Tiger Global’s Scott Shleifer steps down

Mumbai: Tiger Global’s Scott Shleifer is stepping down as its head of private equity and will instead be a senior adviser, his exit coming amid the hedge fund’s slowing pace of investments in India.

The change will see Tiger Global forming a new investment committee (IC) for its $30-billion private equity business. It will be chaired by founder Chase Coleman and include partners Evan Feinberg and Griffin Schroeder, and chief operating officer Eric Lane, in addition to Shleifer.

The IC will review new investments and oversee asset dispositions in private equity.

It is unclear as yet what Shleifer's exit will mean for India, especially as the firm has been less active with investments this year. His exit was first reported by The Information.

Shleifer’s decision to transition out is largely based on geography, a person familiar with the development said, asking to remain anonymous.

“Tiger Global is operating in-person out of our New York offices, whereas Scott and his family have made their home in Florida and want to stay there. We have found that having everyone together in New York is highly productive and a better operating model for our firm,” Coleman said in a letter to Tiger Global investors, which Mint has seen.

Coleman credited Shleifer with Tiger Global’s profitable investments in JD.com, Ctrip.com, ByteDance, Booking.com, Apollo and Google in the letter. He also told the investors that Tiger Global had hired 12 investment and research executives since 2021 and expected to add more talent ‘to this group selectively’.

Coleman did not specifically refer to where the firm would add these executives.

After Lee Fixel, who invested in early Tiger Global businesses in India such as Flipkart, Shleifer was seen as the most visible face of the firm over the past four years. Fixel left in 2019 to start his own VC fund, Addition.

Tiger Global has built a reputation among startups for being founder-friendly and hands-off. The firm rarely takes on a board seat and has a more sector-approach when it comes to investments. For instance, it is likely to be invested in multiple companies in the same sector.

The firm is renowned to be decisive, and at the height of the funding boom made investment calls as quickly as over a weekend.

Since January, though, Tiger Global has almost gone quiet, making fewer investments in 2023 as compared with previous years.

The firm invested around $100 million in PhonePe in February alongside other investors, and $18.5 million in Infinite Uptime in a deal led by Griffin Schroeder in April. It also invested around $40 million in the Indian Premier League cricket team Rajasthan Royals earlier this year, a person familiar with the deal said. Some of its other investments over the previous three years include Sharechat, Apna, Open, and NoBroker.

Overall, Tiger Global has invested alongside other investors in 257 deals worth more than $27 billion in India over the past decade. It has backed 38 out of the 103 unicorns minted in the country so far, per data provider Venture Intelligence.

Over the previous 2 years, Tiger has been booking exits. It has returned more than $2.5 billion worth of capital from its listed portfolio in India in the last 2 years, beginning with Flipkart.

In June, Walmart acquired Tiger Global’s remaining stake in Flipkart for $1.4 billion, a Wall Street Journal report said. In April, news website Arc reported that Tiger Global had sold its entire stake in Freshworks for around $1 billion to $1.5 billion. Tiger Global also fully exited Zomato in August for around $120 million, while booking partial exits from Policybazaar and Delhivery.

In June, Tiger Global raised $2.7 billion for its latest private equity fund, effectively missing the $6-billion target for its 16th fund by 55 per cent, according to a report by Financial Times. The crash of technology stocks have wiped out significant paper profits that the firm was sitting on globally.