader.
Kapil, Your background?
My name is Kapil Suhane. I grew up in an affluent business family where dinner table conversations were always around business, profits, revenues, trading, agriculture commodities, and investments. It was a very typical business-class Baniya family. I grew up in Jhansi, Uttar Pradesh and studied till class 10th in Jhansi itself. My extended family lives in Kanpur.
My dad shifted to Jhansi due to business opportunities there. I was an extremely average student until class 8th and always scored below my peers until I met a great teacher who made me fall in love with Mathematics and Science in class 9th and 10th.
My mom was always under this pressure of what would I do as I was never good at studies, but finally, she found out a teacher who himself was crazy enough that he came to teach me at 4:30 AM for the entire years of 9th and 10th.
This developed a sense of discipline in me towards everything be it my homework, studies, and sleep. I fell in love with Maths and Science because of the way he taught me and his passion for teaching. Plus, my inquisitive nature of questioning everything made us a perfect student and teacher duo. With time, I started scoring well. In fact, I became the top-scoring student across the whole city in my pre-boards.
I became so fluent in everything that I went from no one to the most sought-after student. That feeling of being at the top was the very reason I failed because I became so over-confident that it gave me what I call Bhagwaan syndrome, I scored just 90% in ICSE Boards. My marks fell from 98.5% in pre-boards, and it was just because of one subject, English. I scored a mere 66 in my English Exam. In all the other exams, I got more than 96 marks. What it taught me is to never leave anything for eternity even if it is boring because it will bite you some day. We don’t like doing mundane things. But, we need to do mundane things to become disciplined and understand the very fact that in life we will never get exciting things to do all the time.
Apart from this, my childhood was shaped by business talks at home, my mom’s money management, and music. I am also a level 1 trained tabla and musician, but left it due to academic pressure in class 9. In hindsight, I am not sure what pressure it was? 😛
I went to Kota for my IIT JEE classes. I was studying at Bansal classes.Bansal was a good 2 years of vacation where I didn’t study much at all. I was doing average. I am not sure if it was due to setback from Class 10th or it was my first time moving out of the city, cherishing my personal space. But I made great friends there and in class 12th got a decent 92% and got an 18000 rank in IIT JEE. The thing is that it didn’t bother me, what bothered me was the people saying petty things about me in the affluent society my parents lived in. They said some really shabby things about me to my mom and dad which was non-negotiable for me and that’s when the journey from zero to one again started. I got myself away from all the distraction, blocked all the friends who were not useful for my studies and just talked to my mom and dad once a day for 10 mins. I deleted all the social media and everything. I studied for 8-9 hours apart from coaching classes. I built a small group of two or three people who were great at physics. I was extremely bad at physics. Those friends taught me physics while we went around the park. They helped me with real scenarios and helped me build my understanding in Physics and in return I used to help them in Maths and Chemistry. Today, the same friends are exploring Mars and building a few of the craziest things. What I learnt through this is to always remove clutter from your life and head straight towards your goal.
Well in my drop year, I got a rank of 5712 in IIT JEE, 5000 something in JEE Mains, and 600 in UPTU. I was not satisfied but still it felt like a personal win because I finally made it. Although my teachers always expected me to get under 1500 rank and I did not do that well yet again, but that is fine. The whole point is I tried and gave myself another chance. Until you give yourself chances you will fail, but if you give yourself a chance you might win and everybody is waiting for just that one win.
I went to IIT ISM Dhanbad in 2015.
What did you do for graduation/ post-graduation?
I graduated from IIT ISM Dhanbad in 2019. I did my graduation in Petroleum Engineering. After that, I joined Schlumberger, one of the biggest Oil and Gas companies in the world. I left that company within 1 year as I started feeling suffocated in a fairly large organization where processes were built and I was not loving it. Trust me, if you had met me in my first year and asked me if I would go to Schlumberger and leave the highest paying job at entry level, I would have said NO, but such is the irony it all happened for good. So,why did this happen?
Can you share with us some of the key influences that led you to such an offbeat, unconventional, and unique career in tech sales?
