John Coe 00:00:02  So welcome, Shekar. I've reviewed your background in the introduction. 
Your life and career are very impressive. You founded Beekman Advisors, a strategic real 
estate advisory firm, after leading two significant mortgage banking platforms, Prudential 
Mortgage Capital and WMF Group. Please describe Beekman's business and your current 
role and responsibilities at a high level if you would.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:00:28  Sure. And thank you, John, for having me. you're you're an 
icon in your own right. So, it's it's kind of unique to be on your program, your podcast with 
so many other people that I've known over the years and know some somewhat well in 
some cases and really well in others. And so a big advises over 21 years young. The 
objective when it got started was kind of an accident of fortunes. a a my investment banker. 
When I sold WMF Group to Prudential. because we were publicly traded, was a Credit 
Suisse. And the persons who helped us do that were two people, Andy Rosenberg and 
Diana Reed. And Diana ends up, sort of retiring in this new wave, even starting way back in 
the early part of this, the 20th 21st century retirement was what do you do next, not retire to 
go play golf, if you will.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:01:33  And in that retirement, she leaves Credit Suisse and she 
comes to see me and she says, what are you doing? And I said, well, I'm just taking a break. 
I've never had three weeks off with my family and we're going to go do things, visit people, 
write a book, and I don't want to. And I cannot imagine doing anything in commercial real 
estate finance anymore after having spent, you know, 20 years in it. And Thank you very 
much. And of course, here I am 21 years later. Diana and I started, Beekman Advisors. The 
name, by the way, is derived from where she lived, which is Beekman Place in New York. 
she chose to leave in 2009 to go run, PNC financial. and 2007 rather right before, by the 
way, the great financial crisis. help them through their transitions. And now, of course, 
she's just reemerged as the CEO of Freddie Mac. So this is her third gig or fourth or fifth. it 
points up the the theory of change that we had at Beekman, which is that the people I grew 
up with in the commercial mortgage banking industry, including people who were iconic, 
Kim Beazley, who has since passed on, Paul Neff, who went into social service, Peter 
Donovan, who retired after a very illustrious career at CBRE.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:02:56  Willie Walker and his dad, Mallory Walker, who of course, still 
running a thriving company and others. We assumed that something like what was 
happening to me would happen to them. If you want to understand that which is I was, you 
know, sort of we had a smallish, you know, small cap entrepreneurial company. The world 
was going to get larger. People with balance sheets were becoming critical. larger 
companies are going to gobble small ones. And at some point you decide I can't fight the 
tide, or I can remain small, or I want to get bigger and I want to grow this thing on my own. 
And there were only three choices. And we realized that since I made the choice because I 
was public, I had public shareholders like the Harvard Endowment. You take the highest 
price to the highest bidder in your cell, and you do your best job to protect your people. But 
that was not the only choice. And people were having to make these strategic choices. So 
we assume, hey, if I'm going to have to make that, I'm making that there must be 20 other 
folks that need to.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:04:00  I grew up with them, Diane, and new investment banking. 
That's how it started. John Sibley joins me later and we become more of a consulting 
advisory shop. We still do M&A, but M&A is not the reason we exist. It's to help transform 
companies.

John Coe 00:04:18  Yeah. It's interesting you found a niche that other people probably 
thought about. But you you capitalized on at the time, which is interesting in that, you said, 
you know, I've done enough underwriting deals and let's take a look at companies, you 
know, and I've, I've been fortunate to build my company to a certain success. And, and I 
said, you know, this might be an interesting time to pivot. And you have all the 
understanding of how to run one of these companies. And you said, I wonder if other 
people are thinking that way, just as you just said, about maybe transitioning or merging 
and creating something new and different. Maybe I don't, which is interesting, I think. So 
we've, we've we've talked to high level.

John Coe 00:05:09  We'll get into the details later. But as I like to do, let's turn the page way 
back. So I understand you're a native of India. Talk about where you grew up and how it 
influenced you.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:05:23  And of course, you first were Margaret Mead, say the first sort 
of 12 years dictate the rest of your life. Yeah. Not sure that's completely correct. I probably 
does for your brain cells, but not your life experience itself and your gut. Yes. How you feel 
about crises and how you react under pressure. So I grew up in India. I grew up primarily in 
Delhi. And I was, a South Indian because my parents came from, Chennai and Bangalore. 
my father worked for the federal government, and we were a bit nomadic for my first five 
years and then settled in Delhi. And that's where I spent the rest of my adult through 
college career. I went to, a high school that was a Christian Brothers school run by Irish, 
brothers, called Saint Columbus, which still is around and is still considered one of the 
premier high schools in Delhi.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:06:25  And then I went to, the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, 
which used to have an entrance exam in those days in 1969 when you sat for that exam, 
something like, I don't know, 120,000 people sat for this exam and they admitted 
somewhere around 10,000 students. Now, by the way, kind of a million sit for the exam and 
they take in 50,000. So it is more selective by some leaps and bounds than Harvard in 
terms of the admissions process. But it's of course, gotten more complicated. So I get into 
it at the age of 16, because India had in those years, 11 years of high school, not 12, which 
it's all 12 now, and five years of undergraduate. So my bachelor's in technology engineering 
degree was five years. So you kind of did your high school final year as your first year of 
college, if you want to equate it. and it was, a hostel only, which means dorms. so we had to 
stay away from our families. It was very diverse because people came from all over India, 
and in fact, we had students from other parts of the world as well.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:07:38  These were the five elite institutions that were set up when 
India was first became independent to create an engineering technology class if you want 
to call it that.

John Coe 00:07:48  Is it the MIT of of of India? Basically, yeah.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:07:52  Yes. There is an equivalent. it was not as it was as selective in 
its admissions and its academics, but it was very broad based. For example, the first two 
years before I even selected my engineering major, we had English literature and world 
history and geography. So they were trying to make up for the deficiencies that might have 
occurred across a broad schooling system across the country, as large as India, by sort of 
packaging everything into. But we had some of the most incredible professors. And so it 
was just a very, but you knew you were among the elite when you went here. So everyone 
told you.

John Coe 00:08:32  Why did you learn the English language?

Shekar Narasimhan 00:08:34  And so my father, I should point out, grew up in India. And 
when he was very young, in the 1940s, 40s, he left India to go to McGill University in 
Canada.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:08:47  studied in Canada. traveled all over the United States and 
the UK and returned to India and became one of the people who, was doing natural 
sciences and material sciences for one of the first aircraft manufacturers in Bangalore, 
which was government owned. Most of the large industries in those days was government 
owned and inspire you? Yes, very much and very much not did more than that. I mean, he 
mortgaged his home to send me to the United States to study because he felt so strongly 
that the experience that sort of colored and made his life as full as it was, was having spent 
four years of his life overseas, away from the the the baggage that surrounds where you live, 
only.

John Coe 00:09:35  Talk a little bit about Indian families and culture a little bit. If you can 
just give us a paint, a broad brush of that. And your and yours particularly.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:09:45  Sure. John, there was a point in my life when, first of all, three 
things about, Indian families. And in my particular case, I happen to be Hindu.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:09:58  I grew up in North India, so I was cosmopolitan already 
because I came from one place. So my parents did. And I had a name in India and name 
almost immediately people recognize and go, oh, that name Narasimhan. That means 
you're from South India. You probably are. Your father's probably from Bangalore. It's that 
quick and I'd. Oh, and so because it's so on the one hand, never been one country ever in 
4000 years. And now 76 years, it's one country grabbed and sort of congealed together. 
There were all these things that I knew three languages when I was five years old. you had 
to. One of them was English for two reasons one, obviously my father spoke English, 
understood English, so did my mother. She went to also to a what we called a convent 
school in Chennai. My mother, actually rather an extraordinary woman, was one of the first 
people in her generation to ever be a woman to go to college. So she went to college, got a 
degree, became a principal, vice principal at a school.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:11:05  I learned to drive, which was, by the way, incredible because 
I remember driving with my mother and everyone would look because women didn't drive 
in India in the 1960s, and she would drive. And, because she wanted independence. She 
always told me, she said, if you ever, you know, find a partner, demand independence not 
just for yourself, but for them, that it is clear that motor, you know, transportation is an 
independent. So what did my Why did we learn three languages? Because that's the way 
they taught it in schools. You kind of had to learn the language you were living in, which in in 
Delhi was either Hindi or Punjabi, and Hindi became one of the national languages. You had 
to learn English because in that time it was the medium of learning. I studied in English, but 
I also studied in Hindi. But I also knew Tamil, which is my mother tongue, and I also knew 
some Punjabi, which was the other language that was spoken by so many of my friends.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:12:06  So you didn't grow up thinking in one language bluntly, you 
thought in language in prose.

John Coe 00:12:13  Three years old. When you're first learning to talk or two, you were 
learning. You had three different you. You had to kind of sort out three different tongues. 
Absolutely.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:12:22  And you learnt it with the people around you, the friends you 
had, your family. And it was just natural. There was nothing about it. A lot like going to 
school and learning Spanish, because you should know Spanish because you'd know 
another language. It was like at home. I've always argued my grandsons today because of 
my wife. Their grandmother? No. Tamil. Which is actually so rare that every time they speak 
it, when they go outside, people go, oh, wow. But you don't find that same inhibition when 
people say, you know, I'm an Italian family for four generations, and my son and daughter, 
no Italian, it's fairly so we should make it natural to know language, to know something 
about the rest of the world.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:13:07  I've often said that the people in India, I could go to the 
hinterlands of India and ask them about the United States, and they could tell you the state 
capitals and I can go to the hinterlands of America, which I have done in and lived in, and 
they wouldn't know where India was on a map. So there was such a big disconnect in. But 
we were coming up. You were at the top. So this was always the feeling, if Americans only 
realize how you know how privileged they are, we would be a great country, and we would 
never have to even ask ourselves about greatness because we'd obviously be here. so 
anyhow, so as I grew up in came through this ethos of a very close knit family, very strict 
father, but somebody whose value systems were very clear. It became to him my going to 
IIT wasn't the objective by getting a great education in India so that I was grounded, and 
then he would give me a ticket, and if I got myself a scholarship, I would go and study 
overseas.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:14:12  That was it. He was a middle class person. He didn't have, 
even in those days, $10,000 a year to spend on tuition. He basically said, look, I'm going to 
buy you a ticket. I'm going to give you three months of living expenses if you want to go 
when you finish. Now what happened? When I finished, it was it was such a big degree and 
there were so many people who had gone right before me in 1971, 72, 73 to the United 
States, that when I applied to schools, it wasn't hard to get in. It was a little harder to get a 
full scholarship. So I got a partial scholarship to Pitt. I was arrogant, I'd already done five 
years of engineering. I said, let me find the quickest bridge to go from engineering to 
something else. And that used to be called an MBA. Right. That was the bridge. You took 
that bridge, you crossed over, and you could kind of do anything with the rest of your life.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:15:08  And no one questioned it particularly. I never abandoned 
engineering, but I never adopted it as my profession. Why not? Good question. I think 
predominantly because that's what my father wanted me to do. may sound really odd, but 
I've learned very quickly that, you know, reverse engineering works better than Direct. If you 
want something for your children very badly, and you let them know, there's a pretty good 
chance they'll do something the opposite or different, which is okay. nature of life. So 
what? My father really thought being a scientist and an engineer was the noblest thing in 
the world. Now, many Indian American parents today want their children still to be doctors. 
And, you know, sort of the fruit of labor is serving others, but doing well yourself. And my 
father was in the other mode of public service and so on. My grandfather was a great 
freedom fighter. So there was a lot of public service in the veins of my family overall. and my 
mother was very much about social service.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:16:16  So when I finish my as I'm finishing my IIT, I'm getting 
admission in US colleges. I never applied anywhere else. For whatever reason, I can't 
remember whether I ever even applied in Canada where my father went. But I always had a 
fascination about the United States, and I always had a fascination for the fact that the US 
was actually many countries in one too many. actually, there are many states that are 
countries in their own right, and that the US was always seen as monolithic. was strange to 
me when I came from India. So I wanted to go actually and study in a place that was quite 
different than anything I'd ever been in. And Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was it. So there was 
the other reason, which is a little bit more humorous, is my father seemed to know a lot of 
people in the US. He went to school here and he studied. He worked. He seemed to know 
people in Boston, in, the San Francisco, in Los Angeles. I wanted to go to a place he didn't 
know anybody somehow.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:17:23  It was sort of like rebellion in its own small way, and 
Pittsburgh didn't know anybody. So I landed in new Jersey, went to Pittsburgh, and that was 
in 1974, and I enrolled in the MBA program at Katz in August of 1974.

John Coe 00:17:43  So it's just like more serendipity that you you ended up there to some 
extent. You know, you got admitted there. And so you didn't, you know, I mean, you could 
have gone to Chicago or Detroit or. Yes, Minneapolis or, you know, there just, you know, 
there probably 200 engineering schools around the country that you could have gone to or 
or MBA programs, I should say.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:18:08  But and, and it was a desired thing to bring in foreign 
students at that point. Right. And to bring in folks from IIT in India, there weren't very many. I 
was literally the only one in my class. but it very, easy transition, actually, because I landed 
the airport, I'm carrying two huge bags. had enough money to take the bus and go to the 
William Penn Hotel.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:18:35  Didn't realize that was a good mile away from my dorms. I 
had to carry these two heavy bags. Two elderly ladies later on, I would have guessed they 
were Italian or Eastern European. Come up to me and they offered a help me move to take 
the bags. So first, after being slightly suspicious that people are going to take my bags, you 
know, I kind of like said, okay, but are you sure? And they helped me take my bags from 
there to for a mile. And by the way, they were in great shape. and so I found the warmth, 
hospitality of Pittsburgh to be just so unique in its own characteristics. and then the school 
itself was wonderful. I became I was on the NBA executive committee, I was I was actually 
the editor of the student newspaper and the consulting project, which did work with black 
businesses in downtown Pittsburgh. And that's how I ended up in eastern Kentucky from 
there. That was the next bridge that I crossed was making a decision not to do a corporate 
thing right away.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:19:46  And having this sort of a luxury for a couple of years to do 
something very different.

John Coe 00:19:51  I have to get behind that a little bit. so what major did you I mean, what 
was your was your a finance major? I have to guess.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:20:00  Yes, I was marketing. Actually, I chose marketing, yes, I 
taught accounting, which was what the specialty the school was was awfully boring. you 
had to know it, but kind of like, why would you want to know more than what they gave you 
on a balance sheet and income statement? And you had to understand economics, had a 
great economics professor did some loss, you know, courses found some of that really 
fascinating. But the most interesting thing to me was if you can't distinguish yourself and 
create something differentiated, whether it's on your rŽsumŽ, and this is my first lesson in, 
you know, which I mentor most of my students on. Differentiate yourself. What is it about 
you and your background, or what you can do for someone that is different than anybody 
else in the universe?

John Coe 00:20:47  Oh, that's funny, because I would expect and I'm just going to 
hypothetical the hypothetical here coming into this country, you know, as a newcomer that 
you'd want to try to quote, fit in and not stand out.

