There’s a version of Manish Sabharwal’s story where he never builds TeamLease at all. In that version, he keeps the 50% of India Life he gave away for a $2 million cheque, doesn’t get forced into an early sale to Hewitt Associates, and never learns the lesson that made him refuse outside capital for TeamLease’s first seven years.
Manish Sabharwal is the co-founder of TeamLease Services, the Bengaluru-based staffing company that reported ₹11,791 crore in consolidated revenue for FY2026 and now deploys more than 300,000 associates for over 3,500 clients across India. He built it with Ashok Reddy and Rituparna Chakraborty starting in 2000, listed it on the NSE and BSE in 2016, and stepped back from day-to-day leadership in February 2026, when Suparna Mitra, formerly CEO of Titan’s Watches & Wearables division, took over as Managing Director and CEO.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.
What mistake did he make with his first company, India Life?
Before TeamLease, there was India Life. Sabharwal co-founded it in 1996, while still at Wharton, after convincing a finance professor connected to Lazard Private Equity to back him.
I convinced him to give me $2 million dollars. I think that was a mistake, because I gave him 50% of the company. But I was comparing it to zero.
That one decision shaped everything that came after. India Life started as a life insurance venture, pivoted to pension administration, then into payroll and HR outsourcing after the CFO of an early client, Siemens, told him to keep the “sexy part” and take on the compliance work others didn’t want. The business grew, expanded into Singapore, and eventually merged into Hewitt Associates in 2002. But because Lazard held a drag-along right, the sale happened on the investor’s timeline, not Sabharwal’s and Reddy’s.
Giving away half the company is probably why we had to sell a few years earlier than me and Ashok could have wanted.
He then spent two years in Singapore as CEO of Hewitt Outsourcing Asia, fulfilling his end of the deal, while Reddy stayed back in India and started TeamLease.
Why did TeamLease take no outside money for seven years?
When Sabharwal’s Singapore lock-in ended, he came back to run TeamLease with Reddy, and the two of them made a decision shaped directly by what had happened at India Life: no outside capital for as long as they could manage it. TeamLease ran on its own cash for its first seven years.
The framework he still uses to describe the difference is one he’s repeated for years: a baby versus a dwarf.
There are two kinds of companies you can start: a baby or a dwarf. Both are small, but the baby is going to grow, the dwarf is going to stay there. And the difference between a baby and a dwarf is not more money - it’s not more food.
For Sabharwal, the real difference was balance - between the next quarter and the next quarter-century, between what he calls poetry and prose.
You campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose.
He and Reddy, by his account, were opposite personalities on purpose: Reddy an introvert focused on operations, Sabharwal an extrovert focused on sales. A TeamLease board member once told them that with only Reddy running the company, it would have stayed a hundredth of its eventual size; with only Sabharwal, it wouldn’t have survived at all - a founder pairing not unlike the operator-and-builder dynamic behind PeopleStrong’s rise into an HR-tech leader.
How big did TeamLease actually get?
TeamLease grew almost entirely through direct sales rather than acquisitions for its first 16 years, only entering IT staffing through acquisitions around 2016-17. It listed on the NSE and BSE in February 2016 at a price band of ₹785-850 a share, an IPO that closed oversubscribed roughly 66 times. Sabharwal and Reddy together held close to a third of the company going into that listing, through the entities HROV and NED Consultants.
By FY2026, TeamLease’s consolidated revenue had reached roughly ₹11,791 crore, up 5.7% year on year on its NSE-filed financials, and its market capitalisation stood at roughly ₹3,100 crore as of September 2026. The company now runs three main lines: general staffing (temporary and contractual placements), specialised IT and telecom staffing, and other HR services spanning compliance, permanent recruitment and training - alongside TeamLease Skills University in Gujarat, India’s first vocational university, plus its EdTech and Digital arms.
Sabharwal traces the gap between TeamLease and the hundred smaller staffing firms that never scaled to the money the company spent before it needed to.
You can’t build a factory on cash flow. You have to hire the senior people early, invest in technology early, invest in the brand early, and then go out.
Why did he step back from TeamLease in 2026?
In December 2025, TeamLease announced a leadership transition effective February 2, 2026: Ashok Reddy moved from Managing Director & CEO to Executive Vice Chairman, and Suparna Mitra - who spent nearly two decades at Titan, most recently running its Watches & Wearables division, where revenue doubled to ₹4,500 crore over three years - came in as MD & CEO. Sabharwal stepped down from his executive responsibilities and now serves as a Non-Executive, Non-Independent Director. Narayan Ramachandran continues as Chairman.
Not every high-profile founder exit at an Indian listed company has gone this smoothly - the very public unravelling at BharatPe is the obvious contrast - but Sabharwal frames his own succession as something founders owe the company they built, not a reluctant retirement.
Every time the revenues of the company double, you probably have to rethink your role and your bandwidth and your team, because what brought you to a certain stage doesn’t take you to the next.
What is Manish Sabharwal doing now?
Sabharwal describes his post-TeamLease life as working on “big ideas and systemic change” rather than running a company or turning investor - a shift not unlike the consultant-to-institution-builder arc that shaped Rebel Foods. He’s a co-founder of Ashoka University, is helping revive the think tank NCAER alongside Nandan Nilekani, runs the Kanpur school his parents started (which teaches around 12,000 children), co-founded Neev, a school in Bangalore, and is managing trustee of the New India Foundation. He’s also the author of Made in India, a book on Desh Bandhu Gupta, the founder of Lupin Pharmaceuticals.
On his personal wealth, Sabharwal isn’t specific in the episode beyond calling it “much more than my ancestors’ wildest dreams” and more than his family will need - which is why, he says, most of it is earmarked for the institutions he’s built rather than passed down.
Listen now!
Other ways to listen:
Sources
TeamLease Services — Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeamLease_Services
TeamLease names Titan’s Suparna Mitra as next CEO — Storyboard18: https://www.storyboard18.com/brand-makers/teamlease-names-titans-suparna-mitra-as-next-ceo-ashok-reddy-becomes-executive-vice-chairman-85318.htm
Suparna Mitra to Join as MD & CEO of TeamLease — official release: https://group.teamlease.com/tlmedias/suparna-mitra-to-join-as-md-ceo-of-teamlease/
TeamLease Services IPO subscribed 66.02 times — Business Standard: https://www.business-standard.com/article/news-cm/teamlease-services-ipo-subscribed-66-02-times-116020500286_1.html
TeamLease Services Limited — company filing profile: https://www.thecompanycheck.com/company/teamlease-services-limited/L74140KA2000PLC118395
Manish Sabharwal — Ashoka University profile: https://www.ashoka.edu.in/profile/manish-sabharwal/
Manish Sabharwal on The Ken’s First Principles podcast: https://the-ken.com/podcasts/first-principles/manish-sabharwal-of-teamlease-on-creating-great-ancestors-indias-development-journey-and-regulatory-cholesterol/
TeamLease investment thesis, founding detail — MOI Global: https://moiglobal.com/soumil-zaveri-201804/
TeamLease Services Ltd — market data, Value Research: https://www.valueresearchonline.com/stocks/97454/teamlease-services-ltd