“In the last match, Rohit Sharma didn’t play well,” Shah said. “Is he one of the worst cricketers in the world today?” The room laughed because everyone understood the move before he finished it. A single bad innings is not a verdict on a career, and a bad quarter is not a verdict on a market. It was the kind of answer that lands harder than a statistic, and it was exactly what the evening had been built to produce.
The occasion was the third edition of Take and Counter Take, curated by Kotak Private Banking and held in Bengaluru for the first time. The platform facilitates a candid exchange of views and counter-views on a single relevant topic, so the investors in the room leave with a deeper, clearer understanding than they walked in with. This time the question was one that has quietly unsettled the logic of wealth creation itself. For decades, the public markets were the great engine. You found a promising company, bought into its growth, and rode it as it scaled. But companies now stay private longer, raise larger rounds without ever ringing an exchange’s bell, and often do their most dramatic value creation before the public gets a look. So: is the future of wealth creation shifting from public markets to private?
Two vantage points, chosen for friction
To argue it, Kotak had picked two people who could not comfortably agree, and a moderator who would not let them off easily. Shah, the public-markets veteran, is one of the more quotable figures in Indian finance, a man who makes a discipline sound like a sport. Across the table sat Renuka Ramnath, Founder, MD and CEO, Multiples Alternate Asset Management, and one of the most established figures in Indian private equity, someone who has spent decades buying into companies long before any stock exchange could. Guiding the exchange was Nigel D’Souza, senior editor at CNBC-TV18, who knows how to keep a conversation from settling into politeness.
There was history in the room too. Ramnath, it turned out, had once been Shah’s first boss at ICICI Securities, and the familiarity showed. It gave the exchange an ease that a debate between strangers rarely has: two people who had watched each other work through a long stretch of the market’s ups and downs, able to disagree without any stiffness.
The case for building, not picking
Ramnath made the case for early-stage investing with the clarity of someone who has lived it. Investing in a company while it is still private, she said, is not about picking a winner and watching it run. It is about getting in at the start and shaping what the company becomes. They build them. “We work hand-in-hand with the company by encouraging our entrepreneurs to make more ambitious plans,” she said, “by showing horizons that by themselves they may have feared to see.” A private investor sits in the boardroom, shapes the strategy, sets the governance, and manages what she called, with a phrase that stuck, “another partner who always creeps in along with an investment, and that partner is a dangerous partner called risk.” By DNA, the entrepreneur wants to charge at the opportunity and wave the danger away. The investor’s job is to keep calibrating what is being staked, and what is being risked, for the glory ahead.
It is that active shaping, she argued, the combination of ambition and measured risk, that generates a return above what public markets offer, and it is why investors accept the illiquidity bundled with it. It is also, she said, what justifies the higher fees private managers command. Before a rupee is committed, a manager spends time developing a strategy, studying sectors and finding the right businesses. Afterwards come the harder demands of building the company’s capabilities and, eventually, returning capital. The gap between a good manager and an average one, she argued, can mean the difference between very different outcomes, which makes choosing the right manager the most consequential decision an investor entering this market will make.
She had a story to show what that involvement looks like when things go wrong. Asked how she judges the founders she backs, Ramnath said she asks them about the worst moment of their careers and how they handled it, and then offered one of her own. She recalled the disruption Multiples lived through with an energy-exchange investment, and the interventions it demanded in governance, leadership and technology while the ground shifted underneath. It was a useful corrective to the romance of private markets. The judgment an investor is really paying for becomes visible only when circumstances force decisions nobody expected to make.
Why go public at all
When D’Souza pressed her on why a founder would bother going public in this new world, Ramnath went past the purely technical answer. “For many, many founders, taking their company public is just a huge personal goal,” she said. “Not every action that anybody takes has to sit on a very profound logic.” The hard advantages are real: easier access to future capital, the ability to let employees turn stock options into something they can hold,
a cleaner way to pass listed wealth to children who should not have to repeat the founder’s struggle. But she began with the dream, the more honest place to start.
