Surviving terror, investing in hope: How entrepreneur Shiv Puri turned survival into purpose and prosperity

Straits Times

28-06-2025

Mr Shiv Puri, a philanthropist and the founder and managing director of TVF Capital Advisors, at Sentosa Golf Club on June 23, 2025. ST PHOTO: GAVIN FOO
Wong Kim Hoh meets... Surviving terror, investing in hope: How entrepreneur Shiv Puri turned survival into purpose and prosperity
Meet Mr Shiv Puri and you might think he has breezed through life, helped along by luck and a few well-timed tailwinds.
The 48-year-old entrepreneur and philanthropist laughs easily, tells great stories and carries the steady calm of someone who has seen the extremes of human experience and lived to tell the tale.
Behind the easy charm is a mind forged by discipline – on the golf course, where he was a teenage amateur champion; in the boardroom, as founder of boutique equity firm TVF Capital Advisors; and most profoundly, in the face of mortality, having survived the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks. The last experience reshaped his outlook and brought a deeper purpose to his pursuit of success.
Now a Singaporean, Mr Puri was born in Mumbai but moved to New Delhi when he was a child. His entrepreneur father, who left a stable job to start a real estate business, and his mother, a homemaker, raised him and his older sister in what he describes as a 'very normal upbringing'.
But normal is relative. Even as a child, he was 'very driven to want to do something on my own'.
At 11, he started his first business: buying cricket cards wholesale and selling them to classmates, undercutting the vendor outside his school. The profits, he recalls, were 'great money for a kid', enough to supplement his meagre pocket money and fund fast-food treats.
Around the same age, he discovered golf. His father had joined a club, and young Shiv tagged along, quickly becoming hooked.
'Golf is a mental sport. It's all in the mind,' he says.
By 15, he was playing internationally, and at 17, he represented India at the World Schools Golf Championship in St Andrews, Scotland, the sport's hallowed ground and the oldest golf course in the world.
Golf, he explains, is less about beating others and more about 'competing against the course'. It taught him resilience. He says: 'If you hit a bad shot, it's over, it's behind you... don't dwell on the past. You can still regroup and have a good round.'
These lessons – patience, focus and the ability to recover from setbacks – would later become the bedrock of his investment philosophy.
When it came time for university, he set his sights on the United States, a bold move in the mid-1990s, when few in his family had ventured so far.
His parents agreed, on one condition: He would study engineering. 'I had no idea about engineering, but I said yes,' he says.
At the University of Pennsylvania, he went a step further, landing a spot at the prestigious Wharton School and juggling a dual degree in systems engineering and finance.
'I had to do the engineering degree to make mum and dad happy,' he says with a laugh.
It was at Wharton that he stumbled upon the writings of Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, the minds behind American multinational conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway. Their no-nonsense wisdom and long-term investing philosophy struck a chord and would go on to deeply shape his world view.
To save on tuition, he crammed five years of coursework into four. Despite the punishing schedule – 'in my final semester, my friends were taking two classes... I had seven, plus golf' – he thrived. Playing off a handicap of one, Mr Puri was part of the team that led Penn to its first Ivy League championship in 66 years.
By the time he graduated in 1998, one thing was clear: Engineering had sharpened his problem-solving skills, but his heart was in finance.
He landed his first job at investment bank Morgan Stanley in New York, working in private equity, ironically, in real estate.
'My dad was very happy,' he says.
The hours were brutal, the learning curve steep, but the experience invaluable. Yet, after two years, he craved more than just 'crunching numbers and thinking about Excel sheets'. The lure of Silicon Valley – and the dot.com boom – proved irresistible.
He joined Crescendo, a venture capital firm, just as the tech bubble was inflating.
'We'd make investments, and the value would shoot up 30 times in a year. I thought, 'Making money is so easy!'' he recalls, with a wry smile.
After the dot.com bust, Mr Shiv Puri realised that venture capital – picking winners from a sea of business plans – was not where his edge lay.
ST PHOTO: GAVIN FOO
Then came the crash. 'In one year, I saw people I thought were the best investors lose everything. That was the single best risk management lesson I've ever had. No textbook could teach me that.'
'Even today, when there are market bubbles or exuberance, that risk filter subconsciously is always there,' he adds.
After the dot.com bust, Mr Puri realised that venture capital – picking winners from a sea of business plans – was not where his edge lay.
In 2001, he joined Bain Capital in Boston, this time focusing on public equities.
'Six months into the job, I knew this was what I wanted to do forever,' he says.
The appeal? The ability to analyse established businesses, look beyond short-term noise and invest with a long horizon.
But the entrepreneurial itch returned. In 2004, Mr Puri launched his own fund, TVF (The Voyager Fund), with a modest pool of capital of US$5 million and a simple philosophy inspired by Mr Buffett and Mr Munger: 'Play long-term games with long-term people.'
He sought investors who were willing to commit for years, and focused on businesses he could hold for a decade or more.
'Compounding is everything,' he says. 'All good things happen because of compounding, whether it's wealth, health, family or relationships.'
