Ronnie Screwvala: “The younger generation is impatient. Nobody wants to go to a theatre for three to four hours”

Ronnie Screwvala: My ratio of success to failure is about two successes and eight failures, and I think that's the formula for real success

As a film-maker who smashed the glass ceiling in Bollywood but also broke enthralled generations with diverse movies such as A Wednesday, Jodhaa Akbar, Dev D, The Namesake, Rang De Basanti and more, Ronnie Screwvala is perhaps the only one who exited at the height of his success.

He then launched into venture capital, and funded start ups such as the $4.5 billion Lenskart where he was an early investor and still holds around 8 percent, and more dominantly now Upgrad where he has a controlling stake. At his office in Worli where the cabin is modest, rife with dozens of books on the wall, and has hardly changed in the last 12 years, Screwvala is as almost always, dressed in casual knockabout pants, a round-neck T-shirt and slip-on shoes.  The years have been good to the 66-year old Screwvala who says he is now focused on just a few core objectives.

“Now in my second innings, my focus is education, and giving back through  a foundation. Those are my two focus areas. My ancillary focus is on staying healthy and continuing to tell stories in a hobby-manner through film venture RSVP and I occasionally have fun with a sports Kabaddi team,” he shares.

Two other things Screwvala also is are a  recluse and a teetotaller, I add.  He nods but clarifies that they are not connected and he’s always been that way.  Screwvala may not be publicly feted for it but in business circles he has a reputation for being the ‘King of Valuations’.  A cursory look at the dozen-plus listed companies in the entertainment media space the Rs 300 Crore mark. Screwvala and his team de-listed his UTV venture at around $1.4 billion. What differentiated him?

“It was a diversified model. We were in content but  also an animation studio, we were a VFX studio, we had 8 broadcast channels, and we had a movie studio. I know the movie studio takes the maximum and were considered 28 percent  of our revenue mix, at that particular point in time,”he says.

This is not to say he never made bad bets. “Did I flop more than I succeeded? Absolutely, totally. My ratio of success to failure is about two successes and eight failures, and I think that's the formula for real success,” he says.”The reason is, every time I think I've failed, it's been a 1x, and that 1x could be a very high 1x but it enabled me to bat outside the wicket on almost everything that I did enough to take bigger bets. Then when the needle moved, the upside was 30x and 40x. If you have five failures and five successes that sounds like good, but it could be minus five and plus seven. But when you're minus eight (8 failures), which is 1x each, but have two successes of 30x and 40x that's a very clear differentiator.”

The billion-dollar question is why did he get out of movies after 2012 just when he was at his prime ?

“It's my personal choice that I want to do things on, and what I want to do in my second innings, right?” he says, as I get  a fleeting glimpse of the entrepreneurial aggression under the surface he was known to have.

“The good part is I still want to do it but I think the beauty of when you look at something with a passion is you can be 10 times more selective, and say  no 99 percent of the time,” he says. “ When you run a business, at least 60 percent  of the things you have to do and 40 percent you want to do but in a passion project, you do what you want to do all the time. And I don't think you have the liberty when you're running a business which allows me to therefore be even more selective, and fine tune what I learned for years in media on storytelling, and now do much more selectively," he explains.

Screwvala does about two or three ‘strong stories’ a year mostly for online platforms. Does he think the era of the big screen is over?

“I think consumers and audiences both rightly evolved, because with the OTT platforms, storytelling is sharper, characters play a big role. If you look at the series, you will mostly remember whatever they may be, it's the characters you fall in love with and then you can binge watch, because you can't binge watch a story, you actually binge watch when you get involved with a character,” Screwvala says, adding that when you look at characters, then the concept of stardom is very different.

“The other part is that the younger generation today is very impatient. Nobody wants to go to a theatre for three to four hours. Unfortunately, when film infrastructure companies report  they’ve increased ticket prices by 21 percent then growth has been capped out. The other is increasing the intermission time to 20 minutes so boom! There goes the entire viewing experience.”

Work-wise, Screwvala still clocks around 14 to 15 hours a day which almost always starts with a long walk or some form of exercise daily and in his view Indian markets are primed for real growth now. “Now is a sane time. People have come around, markets have corrected, valuations have corrected, people can build companies to last Vs building companies to raise the next round,” he says.

His education company upGrad is one for example that will look at a public listing in the near future.  It has some 31 offices around the country. “Edtech is literally at the tip of the iceberg in this country and is a business where one can see real impact when scaling up,” he says. UpGrad has around 2 million active learners with an ARPU that goes from a low of $1,000 and up to $4,000. They do about $100 million in revenue per quarter.

In many ways, education is just like agriculture. Plant, watch, grow and harvest. Screwvala had also once invested in an agri company that grew pomegranates. “It merged with a larger company. I got a good exit. By the time we left, we were doing pomegranate, pineapple and bananas. About 60 percent - 70 percent was exported to Europe mainly. I got a very good exit." As Screwvala says, it’s about being able to keep batting outside the wicket.