As I entered college, I made a whole group of college friends and started enjoying college life. Since my childhood, I have always been an extrovert. Hence, I made friends with everybody including seniors and batchmates. I joined the Music Club and AIESEC in the first year. AIESEC is a youth organization that sends people abroad on cultural exchange. That is when it bugged me that I should try to go abroad through AIESEC in the summer break of next year and this would be my first ever flight in 20 years. Apart from this, I became a member of AIESEC and started working as a member there as well.
The 1st year went well, I enjoyed it a lot and went to Egypt for the cultural exchange program. There I learnt another thing: Indians going abroad for the first time behaved in a very dramatic way and people coming from across the globe had a great opinion about Indians and their culture. At least that was my opinion while I interacted with delhi boys who were the only people in my group. That was my first time learning about people from LGBTQ++ and their existence in the world, learning about Chinese,Brazilian, Middle Eastern and European cultures all together. It was such a great feeling when I went to a yacht party for the 1st time. For the first time I drank Tequila with a friend from Mexico. It was great and I was all pumped up for my second year of college.
While transitioning to my second year, an opportunity came to be a part of the Core Committee of an event that was to be hosted by AIESEC and over there I was given the responsibility of Business Development. I had no clue about the work and that’s when my grind started. I was given the responsibility to raise a sponsorship amount of 1 lakh from Dhanbad. Dhanbad was not the place where you get sponsorship from, but that was the challenge. From 17th July 2016 till 20th August 2016, I went to around 406 shops, people from the construction sector to hotels to gift shops to sweet shops to get sponsorship and actually, it was my 407th meeting with a hotelier who was old and was a gentleman who actually gave me 10,000 INR for getting T-shirts printed for the function in exchange of his name on the back of those T-shirts. Post that, he introduced me to other people who helped me raise Rs 60,000 more and we successfully executed the event.
That is when my love for sales began and has never stopped till today. Soon after that I dropped music which was a hobby and sales became my first and only love.I was always good at connecting the dots, connecting with people, and understanding their pain points which always helped me to give them a better value proposition.
How did you plan the steps to get into the career you wanted? Or how did you make a transition to a new career? Tell us about your career path.
Fast Forward to that post:
When I became VP for Business Development for AIESEC: we raised 2.5 lacs from Dhanbad for an event that impacted almost 2.5 lakh underprivileged kids. I also worked with a lot of IAS/IPS officers. I completed a lot of drives for Tree Plantation and worked with people in slum areas which helped me understand the grassroots reality of India. Since then, I have been tinkering around ideas that have social impact but have a good business model as well.
In my final year, I raised a total of 1 Cr for the College Cultural festival through the Alumni network and national partnerships. After that while I was the General Secretary for the college, I raised a total of 1.1 M USD for college infrastructure through alumni. This was all possible because of just one core skill which I learnt the hardest way, that is Sales.
Core Learning: Once you start getting better at one core skill, constantly strengthen it. My core skills were sales, networking, and understanding of business which helped me in understanding the problems of people at a personal level. In the startup world, they say Customer Intimacy is key. I strengthened my skills by constantly working on my personality, speech, and learning hard skills such as Excel to quantify my impact.
That was the end of college. Life at Schlumberger began and since I never enjoyed Oil and Gas space, I left it but the process of getting into Schlumberger was truly great. I came back to my early years of discipline. I never understood anything about Oil and Gas because it didn’t interest me though going to Schlumberger was a goal. Hence for 6 months I studied for 7-8 hours daily without talking to anybody and then on Day Zero I got Placed at Schlumberger. Everybody was surprised, I didn’t get a shortlist but that’s when all my networking helped. I called somebody who called somebody and the next thing I knew I was giving GD for Schlumberger Acing it like a Pro.
My internships were always with startups where I was learning and understanding businesses. When I joined Schlumberger after my graduation, I went to Paris for my initiation and felt like it was all a dream. I came back and started learning Oil and gas, but it didn’t interest me at all. Hence, I left in May 2020 and started working with a college senior on an idea of digitizing the complete solid waste supply chain and enabling traceability to it.
