About the speaker

Saurabh Jhalaria is a prominent finance leader and an Aditya Birla Scholar from IIM Bangalore (Class of 2000). He is a founding member of the InCred Group, where he currently serves as the Chief Investment Officer (CIO) for Alternative Credit and heads the SME lending business. A CFA charterholder, he is recognized for his expertise in credit strategies and his active role as an angel investor in the Indian startup ecosystem.

Prior to InCred, Jhalaria spent over 13 years at Deutsche Bank, reaching the position of Managing Director. During his tenure in Singapore and Hong Kong, he led private financing and performing credit for India and Southeast Asia. He began his career at ICICI Securities after graduating from St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata, and has since become a key figure in evolving India’s non-banking financial landscape.

Summary of the talk

In finance, we talk a lot about terminal value and the compounding of capital. However, we often overlook how these same principles apply to our professional lives. If you want to build a career that doesn't just grow linearly but scales exponentially, you must understand how to let your skills, relationships, and experiences compound.

1. The Role of Mentorship in Navigating Transitions

One of the most vital ingredients for compounding is having a mentor. A mentor isn't just someone who gives you technical advice; they provide a perspective that you cannot see from where you are standing.

In my own career, having a mentor for the last 25 years has been transformative. Every three or four years, when I felt the itch to change my role or felt I had hit a plateau, my mentor helped me see the road from "A to B". They help you answer the critical question: "What comes after this?". When you are in the middle of a role, you are focused on the task; a mentor is someone who has already watched the full "movie" of a career and can tell you how the current scene fits into the long-term plot.

2. Own the Outcome, Not Just the Task

To truly compound, you must move away from a "clerical" mindset—the idea of "I did my work and I went home". High-growth careers are built by people who own the outcome.

Early in my career, I constantly looked at my boss and asked: "What is my boss doing that I am currently unable to do?". Whether it was a technical gap or a soft skill, I realized that if I couldn't serve the needs of the person above me, I couldn't eventually take their role. Compounding only works if you are internally motivated to move out of your "box" and understand the broader organizational goals. If you restrict yourself to your job description, you stop learning, and the moment you stop learning, you stop compounding.

3. Learn on the Job and Beyond

I remember my time in Hong Kong, which was then the biggest market in Asia. Every evening, I would sit down and chart out option pricing or structural launches, trying to understand the "why" behind the market moves.

The idea is not just to have technical events or certificates but to ensure that every day on the job adds to your knowledge base. If you stay in the same job or company for a long time, the only way to keep the compounding effect alive is to go deeper and broader into the business than what is required of you.

4. The Leap into Entrepreneurship

Nine years ago, I decided to leave a stable banking career to help build InCred. The goal was to build something larger and more autonomous.

Entrepreneurship is a different way of compounding. It forces you to pick up additional skills rapidly and provides a level of autonomy that a traditional job might not. Looking back at the last several years—navigating the India growth story, the 2017-2018 cycles, and the COVID-19 crisis—I’ve realized that careers aren't a straight line. There will be years where you feel you are not moving, but those are often the years where the "base" for future compounding is being built.

5. Integrity: The Non-Negotiable

Finally, we must talk about the "non-compromisables." In finance, and especially in leadership, your reputation is your terminal value.

Mistakes will happen. When a client or a firm looks at a mistake, they ask: "Is this irreversible? Is this a mistake of character or a mistake of judgment?". You can recover from a volumetric or a technical error, but an "integrity gap" is impossible to fix. It is very difficult to be a person of high integrity professionally if you are not an honest person personally. In the long run, the market identifies leaders not just by their intelligence, but by their fundamental character.

Closing Thoughts

As you look at your own career, don't just think about the next two years. Think about the skills you are compounding for the next twenty. Find a mentor, own your outcomes, stay curious, and never compromise on your integrity. That is how you turn a job into a legacy.