Who is Nikesh Arora, and why do some SoftBank investors hate him so much?

Photo credit: TechCrunch

This is movie material, really. An Indian engineer from IIT goes to the US for his master’s; becomes the chief business officer at Google; leaps to the top of a multi-billion dollar telco giant, pumps in almost half a billion from his pockets into the company. And then controversy strikes. That’s the nutshell of Nikesh Arora’s story thus far.

Nikesh Arora is the president and chief operating officer of SoftBank, the heir apparent of Masayoshi Son – the founder and chairman of the Japanese multinational conglomerate. As most powerful men do, Nikesh seems to have made some powerful enemies. And in Nikesh’s case, he seems to have stepped on the toes of SoftBank’s own investors. A bunch of them have demanded an independent investigation into Nikesh’s actions as the president of the firm and questioned his track record and qualifications to stay on his chair.

The issue which was brought to light today by Bloomberg got most of us curious about Nikesh – the man who joined SoftBank less than two years ago and won over its founder in such a short time. “I expect him to succeed me at the appropriate time. The last year of working together could not have gone better and it has surpassed every expectation that I had. Nikesh is a great business leader, a wonderful complement to me, and he’s a good person at heart,” Masayoshi had said.

See: SoftBank investors call for investigation, dismissal of Nikesh Arora: report

Here’s a short recap on Nikesh’s journey so far

Nikesh’s father was an officer with the Indian Air Force. After completing his schooling, Nikesh went to the Indian Institute of Technology – Benaras Hindu University (IIT-BHU) for his bachelors degree in electronics engineering. He followed that up with an MBA from Northeastern University and an MS from Boston College.

Nikesh began his career as vice president with financial services company Fidelity Investments in 1992. Five years later, he joined Putnam Investments, a privately owned investment management firm, as its vice president. He was the CEO and founder of T-Motion, which merged with T-Mobile International in 2002.

In December 2004, Nikesh joined Google as its president in charge of sales, marketing, and partnerships in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. He worked for a decade with Google, rose up the ranks to become the chief business officer – the fourth most important person in Google, after its co-founders Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and chairman Eric Schmidt. In 2007, he also took up a senior advisor role with private equity firm Silver Lake.

Nikesh quit Google to join Softbank in September 2014.

The SoftBank stint

Photo credit: Nick Ares.

SoftBank is the third largest public company in Japan after Toyota and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial with annual revenue in trillions.

Nikesh heads SoftBank’s investment arm. Just a month after he came on board, SoftBank announced two huge investments in India: US$210 million in taxi app Ola and US$627 million in ecommerce biggie Snapdeal. It also bet close to US$100 million on Indian real estate startup Housing.

Masayoshi Son also announced a whopping US$10 billion earmarked by SoftBank to pump into India’s booming ecommerce, telecoms, and aviation industries. Nikesh Arora led this investment plan.

The allegations