John Coe 00:21:02  You want to be you want to be part of the culture. You want to fit in. You 
don't want to be, you know, too obnoxious or too out there. And yet you knew in your mind, 
no, wait a minute, I am different. I want to be different. And this is why I want to be different. 
So talk about that feeling.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:21:22  well, you know, it's somewhat reactionary again. a lot of my 
life has been shaped by not wanting something as opposed to necessarily striving for 
something only. So what happened was in Pittsburgh, and this is, you know, the era is 
important. 1974 75 Tony Dorsett is the running back. Yes. Pittsburgh is about to win their 
first national championship in 40 years. NCAA. The Steelers have have just brought in Terry 
Bradshaw. And they're about to win their first Super Bowl with the Iron Curtain. Football 
was the craze. So if you didn't know American football you were like behind the eight ball. 
So here I am sitting with people and that's what they talk about.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:22:06  I had no idea what it was. Nobody else in the world plays this 
football, by the way, and nobody. And the rules are fundamentally esoteric. So the idea that 
people just go bang their heads in. There's a small thing that creeps between them and has 
to cross some line. Just was bizarre. So I learned it. So this is a learned sport for me. I read a 
book. I, one of my friends, Tom, said, here's the book, read the damn thing, cover to cover, 
and then I'll help you when the plays come in the play calling so you'll understand it and 
then play some touch football with us. which was again, pretty bizarre because I grew up 
with cricket. I played a lot of cricket, I played table tennis because I was a champion and I 
did soccer. I did not know American football anyhow, so I learned football. So again, this 
was not something I knew. I had to learn it. And once you learn it, you then actually 
understand it.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:23:00  Once you understand it, you start to engage, which is the 
same thing with anything else in life. The other thing was girls. I mean, the guys would 
spend all their time talking about girls. I didn't know any girls. I in India, The concept of 
dating in 1974 was kind of like a foreign concept. So there was just these disconnects, not 
so much culturally, I would argue, not ethnically, but culturally. And I if you don't get it, you 
you, yes, you should assimilate. I would argue if I had not learned football, I would be a 
lesser person, I'd have fewer friends, etc. but the flip side is I don't have to be the guy who 
goes to every football game and is passionately watching every single thing. Either I can 
enjoy it to an extent, and then walk back and go back to still enjoying cricket and still 
enjoying a good game of ping pong, you know? So I found myself moderating myself from 
being to like everybody and yet not so different that.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:24:07  But I when I use the word differentiation, I mean nuance. If I 
can tell you one thing in the course of 15 minutes that you may not have heard before. 
That's differentiated already. And you could do that rather easily with life experience. You 
can't do that just by reading books though. You should know one thing, John. When I was 
eight years old and between the ages of 1816, I used to read five books a day. Wow. I was a 
bookworm. I was I used to wear very heavy spectacles. I would read a book when I was 
walking on the street in the bus. apparently I was a real bookworm. And the reason I 
became a bookworm was I didn't have a lot of friends. So rather than trying to engage and 
creating friendship, to me, the easy thing was withdraw. But how do you withdraw? You 
withdraw into a book. And so I would read I would always speed read, and I could read a lot 
very quickly and absorb it. And, you know, it's small little benefits you get in certain ways.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:25:09  It improved my memory speeds as well. So even today, I can 
read a 300 page document in about 20 minutes and tell you what's relevant in it fairly 
quickly, depending on what it is. Obviously I have to know the domain or the subject matter. 
So those were skill sets that I found differentiated me, and when I can use those to my 
advantage, I want to get you to have a conversation with me. And if I want your interest or 
something from you, much higher probability of getting it.

John Coe 00:25:37  Well, it sounds like if you read that much, it was not just one subject. 
You were multidisciplinary in that. Yes, yes. So you read fiction, you read, you know, and 
then you read really deep technical, obviously to get a degree in it, very deep, very hard 
subjects to and then probably philosophy and other things too, because if you did that you 
had to understand all these things, how they all work together.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:26:07  So I recommend reading Plato at the age of ten.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:26:11  And I recommend Walt Whitman by by seven. My seven year 
old grandson is reading Whitman with me now. It's very hard. It doesn't have to completely 
make sense, but what it does is it opens your eyes. You start to read and think about things 
that you would beyond your pale. And that's what my mother did with.

John Coe 00:26:34  Your analogy of opening your eyes to me is opening your imagination. 
And to me, the imagination is the is the most powerful substance that humans have 
beyond all animals. If you didn't have the imagination, and to me, curiosity and imagination 
are the spirit of life. And so what you have there is, you know, one. And that's what I 
encourage all the community members that I have to to, you know, open up your 
imagination and keep being curious and keep asking questions, keep.

John Coe 00:27:08  Digging.

John Coe 00:27:09  And reading and all that. Anyway, we can go on on that subject for a 
long time. so Pittsburgh to Appalachia, talk about that evolution and why?

Shekar Narasimhan 00:27:25  so the why stories are necessarily long.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:27:28  So I'll brief and do it briefly and I'll tell you what happened 
there. More importantly, I was running this, student consulting project, and there was a 
professor there named Sam. Doctors and Sam doctors was on the president's at that time, 
Jimmy Carter's White House small Business Initiative or initiative for rural communities. 
And he comes to me one day and he says, what do you want to do when you finish here? 
And I said, what I'd really like to do is I obviously need to make a living, but that's just minor. 
I'm alone. I don't have obligations. but I want to do something different. He said, well, you 
could go to work for us, steel. Or, by the way, in those days, US Steel and Arthur Andersen 
were it. That's where you went when you finished your MBA. You had MBA engineering, you 
went to US steel, you had MBA accounting, you went to Arthur Andersen. Made sense. Yes. 
Yeah. So I said, no, I don't want to do either one of those.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:28:32  He said, okay, would you like to do something different? How 
much what how old are you? I was 21, by the way, and when I went to school, 22 when I 
graduated my MBA. So I had already done, by the way, I had a couple of PhD offers, from 
pretty big schools, and I chose not to do it, which too much to the chagrin of my, my 
parents, my uncle, you know, who was a PhD himself. And I went, no, no, no, I'm going to go 
get life experience, whatever that is. So coincidences, accidents. John Rosenberg was 
running the Appalachian Legal and Defense Fund in eastern Kentucky. He's still alive, by 
the way. He's a they both are Sam doctors and John Rosenberg. And John calls Sam and 
says, I need an MBA student to come here and spend a month. And the reason I need that 
is because we are helping this small town by itself from a coal company. And these people 
were the best well-meaning people in the world don't know how to go about doing that.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:29:36  And worst of all, I have lawyers on my staff, and they don't 
know a damn thing about finance or marketing or structuring. So? So Sam comes to me 
and says, listen, I'll buy your ticket to go there. It's one way ticket, by the way. John 
Rosenberg will pick you up and house you. You go there and you spend at least five days, 
okay? Minimum. And you help figure out if there's something here to be done. If they like 
you, you like them. They'll figure something out for you. Otherwise, come back and go take 
the job. So I did that. Now, what was strange about the experience was that I had grown up 
in a town in Delhi. In those days was like 6 million, 7 million. Pittsburgh was about 1 million. 
And I was going to this town, and I didn't have any idea that the airport was two hours away. 
Literally, I got picked up by this gal named Kay Adrian. She drives me and we keep driving, 
and I'm going, haven't we reached it? And she said, no, no, no, it's 120 miles where I went.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:30:45  Prestonsburg, Kentucky in Floyd County. And David, the 
small town where two hours from Lexington and two hours from Huntington, West Virginia, 
the two airports. That was it. So you end up there. It's obviously so surreal and different for 
me, but that's what I actually enjoy. Anyway. I loved the people here it was. This town used 
to be a model town, 200 homes, thriving community bustling with over a thousand people 
just 20 years before, owned by a coal company called tipples. At either end, both of them 
had completely run out of coal underground digging, you know, coal mine shafts. Many of 
the people living in the community, all the young people had left. There were literally only 
50 families left. The water was, was putrid. They had to use well water, and it was drying up. 
The sewage was floating in the creeks. the houses were falling down. They chose to 
organize. And by their community, they wanted to buy the whole thing. And there was a 
company, you know, that that was willing to sell it to them.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:31:55  They needed 120,000 to buy it, And they needed to know how 
to buy it, repay it, and then fix the water system, the sewer system. Rebuild the housing. 
Bottom line, I ended up staying there two years. I came back to Pittsburgh, packed my bags, 
bought myself a car and went there. And I lived in, actually, a Catholic mission called Saint 
Vincent's, for the first six months. And, they helped me out, and I stayed there, and then, a 
whole bunch of good things happened. that allowed me to go live in a garage and, you 
know, anyway, so bottom line, we arranged to have every single person get a loan to buy 
their home and rehab it, and they took the proceeds of what they paid for their home and 
paid off the 120,000, borrowed 100,000 after fighting with the EPA for about a year. About 
what? Whether a small town like this could afford a large sewage system. Because in those 
days, the EPA's requirement was the effluent coming out of the system was 99.9% pure.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:33:07  we had a raw sewage in the creek, and there was a Swedish 
system that was only going to cost $100,000 to build and bring, but it wasn't approved by 
the EPA. So because of the local congressman, we get this guy, big Irishman named James 
McCullough, who ran something at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, 
and he was the head guy for what they called the building. You know, the code, the housing 
code in the United States. We fly him down because the congressman tells him you're 
going to go there. He sees the creek and he says, I get it. 99% effluent would be pretty damn 
good. red as acid is coming out of the deep mine. Raw sewage in the creek. We're building a 
plant that's going to 99%. Clean this up for 100,000. They wanted to give us $1 million, but it 
wasn't the million dollars, it was that it was going to cost $30 a month for the sewage 
maintenance bill. And we knew we couldn't afford it. Long run.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:34:09  It would default anyhow. So, where did my engineering come 
in? I figured out how to get the water system done and get a brand new sewage system that 
had never been deployed in the United States in the mountains. and that was actually 
alternative, an alternative to the large systems we have, that don't work very well. And just 
because standards were built in Washington and not for local communities. So fantastic 
experience. We got the first subdivision approved. We built 30 new homes. we created, I 
wouldn't call it a thriving community because a thriving community has to have job growth. 
Young people, there are young people now, but they aren't that many. They're not yet 
enough people. They're there to go, wow, we should grow up here and bring up our family 
here because it's a great place to live because the job growth isn't there. So Appalachia is 
one of those places in the United States that's still behind. and by the way, it's a 
communities of some remarkable people. and, when I left there, I stayed two more years in 
eastern Kentucky doing similar work, but across four states.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:35:28  And I don't know that anyone has ever seen an Indian kid 
running around at the age of 22 or 23 doing these things, but it was just the most life 
changing experience. I met the most incredible people and did some of the most incredible 
things. I'll never do any of those ever again in my life.

John Coe 00:35:47  It what you just told me was one of the most incredible stories I've ever 
heard of. Somebody at your age, at that age, to go into that environment. it's almost like a 
Peace Corps story to some extent. But what it tells me is that there's something inside you 
that started really young, probably even when you were in grade school that you saw, and 
maybe it was in India that you needed to do something about. Maybe I'm wrong, but you 
know, what I've read about Indian culture is that the poverty is I mean, you saw poverty in 
Appalachia, I'm sure in India was even worse.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:36:31  Oh, it was the difference, John, between, having one car and 
two meals versus having no car and maybe one meal.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:36:40  That was the difference in the poverty levels. Yeah.

John Coe 00:36:43  I mean, you know, I mean, and the thing is about the caste system in 
India, which I don't want to get into, but oh my goodness. and you know, the analogy is that 
there's a caste system in this country now to some extent. And it may not be as religiously 
set up or structurally there but it's there. Yes.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:37:10  every country has it, every country has it based on social 
strata or unfortunate. Because as human beings, for some reason we desperately need to 
win. I, you know, and I see this with young people here all the time that winning is 
everything. And the notion of a win win is not part of the lexicon. And and until we learn, you 
know, I have never in business succeeded long term. I've never done a merger on an M&A 
deal where both parties didn't feel they won. Otherwise, it never have happened. you know, 
so illogical for us to think as human beings that we're always going to win every game, win 
everything, and the other party is always going to lose.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:37:55  The pie can be made bigger and shared more, and everyone 
can still be highly contented. But that's not how we think.

John Coe 00:38:05  Well, I don't know if I agree with that completely. I think that you can 
meld people to think bigger. and, you know, the zero sum game exists and you try to avoid 
that game as best as possible. So what I counsel young people is to avoid zero sum 
situations as much as possible as you can, because you there's always more in this, in this 
universe, not just in this planet, but this universe to to I mean, there's if you think outside 
the box, keep thinking that way because the box is always bigger than you think it is. a 
question, no question.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:38:47  And you have to always have hope, right? You always have to 
be hopeful. Yes. I mean, I'm an optimist by nature.

John Coe 00:38:55  What's life for if you're not optimistic about what's the future is, you 
know, great. So to me, go after it, get after it.

John Coe 00:39:03  So I'm I'm really encouraged by what that story is. It's it's really an 
amazing story. So what why did you leave then? after two years there? And what happened 
to say this was enough?

Shekar Narasimhan 00:39:19  That's now two years in. David was enough. There was a local 
person ready to take over. The community needed to build its own bench and leadership, 
and outsider doing it for them was actually as bad as not doing it at all. So the fact that it's 
still there, the same Vincent's mission is still there 50 years later is. part of what I take pride 
in. You know that it did survive and last, even though it hasn't thrived again. I want to be 
cautious that you don't declare big success. You declare small essays along the way. I left 
to go run a Christian charity, actually, called called, Housing and Economic Development 
in Berea, which was in the center, most central part of Kentucky to do this sort of work with 
nonprofits and local governments in West Virginia, Tennessee, Virginia and Kentucky.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:40:22  It's called Central Appalachia. It's still, I think, in the 49 
counties, maybe the poorest in the United States other than the Mississippi Delta. And in 
that work drove 50,000 miles, by the way, a year for two years, helping to build capacity. 
How do people recover from floods? How do they take advantage of resources from the US 
Department of Agriculture and build homes with the rural development? It used to be 
called Farmers Home Administration. How do they take advantage of resources from HUD? 
How do they do skills training so that people who build these people were really good with 
their hands? And no shock. But there were federal government regulations against people 
building their own homes because it was I mean, this makes no sense to me, but that's 
what it was. We actually got the law changed so that people could build self-help housing, 
i.e. if I'm good with my hands, I can help build my own house and reduce its cost. and we 
built new homes that way with self-help. So, long story short, how I got into housing is 
literally part of the story of Kentucky is it became so obvious to me that having a home, 
having a place you actually owned.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:41:42  And I'm not. I'm a big guy on rental housing, as you know, in 
apartment finance. So it wasn't the fundamental concept of housing was stability. You had 
to have a place called home to have a family. You had to have a place called home to go 
from, to find the opportunity. You had to have a place called home for your children to 
come back to. And it never made sense to me that this wasn't just a fundamental right, that 
we figured it out for all Americans. And yet, in one of the counties that I worked in 
Manchester, Clay County, 80% of the homes in 1976 didn't have indoor plumbing. Seems 
bizarre. Now, good news is that in the 50 years since then, we've solved a lot of these 
problems in America, and we don't really have slums anymore, but we still have an acute 
problem with affordable housing. So here I am 50 years later, talking about the issue, but in 
a very different public policy dimension. But how do we build a million units? And there I 
was, building one home at a time.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:42:48  So that's the natural transition to saying, how did housing 
become so core to my being and my passion? When people ask me, do you care about 
business, politics, life, family? All the above I care about my passion is affordable housing.

John Coe 00:43:04  That's interesting. You had you get grassroots about as grassroots as 
you could possibly be, except maybe in rural India if you'd done it there, you know.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:43:17  And by the way, I try to go back, John, after this experience, 
after four years in, in central Appalachia, I went back to India and spent a month and a half 
looking for work, doing something similar, saying, you know, maybe it's time. My dad said, 
go four years young, man, I did it. and everybody in India first, they first were like, why do 
you want to come back? that was questioning. But once they got past that, they were. 
Nothing you've done in the United States is applicable here. It was really heavily dissed that 
this didn't that what I was doing here was at such a different level, with so much more 
resource and so much more opportunity for it to be meaningful, whereas in India it would 
have been so difficult, so hard, and none of the skill sets I learned or the competencies I 
had gained were compatible.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:44:06  So that's why I never went back to India.

John Coe 00:44:09  Yeah, I mean, you've got 4000 years of history there. This country only 
has 400 years. Yes. That's right. It's a different your roots are much deeper there. And as you 
said, India was only been a country for 76 years. And you have I don't know how many 
countries or tribes maybe going back far enough. Very different tribes basically that had 
wholly different cultures. So knitting that together is probably a lot harder.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:44:41  Much harder and much slower. But it's happening. So that's 
the good news. Yeah. Yes.

John Coe 00:44:46  So you came to Washington. Why and how and what brought you here?