D’Souza, who has watched many companies list, offered his own image: the family arriving together at the exchange, generations in one frame, ringing the bell. He recalled a promoter who, years ago in Mumbai’s financial district, was urged to delist a company the market had undervalued and refused outright. “You don’t know what value it brings when I’m listed,” the man had told him. Some things do not show up in a valuation.
The counter, in the language of cricket
Then Shah took the risk question and did what he does. Asked about the danger that a private-market promoter’s ambition, if it curdles, lands on the investor’s shoulders, he built the whole public-versus-private distinction out of Indian cricket. A private-market player, he said, is like Ramakant Achrekar, the legendary Mumbai coach who trained many young players. Most never made it far. One was a young Sachin Tendulkar. The public-market player, by contrast, is like Ajit Agarkar, the selector, who does not scout the neighbourhood grounds but watches the established venues, sees the Ranji matches and the senior players, and assembles a team.
“One Tendulkar alone cannot win the match,” Shah said. “You still require a team to win the match.” You need the Achrekars to create the Tendulkars, and you need the Agarkars to build the side that actually wins. Do you win every match? No. “There will be some matches we will lose, but that’s the risk worth taking. Otherwise we will never become the number one team in the world.” Underneath the analogy was a genuine argument: that public and private are not rivals so much as different positions in the same game, one that discovers and develops talent, the other that composes it into a side that can win at scale.
How to actually enter
For all the persuasion on both sides, the most practical stretch of the evening was about temperament. For investors entering private markets, Ramnath advocated a gradual approach, taking the time to understand managers, strategies and, above all, one’s own tolerance for illiquidity before committing. Audience questions pushed on exactly the places where that resolve gets tested, fund tenures and concentration risk, and the answers stayed candid. Shah added a warning from the other side of the table, cautioning against chasing an investment simply because it has been dressed up as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The format did its real work: the opening proposition tested against the worries of the people who would have to live with the decision.
The exchange kept refusing the tidy binary it had started with. Late in the session, an audience member raised the spectre of an inflated market correcting, and its spillover into
public and private alike. Ramnath, who could have hedged, did not. In a downturn, she said, it is better to be in the private market, because you are in the boardroom and in control of the levers, rather than a nervous spectator reading whatever a company chooses to tell you. And then, unprompted, she countered her own take: once the wreckage clears, come back to the public market. “I haven’t yet met a promoter who will come and sell his company cheap,” she said. “But I can show you hundreds of investors who have sold their portfolio cheap.” The wealth, in other words, is created in both places. What changes is where in a company’s life you are standing when you reach for it.
What the room took home
Ultimately, that was the main takeaway of the evening. The two didn’t compete by favouring one market over the other; instead, they emphasised a more important question: at which point in a company’s long lifecycle should an investor position themselves to maximise wealth creation and capture? Private markets offer earlier access, requiring conviction, patience, and a willingness to have capital tied up for years. Public markets, on the other hand, provide liquidity, transparency, and scale, but they often come into play after much of a company’s growth has already occurred. The key is to maintain awareness of both and understand which one the current situation demands.
Kotak Private Banking, among India’s oldest and most esteemed private banks, counts more than half of the top 100 richest families in the country as clients, according to the Forbes India Rich List 2025. For over 20 years and even during uncertain and volatile times, Kotak Private Banking has maintained its leadership position in the Indian private banking industry due to its in-depth understanding of the capital markets environment, asset classes, and the associated risks, while catering to customised client requirements, helping them live their purpose.
Its clients have long moved beyond seeking tips; instead, they gain from evenings of disciplined, candid discussion, which sharpen their questions and clarify the discussions shaping India’s wealth creation in the next decade. Take and Counter Take is designed to provide this insight consistently, with each perspective complemented by a counterpoint, emphasising that every opinion is only part of a larger conversation.