Sanjiv Shah was not your quintessential chief executive officer (CEO). Rarely the one to be seen in suits, boots and ties, one look at him and it’s hard to imagine that he headed Goldman Sachs AMC (India) Ltd since 2011. Not that it was a terribly huge fund house: it had assets of about Rs7,264 crore at the end of September 2016, but still. As we stepped inside Tertullia, an Italian restaurant tucked away in Shivaji Park, Dadar in central Mumbai for dinner, he was seated in a corner table wearing a half-sleeve shirt, leather chappals (slippers) and almost invisible in the young crowd. He had gone home and changed before meeting us, and hence the chappals but the rest of his daily attire is usually casual.
Pleasant, easy-going and always brimming with ideas just as he was in 2001 when he burst onto the mutual funds scene with his long-time friend Rajan Mehta. We settle down on a corner table, next to the window.