Shekar Narasimhan 00:44:51  So I got recruited to come because they were creating a 
program at the federal level, using a lot of the same toolkits we had created in Kentucky 
and Central Appalachia, where they were combining self-help housing with, financing that 
was at below market interest rates with nonprofit and local governments around the 
country. And they said, you should come run this program.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:45:19  When I came to interview, actually, and it was an 
organization called Rural Housing Alliance Rural America, a nonprofit that was getting a big 
grant from the Department of Labor and hired to do this work in, I think 12 states. The funny 
part of it was that I kept saying, well, I've only lived in eastern Kentucky for years. How am I 
qualified to do this? I came here and found that, like, I was one of the few people who had 
ever lived in these places for four years. It was it was quite a revelation that, you know, so 
many people living in Washington had roots elsewhere, but they'd really never lived there or 
lived the experience. And so I was obviously qualified because I just came from there. And I 
had hosted all these people coming from the government to see what we were doing. And 
they said, here's the toolkit. Can you expand this and build out 30 to 40 more organizations 
with similar capacities, pick the organizations and help them build capacity. So I traveled 
the country for basically a year and a half, two years doing that.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:46:26  and then things changed abruptly. the consequence of 
elections. I mean, Reagan defeated Carter, became the president, and everything that we 
had been doing came to a grinding halt, because things were changing in the 
administration. And so I had debated whether I should move back into a rural community. 
By this time, I had gotten married. I had arranged marriage with a young girl from India, and 
we had settled in Washington, D.C., and we she was willing to move. And we actually 
debated moving to Jackson, Mississippi, and building a whole different. Yes. See, I'm used 
to doing things that are somewhat nontraditional, and we ended up not doing it, staying in 
Washington. And then I ended up continuing my housing career here itself. So, but 
extraordinary experience at the local level, at the federal level. but it was really the last time 
I ever worked, even indirectly, for the government. Thereafter it was all private sector.

John Coe 00:47:30  I mean it. I'm thinking this is just really puzzling to me because I think 
that you you come to the United States, you get a master's in business.

John Coe 00:47:42  Okay, Wall Street, you know, all these great opportunities working for 
the major corporation. You go to rural Appalachia, you learn housing at the really grassroots 
level with people with no plumbing, indoor plumbing, and, you know, clean water and all 
this stuff. Then you come to Washington and you want to, you know, do this around the, you 
know, in the poverty levels around the country and do it. And then you have an arranged 
marriage, which I'm guessing I'm going to only guess, speculate that that your in-laws were 
thinking, who is this guy and what is he?

Shekar Narasimhan 00:48:23  He's saying that was that was all that Yeah. My mother said, 
you know, if you don't move from Kentucky to a place like Washington, D.C., I can't get you 
married. because I can't explain it. my father in law, by the way, was the, administrative 
head of a major state in India. And then he became the cabinet member, a health secretary 
in, in India. And he was chairman of the W.H.O., studied at Harvard, by the way, so very 
erudite, also had friends.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:48:55  So one of my, one of my, co-workers, Peggy at Rural America, 
walks into my office one day and she says, you know, I got this really strange call from a 
classmate at Harvard named Tom Timberg. And she said, I said, well, what was that about? 
I said, Tom Timberg, that's a very familiar name, but I don't know him. She said, no, no, he 
says he knows your maybe father in law. Are you going to India to get married? I said, well, 
I'm thinking about it. My mother's trying to arrange it and I'm going to meet a number of 
girls. Which girl is this? She said, I don't know anything more than that. He was just asking, 
are you actually a decent guy? And he was asking all these very strange, intimate questions 
like, does he have girlfriends? Does he support? Does he drink? You know, what about his. 
Does he have a real job? You know. And I was being checked out without even knowing it.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:49:47  Right. So Pinkie Burgess tells me the story. I write to my 
mother and say, who are these people quizzing these people? And she says, well, if you are 
marrying your daughter to a strange guy in a strange job in the United States, wouldn't you 
do that? I said, yeah, I mean, sort of seems like basic, right? So I go, okay, okay. Got it. 
Anyway, that's the girl I ended up marrying. Her father was extraordinary human being. and 
again, you know, India is that kind of multidimensional place. It's rare to find these people, 
but it's not that uncommon. You'll find 100 of them, 5000 of them. And, yes, I and my 
reason for arranged marriage was I felt my children, my grandchildren, would lose their 
culture unless I married somebody from India. And my mother persuaded me that the only 
question was, could I find somebody who was compatible with me? And that required 
going there and meeting and spending a little bit of time.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:50:47  But my entire trip was one month. I met, got married, came 
here, she got a visa and came three months later. And so December, you know, we got 
married in September 1980. She was here in December. And all this stuff with the election 
happened after, you know, after that, and we decided to stay in Washington. and that was 
the, you know, and she's a dancer. She's still married, of course. And it's been 44 years.

John Coe 00:51:20  It's, you know.

John Coe 00:51:23  That's that's just.

John Coe 00:51:25  Culturally to me, it's a complete, you know. Yes.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:51:30  I just so I do have that traditional streak somewhere, right. 
There's this one bone in my body that says, oh, that's traditional. And then there's all this 
other stuff that says, oh no, no, no, I totally need to be different and keep trying to prove 
that.

John Coe 00:51:50  All right. So you the transitions continue here. So so you're in 
Washington. You realize that, you know President Reagan now is in the white House and 
things are different.

John Coe 00:52:04  There's not quite the emphasis on the social Jimmy Carter kind of 
thought process. So business kind of rose its head apparently to you, right? Yes, yes. And 
why why mortgage banking. And how did you get into it?

Shekar Narasimhan 00:52:21  So, I created at a the largest housing co-op in the United 
States called Greenbelt Homes in Greenbelt, Maryland, was built as a plant city. I became 
the first, went as a deputy and then became the general manager during a major in-place 
rehab program. And the problem with co-ops outside of New York was they didn't have any 
financing so that they could transfer and sell their units. And this was a market rate 
cooperative, meaning you could sell your unit to anybody you wanted, subject to the 
approval of the co-op board. But there was no financing available. It was called share loan 
financing because you weren't financing real property. You're financing a share of stock and 
the least a perpetual lease to the unit. So after I became general manager, realizing we 
were just creating this pyramid scheme where people were taking back loans, and so there 
was not any natural market.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:53:22  We created something called the Share Loan Service Corp, 
which became the one of the first co-op financing for share financing. And that's how I got 
to know Fannie Mae. There was a lady at Fannie Mae in 1984 called Beth Marcus that 
created something called share loan financing at Fannie Mae, a secondary market. We 
became one of the first customers. In order to access it, we had to partner with somebody 
as a co-op, and we partnered with the National Consumer Cooperative Bank, which was 
supposed to be doing this and didn't have a retail wing, so they actually invested in it.

John Coe 00:54:04  Okay.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:54:04  And then we partnered.

John Coe 00:54:05  With the National Co-op Bank before.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:54:07  Right. And by the way, that's where I went next, taking this 
share loan thing to them, creating a mortgage business and became the corporate vice 
president for real estate there. So that's the transition. But one of the more unique things 
we did in the middle of all this goes back to my thinking about government and the role of 
government, which of course has evolved in eastern Kentucky.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:54:31  It was the sole reason people existed. If there was no 
welfare, if there was no black lung benefit, if there wasn't government intervention, there 
was no economy. Whereas in Washington it was. We often did things despite the 
government or in spite of it rather than because of it. And here was a chance for the 
government to step up and do something useful. Prince George's County actually was the 
first housing authority in the United States to float single family bonds, but they put an 
allocation in it for share loan financing. And we went we had to go to Standard and Poor's 
and Moody's and get it rated for them. And I remember standing in New York, which I hadn't 
done until then. Explaining to them what their loans were and why they were the safest 
investment. How they could rate the bonds anyway. We did get financing a small sliver 
created share loan service corp and did it with the co-op Bank after that.

John Coe 00:55:29  We ask you, because New York is the center of co-op housing in this 
country.

John Coe 00:55:35  Certainly. And maybe it derived in Europe. I'm not sure where co-op 
originally started, but clearly the banks in New York were doing it and had been doing it for 
probably over a hundred years, I'm guessing co-ops. Go back to the 19th century.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:55:52  Yes they do. Yep.

John Coe 00:55:54  And so there was a culture there. So I'm guessing that lady you talked 
about a Fannie Mae as a native New Yorker? I'm just a guess.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:56:03  Probably not. I don't think Beth was from New York, 
necessarily. But what Fannie did was get pressure to create a national secondary program 
from the savings and loan industry right from New York. And so when we went to them and 
said, we're in Maryland and we want to sell you share loans, they went all good. Now we 
can call this a national program. Yeah. and the banks in New York were looking to offload 
because they were loaded up with the loans and they needed a secondary market. And 
that's why, by the way, Fannie and then ultimately, Freddie Mac started share loan financing 
programs.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:56:40  but we were among the pioneers of that. we the other 
problem was there was no laws dictating enforcement, so we had to pass a model law in 
Maryland. So Maryland has one of the few model cooperative laws in the country which 
specifically talks about share loans and how you perfect a share with the UCC, and your 
perfect the lease, and you can record the lease and all that sort of stuff, because otherwise 
you can't create a secondary market if you don't have security and if you can't enforce your 
security rights. So we did all of that work. Public policy in terms of state legislature, Fannie 
Mae, in terms of secondary market, built a company in between to provide access to it. And 
of course, that company is now national and it's doing business all over. And that's what I 
went to the co-op Bank to run, basically, is when the co-op Bank realized, oh, that's 
interesting. they came to the board of Greenbelt, housing and said, we want to buy the rest 
of our interest in this, your interest, but we'll continue to provide financing here.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:57:48  And they turned to them and say, we want to hire this guy to 
run it. And we had a very interesting six month transition where I, you know, left there and 
came by the way, that co-op is still thriving, etc.. So again, I like in most cases it never 
happens all the time to leave things in a way that they continue. If there's any valid 
elements to it long term. And sometimes that's impossible. But many times it has 
happened in my life and I'm very proud of that.

John Coe 00:58:19  It's interesting the the culture of a co-op compared to a condominium is 
an interesting analogy. I look at a co-op as kind of like a club, like a, a social organization, to 
some extent more so than a condominium situation, which is really just, you know, 
individual ownership, their bond together similarly with an association. But it seems to me 
that a co-op to admit someone in is more of a social thing than a than an economic one to 
some extent.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:58:54  To some extent.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:58:55  But the reason why co-ops are different is because you have 
to. Do you have so much more linking you financially, the carrying charges in a co-op that 
pay for the property taxes, that pay for the improvements in all the common areas. You 
don't own your unit. So even major improvements require that they be budgeted and 
financed. So the budgets are co-ops are bigger, the interdependencies are greater, the 
enforcement rights are different. So it does lead to a very different culture. And also 
because of financing constraints, co-ops never took off in this country. We kept thinking, 
that doesn't make sense because things you would really love to believe. Think about it. 
Wouldn't you love to believe that in America, having mutual interdependency while 
maintaining privacy would be the norm, but at least the privacy beat down? We don't have 
the mutual interdependency.

John Coe 00:59:59  But that's the independent nature of of of the American.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:00:03  Absolutely. Yes. I understand that.

John Coe 01:00:05  Culturally for hundred years in this country. Yep yep.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:00:09  Yep. And it's not.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:00:10  And it's going to change. It has to change because it is led to 
such a level of divisiveness as well. that ultimately will cause us more harm than good. And 
so there has to be a moderation.

John Coe 01:00:23  You talked about green shoots. well, before we even talked about, my 
thought is our millennial generation and perhaps the even the group behind them, Gen Z, 
the Homelander's is they. I've just finished a book called, the fourth turning is here. I don't 
know if you've read that book. Yes, it's you know, he talks about these various generations 
of people. My sense is that generation might look at American culture a little differently 
than our history. And I'm we'll see how it evolves over time.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:00:58  Many interesting things tend to actually remain more the 
same than they change. As you get older, you realize that they change a lot, but they 
actually don't change that much.

John Coe 01:01:08  Yeah, you're right about that. so how did WMF Group come to be?

Shekar Narasimhan 01:01:16  So Wmbf was the product of a lot of these experiences.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:01:20  When I leave the co-op bank, I want to be an entrepreneur. 
from there on, I have never hesitated on. I really don't want to quote work for someone now. 
You always work for someone, right? In whatever however you want to define that. But I 
created a company called Clark Financial Services with a great partner and a couple of 
investors. We took some of the elements of what we were doing with co-op financing, 
blanket loans, share loans. we took some of the elements of multifamily finance broadly, 
moved it in through a single family. Prism continued. the relationships with Fannie Mae and 
our bank at that time that had was supporting us was the National Bank of Washington. 
Because I'd left the co-op Bank, I left on good terms. But still, when I left and a whole 
bunch of people left with me that wasn't, you know, going to be the long term strategic 
partnership for me. So we found another bank. It happened to be led by someone I knew. 
and he said, well, why don't we work together? So they didn't have any ownership, but they 
provided warehouse lines, they provided support systems.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:02:33  They give guarantees so we could become a seller, servicer 
and sell loans. So we kept an office in New York. we had an office in D.C., a small group of 
16 people, Friendship Heights, DC was our headquarters. as again, the same thing started 
to happen to me then. That has happened three times now since then, which is everybody 
else started entering the business and they were larger and they were offering more to the. 
To the client base. And it got harder to compete being a one horse pony. So the National 
Bank of Washington, which has this relationship with us, looks at us just like National 
Consumer Bank looked at shareholder services and says, why don't you become part of 
us? But you know what? If you come here, you're going to be running a little bit bigger 
platform. So I was brought in, folded our team, and we continued the share loan. The in a 
single family kind of a modus operandi. We continued the blanket loans as part of a 
multifamily focus.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:03:37  This company had, the, the they called it Washington 
Mortgage Group. WMG was a subsidiary of the holding company for the National Bank of 
Washington, and I was there for less than a year before the bank itself goes down. The 
holding company goes into bankruptcy?

John Coe 01:03:59  Yes. That was.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:04:01  In 1989. 1990?

John Coe 01:04:04  Yes. Yeah.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:04:06  Okay. But before that, we were doing FHA business. we had, 
we had, gotten the Fannie Mae dust license by buying one of the companies. there was a 
guy at Fannie Mae called Larry Dale who was running multifamily. Calls me up and said.

John Coe 01:04:23  Wouldn't you one of the first dust lenders.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:04:25  Among the first 6 or 7? Yes. Yeah. and, so we took over this 
company's portfolio called AGM, become a dust lender. That was in literally in July of 1989. 
In August I'm, I'm literally on driving to vacation. I'm in Baltimore. We've gotten that far. And 
the news says, National Bank of Washington seized by FDIC. Oh, I told my wife, I said, and 
my son I said, we are like turning around.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:05:00  and that's what we did. So we turned around and we came 
back and there it was. The problem was, the bankruptcy of the parent meant that we were 
subject to the whims of the FDIC. I got a very nice call from Fannie Mae from a guy, called 
Tom white. And Tom says, you know, we really appreciate everything that you've done and 
what you've built. But, you know, until this cloud lifts up because there's a 90 day lookback 
provision in bankruptcies, we can't do any business. You know that, right? I said, no, no, no, 
I know that. So I got 90 days here. So let me look at this as the greatest opportunity of my 
life. 90 days. I assembled our whole staff, which is like 50 people, entire organization. And I 
said, we got three months. We can't do any business. We have a servicing portfolio. We 
have some income coming in, we can pay our bills. That's it. But we can't do any lending.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:05:57  How would you like to reimagine our business? It was huge. It 
was the best planning sessions we've ever had. No interruptions, except for people calling 
from the FDIC and the creditors and the lawyers serving papers and saying, give us your 
records. It was like, amazing. we said, we want to build a national mortgage banking 
company focused predominantly on multifamily, maybe commercial broadly, but 
multifamily in particular. We had to build it on the backs of our GSE and agency 
relationships. So FHA, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, because it's a stickiest value 
proposition in servicing. So we were creating value. But how do we finance our way out of 
the bankruptcy of the parent? Convinced the FDIC to let us go cleanse ourselves, if you 
will, so we can do business. I had to go find an investor who had some deep pockets and 
could help us recapitalize, but it was going to let me and the team run the company and 
own the company. The rest of the at least 50% of it, ended up because of a banker in 
Boston, by the way, named Claire Newbery finding a Saudi investor.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:07:15  One of the members of the royal family went to rehab, cut the 
deal, and went to the FDIC and said, here we go. We'll pay you back all the loans. well, you 
know, so we'll clean out all the lines. This is how much we can afford to pay you, and we're 
going to buy the company and recapitalize it. and, Fannie Mae, will you approve this if we 
don't?