The approach was unusual in the world of public markets, where most investors chase quick returns. Asked how a 27-year-old resisted the allure of fast money, he says: 'There's a lot of noise and turbulence when you're flying at a certain level but if you fly slightly higher, it's actually calmer. And you can see the horizon better.'
Mr Shiv Puri with the late Mr Charles Munger, vice-chairman of American multinational conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway, in 2019.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF SHIV PURI
Word spread. Institutional investors – family offices, college endowments, even a sovereign wealth fund – came knocking. Today, the company manages more than 150 times its original capital, with a team split between Singapore and India.
TVF's approach is resolutely bottom-up, focused on sectors like financial services, healthcare (especially hospitals), technology and consumer discretionary, particularly in India and South-east Asia. Key investments which the company has held for more than a decade include Max Healthcare, a major player in India's healthcare sector; Info Edge, an early-stage tech company that grew into a big online classifieds business; and Bajaj Finance, a non-banking financial company with a market capitalisation that has gone from US$3 billion in 2015 to US$65 billion (S$83 billion) today.
'We look for businesses that can scale, maintain quality and have a long runway for growth,' he says.
'Patience is active, very active endurance, knowing that there's a goal, knowing that you're making progress but it's not immediate,' he says sagely.
He insists on getting to know founders deeply, sometimes over decades, before investing.
'It's not just about the person at the top, but the culture within the firm,' he says.
If golf taught him patience, and the dot.com crash taught him risk, it was the Mumbai terror attacks of 2008 that taught him perspective.
On the night of Nov 26 that year, Mr Puri, his wife and two friends were having pre-dinner aperitifs at the Taj Mahal Palace hotel's Harbour Bar when gunfire erupted.
'At first, we thought someone had dropped a lot of plates,' he recalls.
But the reality soon became clear. Drawing on his knowledge of the hotel's layout – he got married there a year earlier – he led his group through kitchens and corridors, seeking refuge.
They hid in the chef's office, lights off, chairs braced against the door, as terrorists stalked the hallways. At one point, he heard a terrorist outside the door asking a hotel employee if there were guests inside.
'At that point, the terrorists were not shooting the servers, waiters or chefs unless they came in the line of fire. They wanted to shoot the guests, the foreigners, people who would make headlines. Luckily, the employee said there was no one inside.'
Later, a heroic chef – who unfortunately died in the course of the night – led them to a business lounge packed with 150 people. When an evacuation was attempted, the first 30 people in line were gunned down. Mr Puri and his wife and friends were just four places behind.
'It was pure luck,' he says quietly.
They spent the night lying flat on the floor, frozen as gunfire echoed around them, until commandos finally rescued them at dawn.
'I always had an innate belief that it was going to be okay,' he says. His wife, meanwhile, could think only of their five-week-old baby at home. After the incident, she struggled to leave the house for months, but Mr Puri went back to work two days later.
The experience was transformative. 'After that, nothing in business, no market crisis, could come close. It put everything in perspective.'
His brush with death was a turning point, he says.
'I became much more deliberate about purpose. Wealth creation has to have a purpose. For me, that's making an impact, especially in education and healthcare,' says Mr Puri, who also set up his own family office, Vesta Global Capital, in 2015.
Over time, he channelled his energies into philanthropy, especially in education.
'Education can really change lives. It's the best form of pay-it-forward,' says Mr Puri, who, among other things, helped scale Prayas, a non-governmental organisation that runs after-school programmes for disadvantaged children in Delhi, and co-founded Ashoka University, now India's largest liberal arts institution.
His involvement goes beyond funding. He is actively building bridges between Ashoka and the National University of Singapore (NUS), fostering student exchanges and entrepreneurial internships. In Singapore, where he moved to after the Mumbai attacks, he also sits on the international advisory council of the NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, mentoring young doctors and entrepreneurs.
Mr Shiv Puri planting a tree in 2016 at Ashoka University, which he co-founded.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF SHIV PURI
Healthcare, particularly eldercare, is his next frontier.
'How do you age gracefully? It's about finding purpose, getting respect and still feeling like you're a valuable member of society even though you're not working. It's a combination of all these things,' he says.
For insights into long-term thinking, he studies Mr Buffett's annual letters. For perspective, he turns to Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, a collection of writings on Stoic philosophy. Among other things, Stoic philosophy focuses on staying grounded, resilient and at peace by focusing on what you can control and letting go of what you can't.
Despite the constant drumbeat of bad news and global woes, the father of two teenagers prefers to remain optimistic.
'Civilisation requires trust. I think optimism is a default setting. It doesn't mean you're being naive. But I think people are far too pessimistic, especially in the investing world.'
He adds: 'Human ingenuity cannot be underestimated. And despite all we have endured in the past, we are still living in the most prosperous time on earth.'
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