Monsoon Pabrai Prevailing with Force

Lighthouses in Monsoon’s Words “My lighthouse would be knowing when I am not happy, finding my purpose. When you are not having fun, something is wrong. My family is my lighthouse. They helped me to realize I was not happy and try something else.”

Monsoon Pabrai, is like her name: she prevails with force. She was born into the world of finance. Her father, fund manager Mohnish Pabrai, tried to encourage Monsoon and her sister to be as fascinated with investing as he is. She graduated from the University of California Berkeley in 2017, but don’t let her short career fool you. Monsoon is the current marketing and community lead at Coral Labs, a start-up company. Prior to working at Coral Labs, she was an investment analyst intern at the UCLA Foundation and worked as a research analyst for Dalton Investments.

During dinner, if her father was excited about a recent investment, he would break it down for Monsoon and her sister. She became curious and wanted to invest on her own. In 2003, her father encouraged her and her sister to buy their first stock: “What is one company you love, and you think will be around for a long time?” Monsoon and her sister thought about companies they grew up with and knew well, and after thoughtful analyses, they invested in Target and Disney. They thought that these companies could sustain long-term growth and be successful over the long haul.

About ten years later, after seeing that Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway had bought shares in Visa, Monsoon became a shareholder of Mastercard because of the company’s growth, scale, and the way it moved with the economy: “I think it is worth copying ideas from people you look up to.” She started with a question, “How does Visa make money?” And then she dug into the company. When Monsoon noticed that Visa was expensive, especially compared to Mastercard, she decided to buy shares in Mastercard “because I thought it was the same, exact thing as Visa.” During her research, she found out that Mastercard had almost 100 percent gross profit per new customer, which she understood as an uncommon ideal.

Monsoon forgot about her shares in Mastercard until she was interested in joining clubs at UC Berkeley. When she found an investment club she wanted to join, she pitched Mastercard to the club’s interview panel—and she was in! “I told them I picked Mastercard, and that they had close to 100 percent gross profits on new users, really no cost to add users. The club liked what I pitched and put me in the club.”

Starting out at UC Berkeley, Monsoon majored in economics, but then she received advice “to be the most interesting version of herself.” She changed her major to political science because of the reading, writing, and global perspectives. In polisci she could read and write about anything from writing a forty-page paper on the Two Chinas policy or on a crime that happened against people of her faith in India. She eventually extended her love of the research part of political science to the detailed corporate research she had to do as an investor: “It is almost like a dentist performing a root canal when I study businesses.”

Despite her family background and love of research, Monsoon did not have any initial interest in becoming a fund manager like her father: “I couldn't align myself with giving profits to already-wealthy people. I think the Berkeley girl in me had a tough internal struggle.” Monsoon interned as an analyst for the university endowment during the summers of in her sophomore and junior years. She became intrigued by the idea of managing investments for nonprofits and raising and growing money for good as a way to put her analytical and research skills to work for a wider purpose. “The beneficiary [of the endowment] was a financial aid student. Every year the endowment pays out 5 percent, and so the larger the endowment grew, the more they could pay out.” She loved the fact that her work could benefit students who might otherwise not be able to attend college. 

Monsoon’s experience at the endowment fund prompted her to ask her boss for a job, but he encouraged her to practice equity research. She mailed her resume and a stock write-up to four hundred companies for entry-level equity-research positions. Out of four hundred applications, she was invited to four interviews but received no job offers. She persisted. In her second attempt, she sent out 750 applications. This time she received a “thanks but no thanks” response rate of about 10 percent and seven invitations to interviews, which led to two job offers. One was on the East Coast at a female-owned ESG firm. The other was to work on a $20 million India fund at a $4 billion Asia-focused value shop. It was a chance to connect with her Indian heritage while exploring her love for value, which her father, as a value investor, had instilled in her. She picked the offer to work on investing in Indian companies at Dalton Investments in Los Angeles. 

During our conversation in the summer of 2019, Monsoon told me, “I parted with Dalton after two years, with big personal questions. The first was to learn how to scale a business personally and the second was to see if I could run my own fund the way Jamie Rosenwald at Dalton and my father do.”

Monsoon left Dalton Investments to take an unpaid internship at a start-up. She mailed out 1,000 resumes to different start-ups and got fourteen interviews. “The biggest challenge is getting your foot in the door, sending out all the letters. I think I will do that the rest of my life. It’s a great way to be taken seriously at a young age.” She decided to join a start-up company that makes a device to paint nails, simplifying and automating a normal trip to the nail salon. Monsoon works on business development at the company: how to bring in new customers, how to market the device, who the company’s ideal customer is, and how to price the product. In school and at Dalton, Monsoon honed her research and analytical skills to study other companies for investment purposes. Now she is using those same skills to try to grow a company from scratch.