John Coe 01:07:39  Okay. Hold on. Saudi. Yes. So you know where I'm going with Saudi 
investors, right? Of course. Lending is against their faith. So how do you how do you sell 
that?

Shekar Narasimhan 01:07:54  They were just doing they were just investing in the company. 
They weren't lending any money. They the fact that a derivative exists out of what you invest 
in is not against Sharia law. So yeah, it's just technical. It's all technical. So they were 
investing they owned a piece of the company. he sat on my board. One of the funniest 
stories I tell about Wmfe in our first revolution, 1990, we go into business as Washington 
Mortgage Financial Group.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:08:23  Changing the name slightly. Only we're still based in Vienna, 
Virginia. Same people running it. one of the funniest stories is Fannie Mae. About six 
months into this, we're now back in business. Got warehouse lines. Larry Pendleton at, 
RFC is giving us warehouse lines. and the business is now beginning to come back, etc.. 
And people were very supportive. I will tell you, in adversity you find out who your friends 
are. I have not really found out who my enemies are. I found out who isn't a friend, but I 
don't consider them enemies. They're just people who said, hey, let it blow over and we'll 
talk to them again. But then I knew who my friends were because they kept calling and 
saying, you're going to come out of this and you're going to be fine, and I'm going to be there 
for you. That's different. Right? So I six months into this, in 1990, I got another call from 
Fannie Mae. And they say, you know, we love you and we're so happy you're back in 
business.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:09:20  And we're so glad that you're focused on affordable housing, 
by the way. And I'll tell you that story in a second on how that happened. But you only have 
two members of your board, and we really are uncomfortable with that. The two members 
were this gentleman named Mohammed Al Turi, who was from Saudi Arabia, and me. It 
makes sense to have more board members. We had two board members He controlled 
50% of the company. I controlled it and I ran it, and life was good. we had to agree on 
everything of importance. So I said, Jesus, what do I do now? So I went and found Jack 
Riley. I said, you know what we're missing? I've got a Hindu and I got a muslim, and I got 
some Saudi Arabia and somebody originally from India. I need an Irishman and I need a 
Catholic. So. So for a period, literally of six years, the board consisted of Mohammad Al 
Treasury, Jack Riley, who created Riley Mortgage and myself.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:10:22  And, Fannie Mae was very happy. Jack was an iconic figure in 
his own right, became a great, great friend. and we used to eat spicy food deliberately just 
to tease him because he went red when he ate spicy food. And the other two enjoyed it. 
But, so the evolution of the company was very simple. We were very focused on being the 
biggest company. That was the goal. Here was an industry that we thought was in its 
fledgling stages. There was literally only one company that had a government that had $1 
billion of servicing. You know, you know, they're like five now that have more than 100 
million, 100 billion. So this was long time ago. But in 1990, we said, oh, no, we could be the 
biggest. How are you going to be the biggest? Well, you have to have money, capital. You 
have to have the right team. You have to build nationally. You have to have all the licenses. 
So we bought Freddie Mac license, we bought one of the largest FHA companies and 
became the largest FHA multifamily company.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:11:24  We we started to buy commercial mortgage bankers. We 
bought eight companies. We sold, I think three. But we basically became a full platform for 
commercial real estate, multifamily finance, and by the time we sold in 96 when my partner 
exited his investment. we had already grown to 10 billion and we were doing $2 billion a 
year business. So when that sale in 96 occurred, it was because of a guy named Rod Heller 
who had created a company called NP financial. NP was a government spinout, if you will, 
because it was created around the time of the tax deduction financing mechanisms. And 
he had taken that company and built a property management business. Sticky because the 
ownership of the assets, they only owned 20% of the assets in a separate company, 80% 
were owned by limited partners, and they had a 15 year contract to manage properties. So 
it was a property management annuity business, affordable, focused. He said join me. 
We've just gone public on Nasdaq 96. His principal shareholder was the Harvard 
Endowment.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:12:41  The second largest was Capricorn Investments, and they 
said, join us, we're going to build something really huge, large, blah, blah, blah. By the way, I 
learned a lot about, what promises like that mean. explained. So we then in 96, we sell in 
97. I got a call at about 1 a.m. from one of the, Harvard Endowment board members who 
says, I have some news for you. We can't say anything because it won't be released till 
tomorrow morning, but we're selling NP to Aimco, and we'd like to not sell, mfg, which was 
kept as a complete siloed. so we had less than a year in that court, public ownership form, 
in a small cap company. And any Aimco bought both the partnership interests in the private 
company as well as the property management business. That's how they went into the 
affordable space. Harvard ended. We ended up spinning out at the time of that merger into 
an independent public company in December of, 2000 and down, 1997.

John Coe 01:13:58  You learned a lot from that, I'm sure.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:14:02  Well, I learned that nothing is permanent. Ha ha ha ha. You 
play the cards as they're dealt. you don't try to keep wishing for something different. being a 
small cap, we created a lot of excitement around going public because the only other 
company that was public that looked vaguely like us was Ambrosio, and that was it. and, 
you know, and that's why I'm so proud of what Willie has done, by the way, because he has 
taken this to the next level, which I would have thought I wanted to do. But then I realized I 
didn't have the stomach for, But the beauty of being public is that you have currency. The 
bad news of being small cap and esoteric is no one covers you. You'll never raise capital. So 
the advantages of being public are diminished by the cost. So, so it was a wonderful 
experience, and expensive experience. And ultimately we ended up selling it to a much 
larger company that became public, Prudential Insurance, in 2000.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:15:03  And so that's my quick 15 year history of WMF, which was, I 
stayed with Pru for three years because it was part of the deal. they needed somebody to 
run this agency space for them, and they wanted somebody to build out a separate 
managed business of assets because they were going into third party management heavily. 
that would focus on core mortgages. So they have a general account that invests in 
mortgages. They wanted third party money alongside it, and then they wanted the agency 
business. So you could build a broad distribution platform for all these, assets that you 
could create. And they had 100 year plus history and a deep balance sheet. So I was there 
for three years, helped them do some M&A, by the way, because they didn't have a lot of 
people had done M&A. We might be and you should ask them, but we might be the most 
successful acquisition they ever did.

John Coe 01:16:02  That's interesting. Can we go back a little bit to the WMF platform if I 
could? Yes. your roots were multifamily and were more single family and then multifamily.

John Coe 01:16:15  And so you went through the what I call the worst client, worst crisis in 
my career was 1980, 1990, 91, 92. commercial mortgage banking basically Disappeared 
almost altogether. I interviewed Ethan Penner, who was the, you know, the progenitor of the 
CMS industry. and he talks about no one could get a commercial loan for any commercial 
property of income producing asset at all, anywhere. And so he went in as a bond 
salesman. He was a bond salesman at, at Drexel Burnham and then went on to you know, 
he was at Morgan Stanley and he met with the rating agencies one day and he said, we 
can't rate any, any, any package commercial loan that you can do. I said, okay, here's the 
Empire State Building, I'm bringing it in, and we're going to ask for a $50,000 loan on the 
Empire State Building. You're not going to you're not going to give me a credit for that. Yeah, 
just an outrageous request, right? And so they said, yeah, I think we would.

John Coe 01:17:31  And so he was able to at least get some, you know, amazing credibility 
there, for that. So in my mind, he was, you know, there it is. So he able got that thought 
process across the board and you know, so at that time it was just an impossible thing. So 
your roots because it was all in the single family multi, it wasn't as dramatic. And then I 
interviewed Tom Mizuho who talked about the multifamily business, which he when he was 
with the Oxford and basically was at HUD when he first started his career. So he knew the 
roots of that industry and stayed in that lane the whole time of his career. But he said we 
were the dwarf stepchild in the corner in the capital markets and in the, you know, in the 
multifamily space. And, you know, and that was throughout the early 90s. And, you know, in 
the course of Oxford and all the syndication business in the 80s and all that and. And then 
suddenly in the late 1990s and early 2000, the multifamily business say, this is it, fantasy, 
you know.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:18:50  Yes, absolutely.

John Coe 01:18:51  So it's it's interesting to hear your career going through as a multifamily 
only platform. You were kind of, not that in the trough like the commercial industry was. It's 
interesting.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:19:08  And and the other thing quickly to note there is that it was. It 
was back to my housing roots. It was. It was essential housing. when we at WMF decided 
on what we wanted to make a statement about to our clients, even though we were doing 
$3 billion a year, including multifamily, initially some single family, and then we abandoned 
that. And and commercial real estate. All the food groups, the logo. in every office we had 
18 offices around the country. quoted the first paragraph of the 1949 Housing Act. The 
Congress of the United States hereby declares that every American has a right to a, a home 
that is safe, secure and well maintained. And that was in every one of our 18 offices. And 
people would come in and say, don't you do other things? Yes, but that's our Northstar.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:20:17  That's what we care about the most is. And so that's, you 
know, and that comes back from my roots, obviously. But everybody believed in it, that this 
was a mission. We had a mission. We had to make money. We had to do well, we had to 
make returns for our shareholders, but we had to serve our clients well. But the main thing 
was ultimately, the people who we cared about the most were the people who lived in what 
we financed.

John Coe 01:20:47  Well, it's interesting, I started my career at Prudential Insurance 
Company. and so when we started, we were really the first major institutional investor in 
real estate. I mean, we set up the first pension fund advisory, group. Pru was a pioneer in 
commercial real estate. They were really the leader. There was no other institutional 
investor like them. Now. MetLife, of course, was right there, too. And they were doing much 
larger deals. we were much broader spectrum, doing a lot more different things, but it was 
interesting that the emphasis was the multifamily was kind of as like Tom said, the 
stepchild in the corner.

John Coe 01:21:31  I mean, we we did multi we certainly did it. But you know, office, retail, 
industrial those were really the the mainstays.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:21:40  Oh absolutely. Hey there was a guy at Principle Life who I 
don't remember his name. Principal life CIO in 1995 at a conference. No beds. Yeah. You 
remember that.

John Coe 01:21:51  Oh I know well I've done a lot of a lot of business with with with 
principal. Yeah. Banker was bankers life before principal.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:21:59  Yes, exactly.

John Coe 01:22:00  And so I, you know, I met with them real early on and they said no beds. 
No. And we're not doing any hotels. None of that. Nothing, nothing with the bed in it, which 
was a totally different philosophy.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:22:15  everything has changed. Everything has changed. And Pru 
didn't feel that at all, because Bruce had done the examination of what happened in the 
90s, and they found they did their wonderful analysis and they said, this is the lowest 
volatility is in the apartments because they've diversified rental. Duh.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:22:34  Anyway. And so therefore we want to be in beds in 
apartments.

John Coe 01:22:39  And that that statement is that, you know, apartments are one year 
leases. Yes. And that was the argument up front was that's too unstable. I mean, you know, 
rents could go anywhere. How do we predict that?

Shekar Narasimhan 01:22:52  How do we predict that exactly?

John Coe 01:22:54  At the same time they were doing hotel deals. How about the rents 
changing every day there? So I mean, no question.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:23:02  Absolutely. Yes. It's just.

John Coe 01:23:04  You know, it's a mindset thing.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:23:06  It is a mindset. And it changed. And it changed so 
dramatically that somebody like Willie Walker could enter the picture. You know, when you 
think about the ethos there, It was live company with Walker Dunlop. It was Green Park 
Financial, the dust which was off to the side but doing its thing valuable because Mallory 
was on the board of Fannie Mae and you should do this. And that's a business you should 
be in. And then Willie comes in and he goes, this should be together.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:23:36  One distribution platform. And then, as you know, and I 
mentioned to you, I, we helped him with three different ethos, over the years. And then a 
fourth more recently was how do you become full service multifamily? You need Fannie 
Mae and Freddie Mac, FHA that was Column Financial. How do you become the dominant 
player of one of the dominant, you know, top three players in agency. You have to create a 
bigger platform. That was the capital merger. And then how do you diversify your 
distribution when you're competing against the behemoths that have these huge 
investment sale brokerage operations and get to the client earlier than you do. Well, you got 
to create that. That was the Anglo Financial and then the build out that he's done since 
then.

John Coe 01:24:26  What's ironic, Shekhar, as you're talking, is that you set the table for 
Willie because you did everything that he's done to some extent. Yeah. So. Well.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:24:38  He and I agree on that, that it was smaller. It was in a 
different era, but there was a lot of similarities.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:24:44  That's why I'm so proud of what he's done.

John Coe 01:24:46  Frankly, I can see why. because of what you your story you've told. 
Because you were you went public. You did. You were involved in all that.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:24:57  We built the whole agency, networks. I mean, I've chaired the 
first Fannie Does advisory committee because, and then, you know, Howard took over who 
was at Green Park. the reason why this is significant is that as I evolved in Beekman, we 
thought we could do something that was different because, you know, look, I'm 
independent now. I don't I'm not beholden, I don't share, I belong to all kinds of trade 
associations, and I go to meetings, but I don't I'm not owned by anybody. It meant means I 
can testify in Congress and tell the truth. Rare. I can say what I believe. And yeah, people 
may not like it. It may not immediately help their business or may hurt their business. But if 
they don't want to do business with us because of that, okay, that's fine.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:25:47  See, I mean, it's all adult, right? And what I'm saying, why I'm 
saying all this, is when I look at our role as being an advisor, it's been thought leadership. In 
2005, I was watching the evolution of LJ Melody into CBRE with Bryant staffers as the head 
of something new called head of capital markets. Right. And he grabs Peter Donovan and 
brings him in and makes him the head of the fanny, because that's how they got a fanny 
license. And they go, Holy Toledo, they'll make it work. And 40% of their lending business 
became connected to the investment platform, but they did it by some very simple but 
difficult things. Compensation. Co-location. Blank, blank. I said that's the future. So if 
you're a debt platform and you don't have the distribution access to the investment sales, 
you're going to lose. We started hyping that conversation and then we did a whole bunch of 
transactions around it. So thought leadership consulting. You know, we did IRA into 
Newmark and then helped with what happened with Berkeley Point and now Newmark 
Multifamily.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:27:00  And so we've been involved in these seminal things. But it 
could only happen, John, because I could have a vision beyond where a running one 
company to a larger industry.

John Coe 01:27:11  There was a template, though, for the LG metal. The CBRE Holiday Folio 
really was the first to do, in my experience, in doing both sales and mortgage banking and 
doing what they did, they kind of set the table for that industry, and there was almost an 
ethical issue with them to some extent, too. And maybe you're familiar with this issue? 
Yeah. and as we know, as mortgage bankers, when we were one, we knew going in we were 
dual agents.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:27:45  Yes.

John Coe 01:27:46  And so the dual agency issue is a problem. And for the listeners just to 
explain this. as a mortgage banker, you're representing the lenders that you service for. but 
at the same time, you hire, you're hired by a borrower who is looking for finance. And so he 
is he or she is hiring you as an agent to represent them to, to, to to bring money.