We created a world-class patented product, that represented India at Asian Development Bank Technology Innovation Challenge, worked with the World Bank as consultants to the Gujarat Resilient Cities Programme, built a Public Private Partnership Model with ICICI Bank to deploy our technology across Jharkhand, won grants worth 50 lakhs from Govt. of India.
What were some of the challenges you faced ? How did you address them?
But after 2 years of doing it, when we were raising funds, the only problem we faced was no VC wanted to invest in us as it was a business with the government which had long cash flow cycles, and a lot of different types of the network where you needed someone with grey hair, and we were just 25-year olds who were building a good product for Municipal Corporations. Everybody appreciated our work, but nobody supported us because everybody had their own ulterior motives.
Core Learning from my first startup experience: Do not fall in love with your startup. Always think about scalability. Hear feedback and take it sportingly and move on if it’s not working for long. Right Product in a wrong market gets tricky. In hindsight, I now realise that we should have moved out of India and sold our product in SE Asia where waste management is already privatized and everybody wants such digital solutions. This is what I realized after extensively travelling across Asia, Far East for the past 2 years.
How did you get your 1st break?
After working on my startup, I got the job at ACE Green Recycling because Nishchay who is the CEO is an alumni of IIT ISM Dhanbad (2006 batch), knew me as I was the General Secretary for college and had good contacts with the alumni network.
Where do you work now?
After moving out of my startup, I was figuring out exciting opportunities because while working for a startup I realized that I am more like a 0 to 10 person who loves to build companies and take it to a stage where it can be governed by a person who can build processes in the company and take it from 10 to 100.
I currently work at ACE Green Recycling, which is a lead and lithium-ion battery recycling technology company. We license our technology for building plants along with Joint Venture Partners across the Globe mainly US, India, Europe, Far East, SE Asia.
Can you tell us about your role?
I am currently looking at end to end Supply Chain Business for battery Materials and Investments at ACE Green.
At ACE Green Recycling, I currently handle a 10 M USD Trade book of battery materials per annum where I trade Nickel, Cobalt, and Lithium materials across the globe. I work with Supply Chain Partners across India, Europe, Asia to license our technology to them across the lead and lithium ion business. I also work with the CEO on the investments front where we are currently raising a 100 M USD round for our Global expansion out of which we have secured 70 M USD of non-dilutive financing and raising the next 30 M USD in an equity round.
What do you love about your work?
I am extremely passionate about this job because of three reasons :
1) I love trading of commodities, something my father also loves and I guess I have a knack for it because it runs within the family
2) I travel across the globe for deals, and client visits because there is no market within India currently.
3) Working with the shrewdest people who themselves are worth around 50 M USD, understand business inside out, and have been in commodity business for the past 20 years. Learning from them is a delight as apart from work, you also learn and understand their perspectives.
I am able to keep my job because while I do all the good things, profits speak for themselves. If you can generate 10 X the money invested by the company on you, then you are truly an asset.
How does your work benefit society?
We are building partnerships with all the E-Mobility Battery Supply Chain players across the globe in order to solve problems of localisation of the battery material supply chain for the energy security of countries and de-risk all the countries from an extremely dependent Chinese Supply Chain
FYI: ACE Green Recycling has already raised 15 M USD till now and is funded by the top investors across the globe.
Your advice to students based on your experience?
Never regret your actions, learn from them and stand again to fight. To move ahead, winning is the only solution and Yes, everything is correlated somehow. The art of connecting the dots forwards and backwards is an extremely underrated skill but it is the single most important skill to be a leader.
If somebody truly likes to understand what living on the edge is, then be a trader once in life for a good 3-4 years. People either extremely love it or they are not traders because it’s an extremely stressful job.
Future Plans?
Right now I am focusing solely on ACE Green Recycling but in the future maybe 2 -3 years down the line, I would like to do an MBA from Harvard / Wharton / Stanford, although according to my leadership team they think that B Schools can’t teach anything apart from networking. I agree with them. Hence, my reason for going there is to build the next-generation network and think about my next startup venture in that 2 years of vacation.
Building a startup hands on for three!