CHANGE MAKERS ANMOL BHANDARI

is an executive and entrepreneur with expertise in developing financial research and innovative data solutions. Born in New Delhi, India and raised in New Jersey, Anmol was greatly influenced by the importance of family, which shapes his approach to business to this day. He is the Founder and former Chief Executive Officer of Cians Analytics (“Cians”) and Lever Data. Cians, which Anmol founded in 2008, is a research and data analytics firm offering an array of managed services that adapt to the needs of investment banks, private equity firms, and hedge funds. Lever Data, a sister company to Cians, serves as a platform, built with the world’s largest systematic hedge funds, to ingest, validate, and monitor large datasets at scale, while capturing anomalies in data, in real time. Both firms were recently acquired by Equistone Partners and merged into Acuity Knowledge Partners in the fall of 2022.

Anmol is the Managing Partner of Turnbull Capital Holdings, his personal investment vehicle and family office. Given Anmol’s experience in building, scaling, and exiting companies, Turnbull is focused on investments in founder-led, sponsor-backed companies. Anmol uses his experience to help companies devise successful growth strategies to enable them to execute their vision. Based in Miami, when he is not building or investing in companies, Anmol spends his time playing golf and enjoying time with his wife Devina and children Armaan and Lyla. A passion project and homage to his family is PerUs, a bespoke, allocation-based winery located next to the iconic Screaming Eagle winery in Napa Valley that Anmol founded with the inspiration and support of his family. The hope is that “this is one of those businesses that will be passed down for generations.” This venture allows Anmol the ability to express his creativity and create meaningful experiences all while actively engaging with his family, the winery members, and overall community.

You are an entrepreneur and an investor: tell us about your career. When I graduated from Villanova, I became an electrical engineer like my father, but I was more interested in finance and trading. In 2002 my family and I suddenly lost my mother Veena to a heart attack, and through that experience, I had to harness my emotions and channel them into something; it was the first time I took on focused strategic risk. I moved to London where I worked for an entrepreneur who still serves as a mentor. I helped manage his private investments and develop his initial ideas for a few early-stage companies, finally helping him build out one core business named Copal Partners. Copal outsourced financial research to emerging markets and scaled to circa 2,000 people before ultimately being acquired by Moody’s Corporation. It was certainly a challenge, but as with all challenges, much growth is realized. A great mentor supports you but also pushes you out of your comfort zone, giving you the benefit of seeing an opposing point of view you may not have considered. He was, and still is, a driving force in how I approach situations. Having the humility to recognize that we do not know everything and need to look at things from all angles is key.

After the sale of Copal, I moved back to London to pursue the next step in my journey. The experience and rush of fostering a company from its initial stages through incredible growth make it hard to go back to anything else. That rush is indescribable, any founder will tell you the same. There comes a point when risk gets developed as a muscle; it’s not something you can be taught but instead, is something that needs to be leaned into and felt. When you’ve exercised that muscle, it starts becoming a little bit more calculative, a little stronger, and allows you to look at things differently. You start evaluating risk and return from a completely different framework.

While in London, I was helping a family office with some investing, taking stakes in real estate projects in Germany and renewable energy projects in India. I then moved back to India and connected with my former partner where we built both Cians and Lever Data (Lever). Cians was an outsourcing research provider for almost every big hedge fund, investment bank, and private equity fund, while Lever was our data ingestion fintech platform that ingested data sets and did anomaly detection for very large, systematic quantitative hedge funds. During my time in India, I met my wife Devina. We were married a year later, and I credit a lot of my success to her support as well.

The two companies that I currently manage are Turnbull Capital

Holdings Group, my family's private investment office that takes stakes in companies and entrepreneurs that we believe in and that we can help nurture along their journey, and a winery/ vineyard in Oakville in the heart of Napa named PerUs.

What excites you right now? There are various facets of data that are unfinished business for me, and I will most likely start another data company and enjoy the process all over again. It’s not out of necessity but more out of interest and passion. It comes down to a couple of key areas. First, the hardest part about selling our firm is that it was truly a family. Building a core team with people you love working with is so much fun. Second, I think there's an intersection of where you go next. On the left end of the spectrum, the only way to go is bigger but on the right end of the spectrum is what I call a “crisis of meaning.” On the left, you could be in the financial data space and be solely commercially focused, but on the right, you can be in a healthcare data space that helps cancer patients and is serving a greater purpose while also being commercial. Both could have the same addressable markets, but one serves a “crisis of meaning” versus one that is effectively creating a commercial enterprise. In an ideal world, you create something that can do both.

What is one piece of advice you'd give to current MKA students? Embrace your mistakes: they are the greatest lessons. Mess up a lot in your twenties. I'm 42 and realizing I still have several acts left in life, and I certainly do not know everything. If you think you have it figured out in your twenties you're crazy; nobody does at that age let alone in high school. Stay humble, hungry, and positive; keep moving forward and always question when things don’t make sense or don’t feel right.

What was your biggest failure and what did you learn from it? Failure is a bit of a misnomer. The outcome may not be what you had envisioned when you set out, but that doesn’t mean the experience didn’t have an immense amount of embedded value. Being outside of your comfort zone is exhilarating, sometimes surprising, but always worthwhile. I've had a lot of failures, and they were my greatest lessons. I do take a lot of risks and, inherently, those risks lead to unexpected outcomes. Our main business almost failed miserably twice. That’s that risk muscle I referred to. Anything worth doing is worth fighting for. I love the line that aptly states, “you get what you tolerate,” and that can be in a business, a relationship, or really anything else in life.

What do you want your legacy to be? I want my children to know that their father gave them all his time, love, and affection. I want them to know I was there for them, invested in them, and they felt my love in all they did. For the rest of my family and friends, I’d like them to feel I was always present, kind, generous, and the kind of man that would never think twice about giving the shirt off his back.