John Coe 01:28:16  Well, there's an inherent conflict there. If you're trying to bring capital 
from one of your correspondent lenders and or your relationships on the on the servicing 
side to that borrower. So that's an inherent problem. And you almost and not until probably 
halfway into my my career at the company in mortgage banking that we have to disclose 
that in a legal document is part of our agency agreement with our borrowers at the time. 
And I got fired by a couple of clients as a result of that. We said, wait a minute, you can't 
bring me one of your correspondents. That's that is a conflict. Got it. He was an attorney 
and he said no I can't continue the relationship because of that. So it's an interesting 
conflict. But and I, you know, holiday Finola was the first one that basically told their 
borrowers, you know, when they or they're, they're no or they're more of their sales people. 
they're their sales clients. So if they're getting a listing on a property, you are going to use 
our mortgage banking firm, and the buyer of that property is going to use our firm to, help 
them arrange financing for this acquisition.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:29:38  Well that was I tell you why I never had a problem with it. 
because of two reasons. One is I believe honestly that transparency solves a lot of 
problems. So if I explain to the person who's paying me, what they're paying me, what 
they're paying me for, what is the value that I'm providing and disclose it for a long period of 
time? in the mortgage banking industry, we were not disclosing that people were making 
money in many different ways, and that was a problem to me, not telling people that we're 
selling alone at a premium and that's part of the origination fee. Not telling them that there 
was a trade being made on the servicing. Those were problems to me. Disclosure 
transparency addresses one kind of problem. The second was when we were offering we 
became one of the few people in 1999 that said, we're going to always offer our borrower 
multiple choices, even if they don't ask us for it. You could call me up and say, I want a 
Fannie Mae loan. I know you do Fannie Mae loans.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:30:44  I want a Fannie Mae loan. The job of our loan officer was to 
say to you, done. I could do that. I'm also going to show you a Freddie Mac quote, an FHA 
code and a life company court and a CMBS court and a bank court and a debt court. If I can 
get provide those because I owe it to you for you to know what your choices are and what 
the nuances are. We used to do that routinely.

John Coe 01:31:08  That's what a mortgage banker should do.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:31:11  Well, number one, if you do that and you are transparent 
about how you make money, I think you can represent both very, very sufficiently and very 
well. Now, did it make all the agencies happy? By the way, we were also one of the 
company's first companies that went to a commission structure for loan officers. it was 
invented for us by Michael Hirschberg of Ferguson Partners in 1995, in something we call 
plan 2000, at WMG and we said loan officers, because I was always interested in having a 
few loan officers that did a lot of business and then a whole bunch that did some business 
that could gravitate there, because the idea was Ferguson.

John Coe 01:31:56  Is a, is a headhunter. They're a,

Shekar Narasimhan 01:32:00  At that time, they used to do a lot of consulting and advisory 
work, and we hired them to do our strategic planning for us and so on. Okay. That's 
interesting.

John Coe 01:32:09  So how did they figure this out? I mean, what did they use as a as a 
model.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:32:14  Single family model? we use single family. We use non-bank 
specialty finance. We studied a range of industries and how they evolved and said, how do 
we attract the most talented people? We cannot limit their upside if we're going to attract 
the best talent. That was it.

John Coe 01:32:33  Align incentives.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:32:34  Align incentives. It's variable comp with a low base fringe 
benefits to so you can live, but you're not thriving. In order to thrive, you have to do more. 
You're going to reach an elite status. And at that point you can earn even more. But we're 
not going to cap your earnings. That's, a little bit of what we invented as well. Along the way, 
we also invented, by the way, the credit facility where Fannie and Freddie could do 
something for a larger institutional borrower because the world was institutionalizing rights 
were coming into vogue and figuring out how to do.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:33:07  We did the first unbelievable $100 million transaction with 
Berkshire Realty in 1995, that, you know, and then since then, you know, like, I don't know, 
100 billion has been done.

John Coe 01:33:21  But is this like a bank line?

Shekar Narasimhan 01:33:24  Yeah, it was like a bank line, except you were allowed to 
substitute. You could do floating rate, fixed rate agencies had this power because of their 
federal guarantee that they didn't know existed and how to use it exactly in the 
securitization market. And all of a sudden, we were doing getting them into a businesses 
that were lower risk, lower reward, but easier to duplicate and do it scale.

John Coe 01:33:49  Turning them into an investment bank is what you're doing.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:33:52  Exactly. So we did all of that. And then, you know, the 
Beekman story has always been the most interesting to me because we've got everywhere 
there is, the, evolution of the service company and the diversification of revenues, the 
emphasis by those companies now on recurring earnings. How do you create a company, a 
public company, a large public company needs a core basis of earnings that occur every 
year somewhat, no matter what.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:34:24  If they have that, they can be a significant and large public 
company. But still, in our industry, even today, we only have, you know what a mid-cap is, 
right? 10 billion. Now, there's exactly one company above that in our industry right now, still 
all these years later. So I aspire that we will have a company that is large, diversified, 
strong, recurring earnings, solid. One of the best places to work in America kind of thing. 
One of the best. If you think about banking and non banking and specialty finance, you say I 
got to go there because that offers me the best career path and I could actually be there ten 
years and thrive. And then my earnings are not capped other than by ambition.

John Coe 01:35:11  Well you're you're painting a scenario that someday, hopefully in the 
future we can have a profitable company that focuses on affordable housing in a 
methodology that kind of is somewhat of a public private structure that, doesn't burden the 
tax holders, that the taxpayers in this country too much.

John Coe 01:35:37  But also provides a social benefit for the private sector. Now Amazon 
recently has had a program, I interviewed Catherine Buell who wrote a six page memo to 
Jeff Bezos and said yep, I see it. Let's do this. they invested $2 billion. Probably larger. 
Largest investment of private sector in housing, probably in the history of this country, I'm 
guessing.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:36:03  And they just added another billion four to that.

John Coe 01:36:06  Yeah. Yeah.

John Coe 01:36:08  And you know, why is Amazon doing that?

Shekar Narasimhan 01:36:16  Enlightened self-interest.

John Coe 01:36:19  Well, let's get back to the roots of Amazon. The customer comes first. 
Today is day one. I mean, if you read Jeff Bezos annual letters. Yeah, he wanted to solve the 
customer as much as he could. The customer's comes first. Always. And who is the 
customer? And so, where is the largest demand right now in all of housing? There's no 
bigger demand than the affordable space that I can think of.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:36:50  Absolutely. We're short units we haven't built, and we can 
only build at the high end.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:36:56  And the cost of regulations and also the extraordinarily 
archaic systems we use to build unbelievably old land use zoning, construction materials. 
So I once heard the CEO of a company that doesn't exist anymore called Katara, who was 
trying to reinvent the housing, building space and material space to say that if the rate of 
innovation in housing, basically the way we build houses, was the rate of innovation for 
building an iPhone, it would take 4000 years for us to get an iPhone. It sounds a little stark, 
but the truth of the matter is we're still using stick built. We still use the same trades. We 
still build it. Yes, we've improved, we've gotten faster. But then there's also also been all this 
government intervention, both local, state and federal. This can be solved. This problem 
can be solved with manmade problem. Manmade problems can be solved by men and 
women. You know.

John Coe 01:38:02  I've been intrigued by the affordable housing space for quite some time 
and in many ways. But, you know, I interviewed, Vicky.

John Coe 01:38:11  Davis.

John Coe 01:38:12  Yes.

John Coe 01:38:13  Is she led, you know, the state of Maryland's, you know, housing group. 
At one point prior to that, she was with Trammell Crow. I mean, in, in multifamily. So she 
has a very interesting career talking about that. And I, I challenged her. I said, so what is it? 
You know, how can we make make it profitable to be in the multifamily affordable 
workforce housing space. And and she comes at it just like you do from engineering. She 
has like three degrees in engineering. She's an amazing. educated person. And she says, 
you know, we can create value in places that you don't really know you can do. And that's 
sometimes reengineering the physical space into places that are very special. She's doing 
it here in, in Washington's, you know, the, the former Walter Reed hospital with, with with 
Hines right now. And it's quite a project that they've done there and they're continuing to 
make it happen anyway. It just, you know, she looks at things differently.

John Coe 01:39:26  And to me, that's what it's going to take. It's going to take a little 
different perspective on things.

John Coe 01:39:30  No question. Absolutely.

John Coe 01:39:32  So, you know I wanted to get into that a little bit more. So let's let's talk 
about some transactions if we can and some of your deals. you you talked about Walker 
and Dunlop. you know, I would say that what you did was a template for Willie, it seems to 
me, because, you weren't able to get the scale because of the capital markets at the time, 
obviously, and things that happened to you. But now, you know, he was able to transform 
and make it happen and become a public company. And his personality is such that, you 
know, he he wasn't going to take any prisoner and he was going to be, you know, and he in 
his in my podcast with him, it was clear that he had he had some obstacles. He had to get 
out of the way and certainly did it. he had he built a policy internally that he, you know, I it 
was probably the only episode where I probably should have said this is, you know, the the 
language here is a little severe.

John Coe 01:40:40  Yes. Right. you know.

John Coe 01:40:45  But he got that out of the way.

John Coe 01:40:49  But then others.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:40:50  Who have done it in their own way. the CEO of Colliers and 
what he has done, spending them basically $1 billion building an asset management 
business alongside a sleepy ish investment sales brokerage business, something that he's 
now building on the debt platform side. but the diversification of revenues, the growth, I 
mean, it's now a $7 billion public company was a $2 billion company just five years ago.

John Coe 01:41:18  Did you help them?

Shekar Narasimhan 01:41:19  Not bad. Not bad to spend. well, we've sold him things. We 
we admire him from afar. We look at his model, but we've been involved. But not as much 
as certainly with some of the others. The other one that we, that I admire is Bob and CBRE. 
How they have built what I would call a not only a recurring fee model, but a recurring talent 
model, because everybody knows in our businesses that the talent does exist and it's 
people. But how do you create something where you don't just have to re-up everybody 
every X number of years?

John Coe 01:41:59  Well, I'm also an alum, so yes.

John Coe 01:42:03  I was with CB in the early 80s. It was a completely different company.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:42:07  Oh, absolutely. Yes. It was heavily indebted. It was sleepy. It 
was thinking global.

John Coe 01:42:13  It was the largest brokerage.

John Coe 01:42:14  Firm in the.

John Coe 01:42:15  Country even.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:42:16  Then. Yes. Right.

John Coe 01:42:18  We were.

John Coe 01:42:18  We were the the big.

John Coe 01:42:19  Dogs.

John Coe 01:42:21  When we come into the market and CBD had their own culture and it 
was unique. There was no other culture like KBS culture. Grubb and Ellis copied us and, 
yeah, it was quite something, but the early 90s crushed it.

John Coe 01:42:38  Yeah.

John Coe 01:42:38  And and they had to change and as you said.

John Coe 01:42:42  And they did.

John Coe 01:42:44  And they did it. It took time. No one, at least three metamorphoses in 
that in that ten year period, I think.

John Coe 01:42:51  No question.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:42:52  So there are people who have taken pieces of what they had, 
and they haven't built it from scratch necessarily. They've taken it re adapted it, fixed it. you 
know, I mean, and in the world that we live in, I mean, there is a Cushman Wakefield, and 
Michelle's doing a great job there.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:43:10  There's, there's clearly a new mark with Barry Garson and 
what he's trying to do there and his focus on talent. So there are companies that are 
emerging in the multibillion dollar space. You know, there's some energy with his focus on 
research and just building the largest distribution system in mankind, you know, and 
wondering whether you could stitch all that together. So the point is there'll be companies 
in many shapes use. But what I continue to see is consolidation, consolidation, 
consolidation.

John Coe 01:43:43  Let me talk about one that I'm very familiar with.

John Coe 01:43:45  Yes.

John Coe 01:43:48  and this is somebody that I've known for almost the beginning of his 
career, and then his protege, who now runs this company. And this is Bellwether Financial, 
which is, started in, in Ohio, in Cleveland as a mortgage banking firm. And then was 
acquired by enterprise, I believe, ten, maybe 15 years ago.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:44:15  Yeah, 11 years ago we did that deal.

John Coe 01:44:17  Yes, yes.

John Coe 01:44:19  So enterprise is a company that, you know, has its roots with Jim Rouse.

John Coe 01:44:25  And.

John Coe 01:44:25  Jim, you know, as from a, you know, philosophical and philanthropy 
level, was a regional mall developer and said, we need to invest in. Of course, he built 
Columbia, which was the largest planned community in the country, and he saw the 
housing issue, of course, developing from that, being a land developer. And he said, you 
know, we need to do something about affordable housing in this country. So he set up 
enterprise and that became his legacy. Yeah. And that was dedicated and still is to 
affordable housing. That's really a major, perhaps the largest private sector affordable 
housing developer, investor in the country, one of one of 2 or 3.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:45:09  And it's as an end run as a nonprofit.

John Coe 01:45:12  And I think you're you were or are on the board there, if I'm not 
mistaken.

John Coe 01:45:16  That is.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:45:17  Correct. I'm on the board of trustees.

John Coe 01:45:19  Okay.

John Coe 01:45:19  So there's again, a continuation of your passion in the affordable 
housing space.

John Coe 01:45:26  Of course.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:45:27  So we.

John Coe 01:45:28  Helped them do.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:45:29  Mergers. We've helped them grow.

John Coe 01:45:31  Yes.

John Coe 01:45:32  Their acquisition of bellwether is an interesting one, because why 
would they buy a traditional mortgage banking firm? so I want to ask you that since you 
helped engineer that and then their expansion plans. And the irony, of course, there is Todd 
Harrop is somebody I've known since almost the beginning of his career who is the head of 
production there. And his now boss was his protege, DJ.

John Coe 01:46:03  Yeah.

John Coe 01:46:04  So a little story, a little side, personal story about DJ. I saw him when he 
was an analyst there at nationwide when he came in Nationwide Insurance Company. he 
was I was a correspondent in nationwide. I've done for 20 years, well over 20 years. I was a 
correspondent to them. So I knew I saw Todd when he was an analyst, going up all the way 
to run the group and then of course, DJ. But I knew DJ was kind of special when I met him. 
and the last time I physically saw DJ Leffler was in Michigan Stadium.

John Coe 01:46:40  On.

John Coe 01:46:41  2003, The big House, when Michigan beat Ohio State for the last time in 
probably maybe ten years at that point.

John Coe 01:46:51  Yeah.

John Coe 01:46:52  and he, of course, being a native of Ohio and a Columbus native also 
and a Buckeye was very disappointed that day. And of course, I'm on a Michigan alum and 
so had a lot of fun that day.

John Coe 01:47:07  I can.

John Coe 01:47:07  Understand, but.

John Coe 01:47:08  I you know, I and Todd and I had a standing bet for almost 15 years on 
that game. So anyway, so we have a personal.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:47:16  Long and deep.

John Coe 01:47:17  Relationship. Yes. So the company I.

John Coe 01:47:21  Sat down two years, four years ago and he said, I'm looking to buy a 
mortgage banking firm in the Washington, D.C. area. I said, really? So I introduced him to 
Columbia National and they said, no, we're not quite ready for that. and, you know, and 
then all of a sudden I get the news and I just, I don't know where I found it.

John Coe 01:47:44  I said, oh my God, Philips is going to be sold to bellwether. And I said, 
oh, isn't that something? So now that I'm setting the table for you here. So sure.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:47:56  Sure, I, you know, look, it was simple. I was I knew enterprise 
I was called by Ron Villegas was chairman and Charlie Warren who ran Enterprise 
Community Investments. And they said, yeah, we have this small mortgage company 
called Enterprise Mortgage. It does have a special affordable license for Fannie and 
Freddie, and it's doing some FHA small office in Atlanta. we want you to take a look at it. 
And this is how we usually get assignments and help us figure out what it is. Can it work? 
Can it be scared? It wasn't an M&A assignment. That's how it usually starts for us. So we 
take a look. I'm sitting in front of the board, which consisted of a very large number of 
people, most of whom weren't in mortgage finance. And Ron says, why don't you just 
bluntly tell us what you think of EMI? And I said, I was looking for the pimple on the 
elephant's ass, and I couldn't even see it.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:48:55  And they said, what do you mean? I said, in this industry 
today, in 2006, you have, It was actually. Yeah, it was actually 2010, 2010. I think they did 
the deal with bellwether in 2012. you have they're doing $100 million a year lending. They 
have $500 million in servicing. It's nothing. You're not making any difference if your purpose 
in doing this was to serve a particular non-profit, affordable Community. There are many 
others doing more of that. If your purpose was to create a value company that could 
generate income, that could support the mission. You're not doing that. You're not scared. 
So they said, okay, the board then huddles. They're probably slightly offended by what I 
said, but I got it across in a in a couple of slides in one sentence, and they come back and 
Charlie says, okay, now we want you to help you find the merger partner. Who could we do 
this with but still retain control? We want our mission to prevail, but we don't want our 
management to prevail necessarily.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:50:02  Meaning we understand our limitations and we're not it. But 
how do we do this? So we looked at 100 different companies across the entire spectrum, 
not talk to all of them, but looked at them, narrowed it down to a few and had 
conversations. And the finalists included bellwether, which was a spinoff of the National 
Bank, In, which had gone been bought by PNC and PNC already owned arks and Redcat. I 
mean, and there were all these conflicts going on, and this was coming out of the crisis of 
financial crisis. Ned and Debbie had pulled bellwether out and taken some of the life 
company relationships and the Freddie Mac relationship, and created a company that was 
now a true mortgage banker. But they had an office in Atlanta, and they were primarily in 
the Midwest. And so it was small, Ned said, you know, I'd be really interested in doing 
something because it gives me access to Fannie Mae, gives me access to a bit of a balance 
sheet, but controlled by a nonprofit.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:51:14  Yeah. Well, how is that going to work? How do I do this? and 
and it was interesting because where the convergence was and our job is to find 
convergence. was that.

