Nikesh Arora: 'The highest paid executive' is back on a high

Rock-star entrepreneur, heir apparent to SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son, Googler are among the various tags that Nikesh Arora has seen attached to his name over the years. But he recently made news for being "the highest paid executive", a label that is not new to him. 

Whether in Google, SoftBank and now his latest employer Palo Alto Networks, Arora has always managed to be one of the highest paid top bosses in the world. During his stint at the global tech and search giant, Google, Arora earned $46.7 million during his time there, which went up almost six times to touch $290 million during his two-year stint at SoftBank. He was hand-picked by Son to lead his company in 2014. Cut to 2018, and Arora has become one of the highest paid US-based executive again, with a pay package of roughly $128 million plus benefits for this year, according to the contract he has signed with cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks.  

Fat pay packages aside, the 50-year-old electrical engineering graduate from the Banaras Hindu University (BHU) has been controversy's favourite child over the years, most of them concern his much-publicised stint at SoftBank. 

From funding some of the biggest start-ups, which helped them secure the much coveted tag of a unicorn (billion dollar valued firms), announcing his resignation on Twitter after his mentor Son decided to head the investment bank for another ten years, to having an internal as well as full-blown US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigation over alleged conflict of interest and ethics issues, Arora has seen it all — and has somehow managed to come out of it unscathed.

In 2016, when Arora decided to exit SoftBank, he tweeted a laconic explanation to explain his ambition for the top job: "Didn't want to be waiting past my sell-by date". In a series of tweets, he indicated that he was under the impression when he was hired that he would one day head the company and when that did not happen he decided to exit. In the statement that SoftBank gave out, Son said he was not ready to give up his position just yet.

"Arora is a unique leader with unparalleled skills around strategy and execution. He should be CEO of a global business, and I had hoped to hand over the reins of SoftBank to him on my 60th birthday, but I feel my work is not done," Son said in a statement. This was, as everyone knew, not the full story. Sources close to the company believe that SoftBank became aware of the impending SEC investigation linked to Arora after complaints were sent to the investigative agency by the group’s investors.

Thanks to SoftBank funding when Arora called the shots for key India deals, founders ranging from Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal of Snapdeal, college-dropout turned-entrepreneur and the brains behind Oyo Ritesh Agarwal, cab aggregator Ola's head Bhavish Aggarwal and then Housing.com's top boss Rahul Yadav all became overnight stars and captains of the ecommerce industry.

According to industry estimates, SoftBank under Arora invested around $210 million in Ola, along with existing shareholders, $627 million in Snapdeal, $90 million in Housing.com, $100 million in Oyo Rooms and $120 million in Grofers. 

While Arora caught global attention for sniffing out a great deal, many industry insiders called him brash, overpaid and underperforming. "Most of the investments he made tanked, and were an embarrassment for SoftBank later. He just fuelled a boom when there was none. When you think you are next in line to head a global conglomerate, you can either make the right decisions or do what he did," said a top honcho at a venture capital fund, who had worked closely with Arora in an online venture that went bust. 

The argument does hold true in the case of Snapdeal and Housing. Snapdeal, the Gurgaon-based ecommerce company, was once fighting Flipkart for the status of being the biggest online marketplace and had a valuation of around $7 billion. It lost the plot soon after Arora walked out of SoftBank. Last year, after trying hard to sell the company to Flipkart, SoftBank wrote off close to a billion dollars in investments it had made in Snapdeal.

Housing.com, again, was a company doomed almost from the beginning, generating bad press courtesy Yadav’s very public spat with the investors and later because of the business model that failed to take off. It was finally sold to News Corp-backed real estate portal PropTiger for a paltry $70 million.

However, to give credit where it is due, Oyo has been one of the best investments for SoftBank when Arora was taking all the decisions. The company, which started its life as a listing website for budget hotels, has now pivoted to running them all over the country and expanding abroad to China and Southeast Asia.

As CEO and chairman of a network and enterprise security major, Arora finds himself in a business that is at the epicentre of global privacy and cybersecurity debates. In that sense, Arora has chosen his new vocation well. And given his expansive style of functioning, he is unlikely to be out of the news for long.