'To Me Conventional Wisdom Is The Ultimate Enemy'

Never make a bet you can’t afford to lose is the philosophy that has kept billionaire investor Sam Zell in business over the last five decades.

- Samar SrivaStava

Self-made entrepreneur Sam Zell, 76, has made a career out of buying distressed assets and turning them around. He says he always looks for value in areas that are not the flavour of the season and then goes about gathering as much information as he can before buying. He founded Equity International (EI) in 1999 to focus on real estate opportunities in emerging and frontier markets. In India, EI has partnered with Samhi, a hotel assets company that owns 25 hotels offering 4,300 rooms.

Q What, according to you, are some of the key qualities an entrepreneur should possess?

Enormous self-confidence, high energy, someone who not only sees problems but sees solutions, someone who doesn’t have the word ‘failure’ in his lexicon, a high level of curiosity and the ability to look at complex situations and achieve simple solutions. If you cover all those, you’ve probably gone a long way.

Q In your recent book Am I Being Too Subtle? you mention that when others look left you look right or vice versa. You see value in places where there is great distress. That is a great trait to have, but it also takes nerves of steel to get into situations like that. I’d like you to narrate one such instance.