John Coe 01:51:27  The clear.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:51:29  Path that Ned was on? Was thinking about this like a law 
partnership or a doctor partnership, where the problem for mortgage banking firms is that 
when they grow, they they really can't keep their people. The talent has to please because 
they're groomed. People pay big checks and buy them, if you will. How do you keep people? 
And he said, I would like a company where the a significant portion of the company is 
actually owned by the people who produce the business, and it's recurring. So we have to 
create a mechanism where they can sell, where they can buy, where the new people come 
in and they can own. I said, you're only going to do that if somebody commits to owning you 
for 10 to 20 years, and that's not going to be a typical private equity shop.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:52:16  It may be a bank, but a bank will want to control you. And by 
the way, do you want to be? Owned by a bank? He goes, hell no! We're all bank refugees. 
We came out of Mellon Bank and Bank of New York and National Bank, you know, 
anywhere. And so we're not gonna want to be owned by a bank. So I said, okay, then here it 
is. So after getting through that hurdle, it took a while to get the deal done. But Ned and 
Debbie, in effect, it was a reverse merger because Lamarr Seeds was there at enterprise 
representing them. But Ned and Debbie ran the business and now DJ and Todd were 
running the business. How did it grow? Predominantly by using their stock private stock, 
but having a liquidity and an asset value that they could demonstrate to people pays a 
dividend because that's what enterprise wants. And then the other thing that we did for 
them in 2020, right, during Covid, by the way, was it enabled them to sell a portion of it to 
Fifth Third Bank.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:53:15  So they are uniquely owned by management, a nonprofit that 
controls the board and a in a regional, a significant size regional bank that has a big 
balance sheet. And they are opportunistically one of the few companies that doesn't have 
the kind of turnover that the larger and smaller guys have because they have ownership, 
they have a real stake in outcome. but at the same time, they have the challenges of having 
to grow. Having all these overlays, their goal has to be multifamily is more than 50% of their 
business. They need to be big and affordable. They need to also service their bank clients. 
and they have bank regulatory constraints that might prevent them from doing some things. 
But they have this unique positioning with JW and tired of being a mortgage banker. That's 
truly where the people who work there and produce the revenues can call themselves 
owners. And that's why Phillips sold to them. That's why they had. They bought a company 
in Charlotte. They did a merger with the company in Minneapolis. You know, they airlifted 
people in Los Angeles, all because of this.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:54:29  It's culturally compatible with our industry models. It's got a 
longer term future creation. You can build a bench when, you know, people might be there 
5 or 10 years. You can create a different kind of company. So that's one of the contrasts in 
our industry is that we're creating all these models, you see. And each of them could work 
long term. Each of them might not work, but we'll see. that's why I love where I am. In 
between advisors, I have this wonderful 30,000. I can look inside and I can look outside, 
and I can do both at the exact same time.

John Coe 01:55:05  Interesting, interesting.

John Coe 01:55:09  but what's, you know, having enterprise as a parent, you know, you have 
this affordable housing lens that you have to really almost. I mean, that's got to be the 
mission of the firm. And so, you know, but it's.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:55:24  Also the mission of the firm to get what they call unrestricted 
income, because a lot of what enterprise lives on is grants.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:55:33  And those grants all come with strings for a purpose. This is a 
significant source of unrestricted income, which allows them to support, for example, 
public policy advocacy, research, things that many times grants and grants or grantors 
don't do directly. So this is very important to enterprise in terms of cash flow return on 
investment, but much more important, cash that it generates every year that can be 
granted back to the parent. So it's called capital on a mission. They do care about 
affordable housing, but it doesn't have to be the sole thing that bellwether enterprise does.

John Coe 01:56:13  Why can't you get the capital then to become the Amazon type player in 
the affordable housing in that enterprise? So, you know, go sit down with Wall Street. You 
know, here's the biggest problem in all of real estate is affordable housing. So let's sit 
down. Sit down with Morgan Stanley or or Goldman Sachs or somebody that's able to raise 
multi-millions in capital and say, we need a vehicle to solve this problem. And if we get 
Fannie and Freddie to back us with some kind of an insurance, not necessarily money, but 
just kind of a backing that's quasi governmental.

John Coe 01:56:58  Set up a whole new affordable housing type instrument.

John Coe 01:57:02  Yeah.

John Coe 01:57:04  To finance these, you know, and it could be on the equity side as well. 
And I look at my friend AJ Jackson, who I just interviewed, and they've set up an interesting 
model at JBG Smith for, but it's more of a debt model. Yes. And they're getting into the 
equity space a little bit with his new enterprise there, the new setup set up. It just seems to 
me that with the smart people out there, you can solve this problem now, am I? Am I off in 
my office?

Shekar Narasimhan 01:57:33  Well, there's multiple problems. There's a whole problem 
with just building enough. There's a whole problem with income subsidies. there's a whole 
problem with how funds are allocated by the government. There's a cost issue, so there's 
multiple problems. But the answer to the problem is there are people of with great intellect. 
Bob Simpson wrote a paper with some folks, as you know, Treasury has been working on 
this. I don't think capital will be the constraint, but I think that you need people at scale.

Shekar Narasimhan 01:58:05  And that's one of the things, That, you know, like, you would 
think. Right. sorry.

John Coe 01:59:01  so you're now you served at one point, the chairman of the Virginia 
Housing Development Authority.

John Coe 01:59:18  And talk about your service there and what you would what you have 
been able to accomplish. And how does the VA compare with other state housing 
authorities and what what does it make what what makes it special?

Shekar Narasimhan 01:59:33  Governor asks me, Will you serve? I said yes, I did not expect 
to become the chairman during Covid, which was fortuitous in some ways, because it's 
one of the first times that being asked to do something in public service. Voluntary, of 
course. and my knowledge of what the subject was in my caring about it coincided you very 
often in public service do things for resumŽ or platitude or whatever picture ups, but this 
was real. VD is one of the finest state housing finance agencies in the country. It's well run. 
It's been organized so that it is independent of any government appropriations, in the state. 
So it is political because the board is appointed by the governor and with the consent of the 
state Senate. But, it's still run pretty autonomously. And $8 billion balance sheet, lends 
somewhere around $2 billion a year, half in multifamily, half and single family.

Shekar Narasimhan 02:00:34  Also allocates tax credits across most of the state. Allocates 
makes enough money that we have a pot of money called reach, which allows us to 
basically underwrite the difference in cost between a tax credit project, what it will take for 
it to make economic sense, to keep affordable for a minimum of 30 years. And we have the 
capacity to put that kind of money into deals so we can be a one stop financing shop 
problem during Covid. The governor approaches me. His name was Governor Ralph 
Northam. He was a doctor. He told me. He said, listen for the moment. Just imagine that I 
have only one objective, and that is I'm a public health physician. I want to keep people in 
their homes. I want you to help me just do that. So what will it take for us to accomplish 
that goal? and what we did in Virginia, which was pretty remarkable. In less than 30 days, 
we moved $8 million in grants to social service organizations who were directly talking to 
tenants. We built one of the largest tenant bases in the country, actively could talk to 
tenants through, a messaging app and text.

Shekar Narasimhan 02:01:57  We built a online which had already started because of other 
reasons. rental counseling program that we then put 30,000 people through helping them 
with budgeting, helping them with safety and security concerns, linking them to other 
social service providers, etc.. The objective was simple. Ralph Northam thought the crisis 
would last six 3 to 6 months. It ended up lasting, as you well know, well over a year and a 
half. We and Virginia had one of the worst track records for evictions and one of the poorest 
rental laws in the country. We fixed all of that. The state committed over $100 million in 
addition to we were the leading state and the distribution of of emergency rental 
assistance. We kept our landlords alive. We kept our tenants afloat. We built a nonprofit 
service system in between that kept afloat as well. If we had not done what we did early on, 
it would have cost four times as much and taken a year longer to recover. but I think the 
Covid eviction moratorium went on too long. I object to things that cause moral hazard that 
destroy the relationship between landlords and tenants long term.

Shekar Narasimhan 02:03:16  We are still suffering the after effects of some of that. So 
when you can be in a state like Virginia, which is sort of blue purple but blunt bluntly is 
governed well, you want a good government. You don't care whether it's Republican or 
Democrat or independent. You just want good government. Good government should want 
what is the best for its citizens, all its citizens, but particularly for the subsets that can't 
speak for themselves. And so I'm very proud of the work we did for two years. But I was 
chairman because we enabled and met what the governing objectives were, and we did it 
efficiently. we avoided fraud. We did it better than most states dead? And we did it because 
of a great organization and a staff and a governor and a cabinet that was willing to support 
that.

John Coe 02:04:05  What two years was that?

Shekar Narasimhan 02:04:07  This was literally 2020 through 2022.

John Coe 02:04:11  Through the pandemic.

Shekar Narasimhan 02:04:12  Through the pandemic. Yeah. You just call fortuitous in your 
life. I've done public service. I served on one commission for President Obama that was 
meaningful in certain ways.

Shekar Narasimhan 02:04:23  but this was, my life's work collapsed into two years.

John Coe 02:04:27  Wow.

Shekar Narasimhan 02:04:28  I would go to Richmond literally every other every month, 
every other month, even during Covid. And we would sit in separate rooms and we would 
actually say, how do we solve this problem? Not what is the problem? Not should we try? 
Just what the heck will it take to solve the problem? And we did. We created templates. We 
did things that were remarkable. Crisis brings opportunity. It also brings challenge. You 
have to overcome them and do it. And we did it.

John Coe 00:00:04  So, Shekar, what about, the pandemic? I want to talk a little bit about 
that. it had a significant impact on this country, socially and economically. The local the 
office market has probably changed forever. More than likely, the urban markets will take 
several years to recover. Residential construction is challenging until land values make it 
feasible. What are your thoughts about the pandemic? So, short and long term impact on 
the markets?

Shekar Narasimhan 00:00:36  I think long term we we go back to a different normal, 
because I think we're in fact, we might be there or close to it right now on the economy stuff 
where we have a normalized yield curve. We've had the inflation with supply chain shocks. 
We're sort of drifting out of that. The curious thing about our business was that 
construction continued. It was one of those industries that everybody agreed we could still 
continue. And so we actually did a lot of building, did it often more quickly than we've ever 
done. People were actually finishing up early.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:01:21  The problem was that materials cost was just skyrocketing. 
So you had, of course, you know, issues, but but people were glad to be employed. People 
were glad to be outside. So, you know, so we had this aberrational moment when a lot of 
construction, remember that we've just had the biggest surge in multifamily construction 
since 1973, over a million units being delivered in a two year period. And it happened partly 
because of Covid, meaning you could get it built. And and people were driving on empty 
roads and getting there faster. And and leasing was being done contactless on the web. 
And people were making decisions very differently. I think there's been some major societal 
impacts and I've experienced it on a personal level. I think there's a mental health crisis in 
this country because in fact, if if you were to believe the surgeon general, he says the 
number one illness in America is loneliness today. Yes, I think we already had that. And 
people were getting more isolated. And then now you can live inside your phone kind of 
thing, right? So there was a whole tendency to drive people into smaller and smaller 
universes.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:02:41  But what has happened because of this, children got 
affected. I mean, imagine a scenario where you didn't go to school physically for a year and 
a half. Imagine a scenario where you didn't meet kids. So I had, during this period of time, 
My five year old, was was I just had been birthed by grandson and he was two years old 
when I took him to his first to a playground. And we used to go to playgrounds that were 
very quiet. Hardly anybody was there. And then he would be masking, by the way, these 
kids were masking easily. They walked out, they put out their masks knowing the conditions 
at all. Right. Where at this particular playground in Fairfax County, where he is standing 
behind a little girl who's about six feet away with ponytails, and he's looking at her and she 
turns and she sees him, her mother standing on the other side of the swingset. And this this 
place said. And he looks at her. She looks at him. They look at each other like they're 
creatures from some other planet.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:03:50  Like what is that? Something like me? My size. And then he 
he's very gregarious. So he calls out and he says, what's your name? And she doesn't say 
anything. And her mother says to her, but tell him your name. So apparently they 
exchanged that about for 35 minutes into it. They're playing together. Yeah. Now, of course, 
with all the care in the world and all of that. But you know what? These are kids. The mother 
and I happen to get closer to each other, and I she looks over at me and she says, you know, 
is that the first time your grandson, because she knew I was older, has seen a girl. And I 
said, yes. I said, I think so because he he has two he had he had an older brother and all the 
other people in his life are adults. And she said, you know what? This is the first time my 
little girl is seeing any little child. I said, wow, yeah, they've grown almost two years old.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:04:53  And here they are. They've sort of missed that whole period. 
So think about people missing graduations, right? Missing the stuff we went through at the 
ages, young ages particularly, and then teenage ages. So I think something got missed. 
Something is lost I don't know. It's recoverable. I cannot tell you. I know I'm not a 
sociologist. I cannot tell you. I know what all of that could or could not mean. But at the 
same time, I would make an argument to you that humans are so frigging are able to adapt.

John Coe 00:05:31  Absolutely.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:05:32  We're going to get there. We'll get there. It just has. It's 
caused these ruptures that I think get our you can see it at the divisiveness in our politic, in 
our dialogue, in our discourse. We are now doing courses in college, I'm told, on how do 
you have peaceful dialogue? What is civil society mean when people behave with each 
other and don't attack each other? I mean, my God, okay, like, my dad would have whipped 
my tail if I had misbehaved and said something about somebody without any knowledge, 
but fairly.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:06:12  That's not at all. So I some of that just got exacerbated 
because of Covid. But we did so much. We learned so much. We figured out how to keep 
people in their homes. As I told you, we figured out how to make sure that shelter became 
high on the priority list of things for human beings, for their families, for states and local 
governments, and not just the federal government.

John Coe 00:06:38  I would agree, with just about everything you said. I actually think that, 
the adaptability of the human race is such that I look back at events in my lifetime and, you 
know, the pandemic being the most recent dramatic one. But I think of nine over 11 and the 
reaction to that in this country and how, you know, that was a pretty significant event. The 
Vietnam War was a pretty significant event that had I think both of those had pretty 
significant long term effects. Absolutely. and I still think that we're feeling them today, some 
of them from each one of those events.

John Coe 00:07:20  And there are more. For instance, Donald Trump was a there twice now 
was a had an assassination attempt. I've lived through, let's see one actual assassination 
president and another almost assassinated Ronald Reagan. So, we've seen violence in the 
society. Yeah. so the question is, you know, and I also grew up in Detroit and saw the 1967 
riots there. And then, of course, most major cities in 68 after Martin Luther King was 
assassinated. So we've seen really social a lot of social disruption in this country. And but 
it's funny, people's memories sometimes are short on, on, on most aspects of that and they 
get over it. I'm not sure about the pandemic. though I have a feeling that there's going to be 
some long lasting effects and getting to the real estate industry. And this was, as you 
suggest, as you alluded to earlier, we did have some consolidation already in the office 
market. Yeah. And so there was disintermediation going on between the office and 
residential, which is going to continue.

