Who are the Tandons?
The mysterious Chandrika and Ranjan Tandon are not your average Indian-American couple. On NYU Tandon's page, Engineering Transformed, Chandrika is mentioned to be a grammy-nominated music artist (for her album Om Namo Narayanaya: Soul Call, in case you were curious) and business leader, born to a Tamil family in what is now Chennai, India. She's not only an elected partner for the major American consulting firm, "McKinsey and Company," but also founder and chair for Tandon Capital Associates, which was founded in 1992. On top of all this, she's also a formidable philanthropist as a member and trustee of the America India Foundation, a founding board member of the Hindu Community Outreach Foundation, and a supportive partner to multiple charities including the Indo-American Arts Council, Art of Living Foundation, the Arsh Vidya Gurukulam, and Hindu Temples in many parts of the US. She also is the founder and chair of the Krishnamurthy Tandon Foundation - a private altruistic foundation that she shares with her husband, who acts as a board member.
Although Chandrika had chosen to go down the business route, on her self-titled website, she attributes her ties to music to her mother, who was a Carnatic classical musician (a form of classical Indian music associated with Southern India and mostly featuring Hinduist devotional lyrics). While traveling around the globe doing work for both her business and her philanthropic pursuits, she was inspired by the music of many local cultures, leading her to create her first CD, "Soul Call," which received a grammy-nomination in 2011 in the category of "World Contemporary Music Album". The album blended Indian classical sounds and traditional hymns with Western instruments, to create what Chandrika calls a, "healing, worldly sound." Also naturally, the 100% of the proceeds of the album went to charity, as did the proceeds of the albums she continued to make afterwards.
Ranjan doesn't fall far behind. With two degrees under his belt - one from the Indian Institute of Technology in Chemical Engineering and an MBA from Harvard Business School - Ranjan is today most commonly known as the founder and chairman of Libra Advisors LLC., a hedge fund based in New York that is consistently ranked by Barron's to be within the top 100 Hedge Funds - no small feat (Engineering Transformed, NYU Tandon).
According to Dictionary.com, a hedge fund is, "an investment partnership that uses high-risk, speculative methods to obtain large, short-term profits." In other words (particularly, the SEC's words), hedge funds pool private funds borrowed from investors and invest them on these individuals' behalves, often using higher-risk/higher-return strategies that typically wouldn't be used by more conservative investments funds, like mutual funds. These risky, aggressive strategies prioritize maximizing profits regardless of the state of the market and economy, as their perogative is to outperform what profits the investors may be able to make using their own resources and strategies. Investors are typically "locked-in" with their investments for at least a year, before they are allowed to utilize periodically available withdraws. They typically make money through two types of fees - management fees and performance fees. Management fees (usually around 2%) ask for a payment worth a low percentage of the total amount of funds being managed for the investor, while performance fees (typically around 20%) give the hedge fund a sizable share of the invested funds' profits. Performance fees give hedge funds a majority of their profit, while also establishing trust between the investors and the hedge fund, as hedge funds share the same motivation as investors to maximize profits since they have much to gain as well.
The Tandons share a daughter, Lita Tandon, born in 1988, who seems to share their motivation for success as a graduate from Yale University. They currently live in New York City, frequenting the Metropolitan Opera, the Lincoln Center, and a New-Yorker classic - Central Park.