John Coe 00:08:42  and I think, you know, the hospitality move. it got slammed initially and 
then was probably the quickest to recover of all.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:08:53  Yeah, I know, and remember, we predicted the demise of 
retail. And look where retail is now.

John Coe 00:08:58  Retail bounded. Rebounded really nicely.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:09:01  Beautifully. Yeah.

John Coe 00:09:02  Yeah. But they figured things out. So I interviewed Don Wood of Federal 
and he said, you know, we set up, ways of getting merchandise to customers.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:09:12  Absolutely. And it changed. It allowed them to create lower 
cost models.

John Coe 00:09:17  Yes, exactly. So again, it gets back to the overall theme of adaptability. 
So I agree that that but you know, the question is and this you know, as these trends are 
short term, how do you take advantage of them and and try to align all the opportunities 
that are there. So you think back during the pandemic, you didn't you had no clue that the 
retail market would rebound as quickly. Had you known that, or had you anticipated that? 
Imagine how you could have taken advantage of it.

John Coe 00:09:52  And you said during the construction never slowed down. Everyone 
thought, well whoa. You know, but certain things had to continue. You just couldn't.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:10:01  Could not stop everything. Yes.

John Coe 00:10:03  Anyway so it'll be interesting to see how it all plays out. I'm going to get 
into some other issues now. Sure. shifting to your personal board experiences, how did you 
earn the opportunities you've been given and participating in corporate boards as a smart 
and bold Indian American leader, with your educational and professional credentials? You 
stand out clearly and perhaps in an earlier era might, quote, fill the quota of either a woman 
or a minority. Talk about how you've seen that change over the years. And to a person, into 
the person you are instead of your ethnicity or gender. If you could address that.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:10:45  Sure. I look, I came to this country because I wanted to 
belong, be in a meritocracy. I did not come to this country because I felt, oh, I'll be 
discriminated against and contrasting.

John Coe 00:10:59  To the caste system in India.

John Coe 00:11:02  Is that okay?

Shekar Narasimhan 00:11:04  Or a system where it says you have to allocate resources, the 
scarcity, and you must always say, oh, if you don't get this much, you will get nothing. 
America always represented to me a place where you kept talking about growing the pie. 
You said if my economy is 1 trillion, should be five. If it's five, it should be ten. If it's ten, it 
should be 20. That's the.

John Coe 00:11:27  American way.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:11:28  And that's how you grow. That's how everybody grows. Now, 
does everyone grow the same, though? Not at the same level, blah blah blah. But that's so I 
never really I did. You could. It was noticeable in banking and in mortgage banking that it 
was dominated predominantly by white males. That was actually obvious. Did it cause me 
discomfort? No. Did it cause me to wonder why others weren't in the room? Yes. Did I 
intentionally support others who I thought deserve to be in the room, who looked either 
different than I was, but more not didn't belong to the stereotypical, white male category? 
Absolutely.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:12:15  have I done all of that because I believe in equity or some 
ideology? No, because I think at the end of the day, hard work and merit should prevail. And 
so but if not given any chance, it can't. So everybody needs that chat's so, so my entire 
engagement. so I've been very lucky. That's how I describe how I've gotten opportunities. I 
didn't ask to become CEO of WMG. I was handed the job because the guy ahead of me was 
leaving. I happened to be there, and I was asked, would you take this over? I've often asked 
myself, was I really qualified to do that? Well probably not. I was very young and didn't 
know much about this, that and the other. You figure it out. I was asked then, you know, we 
go public. And was I qualified to be a public company CEO? I wasn't quite sure, but I didn't 
express those doubts, like on the screen or something, and sit in front of John Coe and say, 
John, I don't know why I've got this job.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:13:25  I said, let me figure it out. And the best way for me, I think if 
you understand this, you know everything about me is who do I surround myself with that 
I'll Trust that will not just do what I say, but honestly will add much more to what is created. 
And if I can figure out how to find those people and make that happen, I'll be fine.

John Coe 00:13:49  You don't want yes men or ladies?

Shekar Narasimhan 00:13:51  No, no.

John Coe 00:13:52  You want somebody going to challenge.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:13:53  You, and you want somebody who's going to enhance 
whatever you're presenting. So I you want people who can finish a sentence, but add 
something to the sentence at the end, of course. And that's obvious. It's very it's just hard 
to do.

John Coe 00:14:07  It's not obvious to everyone though.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:14:09  So and let me just say it's intentional. It's you got to do this 
purposefully. You can't. I am often on calls, which you would argue if you listen without any 
context, you'd say, these are contentious, he's saying something controversial or he's being 
provocative and people use that word with me a lot.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:14:31  Actually, I think it's completely not true. I'm actually 
Disdainful of the current establishment. I truly believe that people who live within their silo 
do what they do, and they probably just fine people, as they say. But you know, they're 
never going to get out of that and do something. It changes the world. And so how do you 
not allow yourself to fall into that trap? One, in my life I have been blessed. People call me 
up and ask me to do things, whether it is on public policy or it's on corporate boards or it's 
non-profits or speechmaking, and they often get me out of my comfort zone. so recently I 
was asked to do a role play a few hours ago on why I would join an organization that I'm 
already a part of, and this is on a board call with some very esteemed people. And it was 
just somebody saying, hey, I'm going to send you a little script. And I said, no, no, no, no, no, 
no.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:15:32  If we're going to do this, I can't do it for the script. I'm not 
going to read. I'm not a I'm not an actor. So, you know, tell me the context. Context? Yes. 
And we did it. Five minutes. Why would I yes or no join this organization and pay these dues, 
become part of this court club. And what was fun about that was that I could do it 
lightheartedly, but I could also do it with the assumption I'm going to learn something, and 
people on the screen are going to learn something from me. so that's why people ask me to 
do things. I think, honestly, I don't think it's because I have these credentials. I think those 
matter that's check a box, check these boxes. Does he have this this, this this? Okay. He's 
qualified now, what could he do to enhance my business, my opportunity, that of those 
around me, he's going to ask me a few questions. He's going to challenge me. And he isn't 
going to just say yes.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:16:33  So I get lots of opportunities. Yeah.

John Coe 00:16:35  So transfer that as a mentor to young people. That idea, that thought 
process. How are you how would you share? What would you recommend young people 
do? given opportunities that you've had and how you and how to look at them that way?

Shekar Narasimhan 00:16:55  I use three things. I said, first of all, character. if I cannot be 
convinced that you are of good character and ethics and I don't want to do business with 
you, that's that's a gating issue. The second is you always need to have this wound. I call it 
my second see is control, but it's not control off, it's self control. If you know yourself, you 
know where your own boundaries are and how far you can push certain people. And you'll 
find out pretty quickly that some people are more prickly than others, and they listen better 
and they don't listen. But knowing how to express yourself and exhibit self-control in any 
context, it's an art, not a science. But if you know how to do that, you're going to always be 
the one that people listen to or or in.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:17:53  This is funny. I cannot tell you in the last 20 years of my life 
how many times at events I've been asked to have the last word, and after the first 10 or 12 
occasions of this happening, I started, I actually said, why do they want me? Is it the no 
one's listening or is it expect me to say something provocative? And I finally asked one of 
the organizers of an event that I went to with a thousand people in the room. Why, why, why 
is it you had a panel and then you said you're going to speak last? Why last? And they said, 
oh, because you're so good at bringing other people into the conversation. They said, what 
you do is you're sort of listening to them and you're just wrapping it all up when you're 
presenting it, and somehow it becomes cogent. If it wasn't until that moment. But I thought 
that was such an incredible compliment, I should tell you I have. I didn't ask for it in that 
way. I didn't say, tell me how wonderful I am.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:18:56  I just said, so why last? Why, why? Because I was trying to 
ask myself that question. I didn't know I did that, actually. You should know I do. Did not 
know that what I was doing was sort of wrapping everybody into the closing. And, you know, 
John said this and Susan said that, and Lily said this, and that's how all of it makes sense. If 
you believe in this and then drop it on the floor and walk away and everyone goes, oh, that 
made sense. That whole hour suddenly encapsulated. So apparently I have that ability. 
That's pretty special. so I think you have that ability. You keep doing it right.

John Coe 00:19:36  You use the word self-control. I'd like to think that the word confidence 
probably overrides that to some extent. to me, that that what you're showing is confidence 
that you what your, your assertions are what you believe. And that's your statement. You're 
there it is.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:19:59  So my third, by the way, my third see for young people is 
closing.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:20:03  So character confidence closing. However you want to call 
those if you don't know how to close you will go in circles all of your life. You will never get to 
a place where you're satisfied. You just won't. You've got to close chapters and open new 
books you got.

John Coe 00:20:20  That's an interesting concept because I struggle with that myself and I 
look at life and I say, how do we know it's over? And you know. you know, people ask me, 
are you retired, John? And I said, no, I'm not retired. My mind is still active and until it's 
inactive and I hopefully it never will be other than to take my last breath, but, I'm never 
done. No, no, the question is, what does that mean? Closing. You know, I guess the thing is, 
you know, how do you how do you stop one thing and then move on to the next? And then 
the question is, what is the next?

Shekar Narasimhan 00:21:08  So sometimes you don't know. And but unless you close the 
chapter you don't open another one.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:21:13  It's right. so I now read, just so you go back to my earlier 
analogy about reading five books a day. I used to read them. Seriously? I now can read five 
books at the same time. Now it takes me much longer than a day. I don't have enough time 
and I've got too many other obligations, but I don't read only one book. I'll read portions of a 
book.

John Coe 00:21:37  And the.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:21:37  Same way I move to something else. And why do you think 
that is? Because I always ask myself why questions? It's because I get bored much easier. 
Yes. My attention span is so much smaller, so if I just stuck with something, unless it was 
thrilling and enthralling and dragged me and it was short. Most of the time, you know, I want 
to read, absorb, forget, move on, read, absorb, forget, come back and relive. That's what I 
mean by closing. It's not exiting things. It's knowing when you can stop something and 
restart it later.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:22:17  And that's how you do multiple things. But that's also how 
you hold this portfolio of life and all its different buckets together, and you allocate your 
time and your wealth and you know, to and your heart to these things.

John Coe 00:22:32  I mean, you think about the things we do every day we sleep, we can 
only sleep so long and we try to sleep enough. We eat, we can only eat so much. We can, 
you know, so I mean.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:22:44  Allocate you allocate with with reason and you can allocate 
inadvertently. I'm trying to do it more. Again I'm trying to be intentional about everything I do 
in my life.

John Coe 00:22:55  That's that's a that's a great thing. I don't know if you're a fan of a fellow 
by the name of Nabal Ramakant, but he has he's an interesting writer. He's an Indian fellow. 
Yes. And he's got the almanac and it and he has it's a he's a philosophical guy. he's a very 
successful businessman. It's a company called AngelList. So he's a he's a.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:23:18  Yes, I know Angela. Sure.

John Coe 00:23:20  Yeah. That's his company. And you should read because you're. You're 
thinking it reminds me of it. It's a little bit. Oh, okay. I also think of, you know, I read 
Siddharth Siddharth again recently, and so I think about Indian eastern philosophy. I was 
exposed to it when I was young, and I often think about it. and then there's another fellow 
by the name of Anthony Demello. And if you've ever heard of his writings.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:23:47  Yes, absolutely.

John Coe 00:23:48  About awareness. So he, it just seems that your culture brings forth, 
ponderous thinking that, is interesting. It's very deep, meditative type thinking that I've not 
heard in other cultures as much. But anyway, I'll bring that out.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:24:08  Yes.

John Coe 00:24:10  so shifting gears again, sure. Networking is such an important part of 
this in any business. How would you recommend young people to start and build a 
network?

Shekar Narasimhan 00:24:24  Please don't think that Facebook is a network, right? So know 
what? Know what doesn't work.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:24:30  It is not enough.

John Coe 00:24:32  Why is it not a network in your opinion?

Shekar Narasimhan 00:24:35  because it doesn't allow for anything that involves pot. It 
allows for a lot of things that involved action, saying what you believe, telling people what 
you're doing. But there's nothing about it. That's a two way street that establishes any kind 
of relationship or what I call controversial dialogue. I therefore, if you accept that most of 
life has to be about personal interactions, it's not necessary that everything be in person 
anymore. We did, after all, invent, video tools. One of the long lasting effects of Covid is just 
what we're doing. Yes. Which is we may only be six miles apart, but this way has a a 
confidence level and a social interaction level that it replicates that not 100% but 95%. So 
encouraging people to think of networking as going to places, being in a new setting, 
meeting people you don't know, meeting people you likely would never meet, trying to 
figure out within all of that are there common threads? That's just human, right? It's not 
unlike any other race.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:25:58  But if you don't do that, you can't possibly grow a career. 
Because how will you meet the people that can become your mentors, your partners, your 
your associates, your investors, your clients? so if you lose that ability, which is why it's so 
important to have conferences and trade shows, sounds like a bore after you've done 100 
of them. But lordy, if you can figure out how to navigate through them. And you know, by the 
way, all of us learn how to navigate. So certain conferences I don't actually attend a thing. I 
actually just take a suite and meet people. Seems to work fine for me. And there are other 
conferences where I actually want to go on the floor and walk through it and meet people 
and attend sessions and learn something, and then go back into cocktail parties. So go to 
places where you have to learn how to navigate, right? What's the best experience for you? 
What's the highest ROI for you? And if you do that, that's called networking.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:27:01  That's how you build a Rolodex of contacts and relationships 
that are affiliated.

John Coe 00:27:07  There are tools, of course. Yeah. part of it, you know, and I think it 
depends on, you know, your age and your experience in an industry or what you're trying to 
pursue. So if you are an early stage person, be very open minded and listen more than talk. 
But once you develop confidence, you could set up a suite. People will come to you 
because they're curious about what you have to offer. So as over time your your networking 
skills change and how you, how you interact obviously changes over time. so it's just, you 
know, there's, there's rules. And then the other thing is, how do you overcome the inner fear 
that you have approaching very strange, strange setting and people and being in a room of 
strangers? How do you approach people? How do you feel confident that you can you make 
a good impression?

Shekar Narasimhan 00:28:08  John, I when I first started running a company. And I will say 
to you, and I probably have never said this outside of my family or my wife.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:28:18  I didn't like public speaking. I thought I was really bad at it. In 
fact, yeah, I would get up.

John Coe 00:28:25  Yes.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:28:26  Want to be very heavily scripted? I needed to know who was 
in the audience, which you didn't very often. And all of a sudden, here I am running this 
company, and much of the time you're winging it and you're suddenly speaking to 60 
people. 100 people. You're doing PowerPoints, you're also answering questions. You're 
doing town halls, you're on television, you're doing interviews. You don't know what on the 
record, off the record means. It's so suddenly you're being handled, if you will, as opposed 
to handling yourself. I overcame that with literally only two things damn hard work and 
practice. So the hard work was I would write down what I was going to say. I would imagine 
the audience right. I did practice and rehearse using techniques about how do you avoid 
getting distracted in a large audience. How do you pinpoint somebody, identify with them, 
look them in the eye.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:29:33  Bring the audience with you. Drop your voice. Raise your 
voice. All that stuff. When do you tell a joke? How many jokes do you tell? What's okay to 
tell? What's not for the right audience? And now it's natural. It's easy. But I keep telling 
people. That's not a small example. There's a hundred things in your life, all of which you 
should fear because you're not good at it. Naturally. You're not just born with this. some 
people love it.

John Coe 00:30:04  Exactly. There are some people that are. They can walk and entertain 
from the time they were, they could talk.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:30:11  That's fantastic. I love it. I definitely wasn't. I was inhibited. I 
was. Yeah, I was scared. I always felt I would flub it. I would say something wrong, 
whatever. And I did all of those things. And then I learned and I said, no, I can fix this. And, 
you know, a year into it, you could fix it.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:30:32  So. Hard work. Persistence. Absolutely. The most important 
thing is rehearsal. I used to rehearse in front of a mirror. I would absolutely memorize the 
entire thing, and then I'd change it as I was going. So I made my brain think differently. I 
made my voice modulate differently, and then I changed my mannerisms so that it was 
more attractive. And I could now sit in a room with a lot of people, not have to actually raise 
my hand or raise my voice, and everyone would let's say.

John Coe 00:31:06  Well, I'll make one final other point about public speaking. That's 
interesting. Martin Luther King, when he spoke to his most famous speech of all time, 
which was on the National Mall, was not the speech he wrote. he was told by one of his 
aides, a lady, tell us your vision in in his ear. In essence, before he actually he started 
talking, he started saying something and then changed his he changed his tone. And that's 
when I have a dream.

John Coe 00:31:40  Yeah. That's the words he used next I have a dream. And it was all 
extemporaneous. Okay. So amazing.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:31:53  but you can only be extemporaneous when you already have 
confidence.

John Coe 00:31:57  Yes.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:31:58  When you have.

John Coe 00:31:59  He was a preacher. Yes a preacher, absolutely brilliant human being 
Obviously. Obviously. and a person that just had a passion beyond very few others. as far as 
nonviolent communication and his way of conveying things, so is obviously a unique 
human being. Absolutely. But as far as public speaking goes, he he just pivoted right there, 
you know, extemporaneously, which is a pretty amazing skill, actually. So anyway, I don't 
want to go off topic much more. Yes. so how do we how do we change the mindsets to 
accentuate differences among people, highlighting their strengths as contributing people 
both in business and society? You alluded a little bit to that, but tell me what your thoughts.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:32:47  We bring them into our conversation. We do choose not to 
ignore. And we we listen better.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:32:59  there's a big difference between listening and hearing. So I, 
you know, my wife tells me that to, listening to my pension and hearing just requires your 
ear. So, I don't think it's complicated. I think it's a it's not even a learned skill. It's what we 
grow up with. what we need to do is get everybody to slow down and recognize that it's an 
equal priority to action. Listening is as good as action, and listening is part of action. So I 
don't fear that we've lost that skill because of Covid or because we've become such a, a 
rigorously busy society where we have 100 tasks a day. I think what I find is that I no longer 
make lists in the morning when I was young, I write down so my top three things. Somebody 
in business school told me to do this. You say, top three things that I wanted to accomplish 
that day. that and then get up in the morning and go, one, two, three. And when I did it.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:34:06  I did. Don't do that anymore. Not because I don't have three, 
but because I have too many. So how do I play the game? While people are changing 
around me and my environment keeps shifting. I don't have three. I have some simple sort 
of principled ways to approach things so that everything you do should be, to the extent it's 
possible, a win win. I don't have to win for you to lose, and you don't have to win for me to 
lose. And if I can convince you that in almost every interaction, will both be just fine and 
then think, imagine multiplying that to 10 or 20 or 50 or 100 people. So it's really been 
rewarding because I therefore get asked to do things people want. If I can go now to a 
conference as an example. And perhaps this actually answers a couple of other questions 
you have. One of the things I do is I don't necessarily go to the conference because I need 
to network, because most of the people there that I need to know already know who I am.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:35:14  I might meet somebody new that I can, you know, wow, that's 
interesting. But more often than not, I can just go stand in a corner, hold a drink in my hand, 
and people come up to me. that's a point of privilege. And how you utilize that is you 
actually spend your time with, therefore with people who want to spend time with you but 
don't always agree with you or think like you. So can we continue to just keep doing that? 
Because that accentuates my strength as a listener, that accentuates their desire to be 
with me, which is whether it's, because if they need something or because they heard 
something, you know, the number of people that come up to you and say, you know, I saw 
you speak for ten years ago, How come we are sitting up on the podium every time I go? 
Because it's other people's turd? and it's completely logical. And yet I'm here so I, you 
know, you want to chat? Let's go. No.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:36:11  So I have very little fear of those interactions today. And 
again, perhaps 20 years ago, I would have been much more inhibited.

John Coe 00:36:20  Yeah. Well, unfortunately, you're you're, open mindedness, is not a 
pandemic, which I wish it were. Honestly, but, you know, we kind of fallen into these these. 
Yes, tribal trap traps that we're in right now, and people just are blind to open to alternative 
viewpoints often.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:36:44  Absolutely.

John Coe 00:36:45  And it's just it's it's it's frightening to me that that's happened.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:36:50  It's scary and and worrisome that it would continue for as 
long as it has, but again, are if you have optimism and belief in the human race, we will 
overcome this. Yeah.

John Coe 00:37:04  But we've seen trends over the years. And, you know, this is, I'm, I just 
finished a book, called The Fourth Turning is here, which is about kind of the evolution of, 
you know, society and, you know, the fourth turning being a crisis time. And that's kind of 
where we are right now.

John Coe 00:37:26  No question. And the analogy is 1939 to 1945, or actually maybe earlier 
than that, 1930, maybe to 1945, that that period of time is the last time that we had a major 
crisis period in this world. And, you know, we know what happened during that period of 
time.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:37:47  Yes.

John Coe 00:37:48  So, is that and then you go back 80 years Before and keep going back for 
the last 500 years. The pattern is pretty interesting.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:37:59  The pattern is interesting. History does repeat itself. Yes, yes.

John Coe 00:38:03  It rhymes, but.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:38:03  In different ways. Yeah, yeah it rhymes.

John Coe 00:38:05  It doesn't necessarily, you know.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:38:08  It's not identical, but it rhymes. You're right. Yeah.

John Coe 00:38:11  So the question is, you know what, what's forthcoming with all these 
tendencies that we've seen and I'm, I'm my hope is we can overcome what could happen. 
But let's we'll see. Yeah. All right. Now I'm going to shift to some personal things beyond the 
subject we talked about. What are you what were your biggest wins, losses and most 
surprising events in your career?

Shekar Narasimhan 00:38:36  Well, probably, among the more what I would consider wins 
is that I have found myself in the fortunate position many times in my life, are being asked 
to do things that I didn't ask to do.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:38:51  Now, that sounds like a strange thing. It's not like people now 
think that the only way you get anything is by demanding it. You have to raise your hand and 
say, I should get a promotion. you should raise your hand and say I should be chairman or, 
you know, CEO. And while that is true, if you do not demonstrate ambition, you won't 
advance. That is true. But I feel like the art of creating, an aura that you're capable is equally 
important. And so most of my wins have come from people asking me to do things that I 
never thought I would do. Taking them on, proving to them that they were right. Yeah. 
Whether it was becoming CEO of a company or chairman of the board of a couple of 
enterprises, starting things from scratch. I was, you know, people ask me, why do you do 
that? I was the first chairman of the Commercial Mortgage Bankers Board. and it's because 
a guy named Jim Anderson calls me up and says, you got to do this thing.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:40:07  You help to create it. And I said, no, it's a wrong time for me. 
I've just taken over. I'm now the CEO of a public company. He goes, no, no, no, no, no, no. 
You should do it. And my methodology to doing it has carried even 30 years later, 25 years 
later, they're doing, I said at that time that the best thing to do was to have vice chairs who 
are already ready to succeed you because a voluntary job and to only have you in there for 
one year. Well, you know, believe it or not, that's what they're doing today, 25 years later. 
And so I feel really good about stuff like that, as I've told you before. And but somebody 
called me and offered me that and persuaded me to do it, even though it wasn't the perfect 
timing. I've just had that kind of luck, and I feel like luck and opportunity have to coincide 
with your being in the right place at the right time.

John Coe 00:40:58  So I think what you've done is you've earned it. And so the question is 
how do you earn something? There's a there's a question. And to me, earning something 
means that other people believe that you are capable. Yes. And how do you how do you 
build that belief by by demonstrating it in actions demonstrate necessarily in words, but in 
actions and reaction.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:41:25  In action so that there is never a question that and it's about 
your otherness. It's about people truly believing that you're doing this not just for yourself, 
but for others. Whatever the cause is. Is it the industry? Is it the trade group? Is it your 
business? Is it your employees? there has to be a strong sense of that otherness in you? 
Yes. I used to make speeches, and I still do. But why should CEOs engage in politics or 
public policy, to be more exact? And I would listen to people tell me how they founded a 
board, and it was distasteful and all of that. And I would say, but isn't it true that in order to 
get anything built in America, we need approvals from local government and a planning 
board and money from so-and-so? And then, you know, you go to Fannie Mae, which also, 
by the way, is a government sponsored enterprise.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:42:21  And you do this and you do that, and all of that is policy, and 
it can be changed on you and be detrimental not just to your business and your livelihood, 
but to your, your community. And yeah, well, I said, you have a position, but I call a platform 
a bully pulpit as a CEO to go talk about those things in a way differently than others. You 
owe it to yourself to take 10% of your time and allocated to being helping the others 
because it will come back and rebound. Be worth ten times as much to you. I've always 
believed that that was obvious to me, but apparently not obvious to everybody you see. So I 
think that's so. Most of my wins and most of the surprises in my life have come from net 
losses. Interesting question. I think my biggest failure was and in business was that I wasn't 
ambitious enough. Yes. And it may sound strange. I was always extremely ambitious about 
wanting to do well, but for example, I never dreamt about I'm going to build a $5 billion 
company, and I actually should have.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:43:35  And when I look back on it, the reasons why we never went 
from here to here to here was because I always thought this was terrific because it was 
unique and nobody else had done it before. But I never kept thinking, not only will people 
come chasing this, but they can surpass it. So what are the reasons why? Where I am today 
is so gratifying is that I can see other people doing it, and I've recognized that's not an 
inhibition I should allow them to have.

John Coe 00:44:08  Well, I would look at it is that you're scaling something different than 
than assets or yes, you're scaling a reputation. And so the question is how do you measure 
that. You know. And so that's not the easiest thing to measure.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:44:25  I think you measure it not just by the success you have with 
others, but I think to a question that you haven't asked me yet, it's by balancing your 
portfolio in life. So life has many complex pieces. Life has family in it, which is terribly 
important. It has your business and the people that you work with and the clients yourself.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:44:47  Very important. Yes. It has the community and all the other 
activities you might do, philanthropy and so on. Yes. All these are so how you find yourself 
allocating time, and time and money go together and money to each of these endeavors 
and doing them really well to the best of your ability. At any rate, the minimum sort of 
defined requirement. I have been so lucky in the last 20 years of my life after becoming 
independent. If I want to. I use that word always because it means I can say what I believe, 
and my First Amendment rights are not could be abridged by somebody else. when I, I 
believe very strongly that that right of independence has given me the freedom to manage 
this book that I call my life in a way that is satisfying to me. Not every day, not every week, 
but certainly when I look back in a year. Wow, that was pretty good. That helped me 
accomplish all my things. For example, even though I may be going out and doing work on 
weekends, I'm always back on Saturday night.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:46:03  Because why? Because I have my three grandsons on 
Sundays and that's the one thing I can't miss. They want me there. They will be pinging me 
on Saturday night wherever I'm traveling and saying, when are you getting home? Aren't you 
coming back? We have a sleepover. Look, these things are all ephemeral. They are young. 
They they want it. They're going to grow up. They won't need it, while they want it. While I'm 
able. Boy, find that time and make that your priority. And then I will answer your 30th, A next 
question, which really is the one that struck me as the most interesting. If I was thinking 
about where I would be, if I had changed some things when I was about 25 years old. Okay. 
Yes. What would I have changed? John and I don't know that many people can answer this. 
Well, so I was just try. The one thing I probably would have changed is that I would have got 
married younger.

Speaker 3 00:47:12  Interesting.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:47:14  And why that?

John Coe 00:47:16  How old were you when you got married?

Shekar Narasimhan 00:47:17  Just two years later. 27.

John Coe 00:47:19  27. Okay.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:47:21  And what happened was that that was because I debated 
whether I was going to go to India and get married. Get married here. Perhaps that. But now 
people are getting married older and older. You know, they're getting married in their 30s. 
Some of them, both.

John Coe 00:47:37  Both of my children were in their 30s, I guess.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:47:40  I not unexpected. That's what's happening in America. But, 
as I you ask, it's your question. You know why? Because if you're going to grow your life, do 
it. Don't do it a lot. You could find a partner. It doesn't have to be your wife or your husband 
or your partner. It could be somebody else. But just don't try to grow. It's so hard in this 
world, given where we are in society, given the complexities of change, to do everything 
yourself alone. If you can find somebody who's compatible with you and do it with them 
twice as fast.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:48:25  So that would be my advice. It sounds very strange, but 
that's.

John Coe 00:48:29  The first one. You're the first person of 120 almost. I've interviewed that 
have said that they want to marry earlier, I would say, did.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:48:38  Anyone see.

John Coe 00:48:38  The first one?

Shekar Narasimhan 00:48:39  You know what you should do? Find a partner interesting. 
Grow with that person. Make it happen. Maybe ten years. You say that's not the right 
partner anymore, but you know what? For ten years you will grow faster, much faster 
together. Then you would have a lot. So never, never discount the importance of that kind of 
societal, you know, togetherness. We just abandon that in this, in this era and that we're 
wrong. That's a failure.

John Coe 00:49:07  Well, that's interesting. I, I'm wondering if that may come from your 
culture a little bit. possibly yes and no.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:49:15  Yes and no. Because in India you will be, you know, India's 
become very urbanized, very true to people. And they and they both work.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:49:25  so the.

John Coe 00:49:25  Arranged arranged marriages is not a United States thing. No.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:49:29  It is. So you're absolutely correct.

John Coe 00:49:31  Yeah. So, Yeah, I mean.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:49:34  I think it is cultural, but when I look at what my son has gone 
through, what others have gone through, I say to them, why don't you do this five years 
earlier? And they were too busy. There was no pressure. You know, which of course, again is 
societal. And the strong feeling was, I can do this on my own. And I go, look how much 
further you'd have gotten if you'd started earlier. And that's why I give that advice. It's not 
done, you know, freely. And it is not given, with disdain that you're not doing that, but it's 
given with if you had done it, would you be better off?

John Coe 00:50:12  Well, here's my final question, which is well known to almost all my 
guests. No about. No it's coming. If you could post a statement on the billboard for the on 
the Capitol Beltway for millions to see, what would it say.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:50:27  So I thought about this. And you had.

Speaker 4 00:50:31  Sent.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:50:31  Me the list of questions. So I have to admit, I did have some 
planning. I think I would just put one word and I put it on every billboard. I put it up on every 
highway in the intersections and the bridges, and it would be belief.

John Coe 00:50:51  Well, it's Ted Lasso. Ted Lasso.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:50:55  Yes, it's Ted Lasso's word. I can it's I'm plagiarizing like hell.

John Coe 00:51:01  Yes. Well, you're not the first guest to do that one. Okay. My first was 
Bob Murphy. He was?

Shekar Narasimhan 00:51:07  Oh, yeah.

John Coe 00:51:08  Bob Murphy said that, and and the show had just been it was brand 
new. And he said, John, you gotta watch this show. You gotta watch this show. I'd never 
seen it give you, you.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:51:17  Know, the symbolism of that sign above the door as people 
leave and can tap it. Touch it. What it what it really says. And by the way, it doesn't say I 
believe.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:51:29  No, it just says believe. Believe. You have to believe in 
everything around you, in yourself, in others. Yes. And if you do, can accomplish anything. 
Which really trails back to that point I'm making about partnership early. If only you don't 
isolate yourself early, and you actually learn to partner in a intimate way in a in a total 
trusting way with others, your life will go better, faster, and be more rewarding not just for 
you, but for others. So yeah, so in our original but I would put that on every billboard on the 
Capital Beltway.

John Coe 00:52:08  That's great. Well, reflecting back on this interesting conversation, 
believe is a really good way to end it. And I really appreciate your time, Shekhar. And this 
has been really, really interesting and I appreciate it. Thank you, John, very much.

Shekar Narasimhan 00:52:25  Appreciate it. Talk to you soon and stay in touch.