India Abroad - September 22, 2017

By Aziz Haniffa

— WASHINGTON, D.C. hicago native and Indian-American Ravin Gandhi, at 44, had already lived the American Dream and then some.

The Waukegan, Illinois native, the quintessential all American, graduated college with a major in accounting. With a CPA and MBA under his belt, he joined his father’s company, Coatings and Chemicals Corp. and after working for a few years with his dad, Kanti Gandhi — a chemist-turned-entrepreneur — he put a deal together in 1998, to sell the family business to Akzo Nobel, a major global paint and coating company.

After a five-year non-compete agreement lapsed in 2007, he went out on his own and founded GMM Nonstick Coatings and built it up to become one of the world’s largest suppliers of nonstick cookware coatings to such iconic American brands as Calphalon, KitchenAid, Wilton, Oster, George Foreman, Farberware, Crock Pot, and Pyrex.

In 2016, GMM, which employs hundreds of employees in the U.S., China, India and Europe, was acquired by Showa Denko (SDK), a $7 billion Japanese conglomerate, in the largest buyout in the history of the nonstick coatings industry. Gandhi stayed on as CEO.

Ten years ago, Gandhi, an
alumnus of the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
and the Kellogg Graduate School
of Management, had also started
Glenborn Partners, a private
equity fund. While moonlighting
as a venture capital investor, he
went about investing in technol-
ogy companies
that had raised
more than $250
million in equi-
ty financing.

In 2012, Gandhi was the first investor in KeyMe, a high-tech manufacturer of robotic kiosks revolutionizing the $8 billion locksmith industry.

To date, KeyMe has raised more than $100 million and Gandhi was gung-ho about it becoming a billion-dollar business in the next two years.

Gandhi had already received a
lot of press as a top entrepreneur
and angel investor. He was a reg-
ular commentator on
CNBC, a contributor to
Fortune, Inc. Magazine
and Entrepreneur,
among others and of
course, his hometown
newspaper, the Chicago
Tribune.

But in August, after
he penned an op-ed for
CNBC on the recent
Charlottesville, Virginia
violence, trollers began
hurling racial epithets at
him for taking President
Donald Trump to task
and for calling Trump’s
response to the white suprema-
cist rally repugnant.

Gandhi had written: “I recent-
ly told the New York Times I was
‘rooting’ for certain aspects of
Trump's economic agenda. After
Charlottesville and its aftermath,
I will not defend Trump even if
the Dow hits 50,000, unemploy-
ment goes to 1 percent, and GDP
grows by 7 percent. Some issues
transcend economics, and I will
not in good conscience support a
president who seems to hate
Americans who don't look like
him.”
Almost immediately, he was
pilloried with tweets, e-mails
and voice mail rants, including
one from an alleged Trump sup-
porter screaming “get your
[expletive] garbage and go back
to India.” The woman hurled
other remarks his way, laced
with epithets and expletives.

She ended her voicemail
telling Gandhi to “go clean up
your own [expletive] country,
it’s a filthy mess.”
All that changed after Aug. 17,
when Gandhi went public with
this voicemail and other mes-
sages and virtually became a
rock-star. He posted the remarks
on You Tube, Twitter and
Facebook and they went viral.
He was overwhelmed by the
public support he received
defending him even as he con-
tinued to be interviewed on tele-
vision and newspapers, includ-
ing the Chicago Tribune.

He said he had decided to go
public against the trolls because
“no one has walked in my
shoes.”
“I am an Indian guy, who was
born in 1973 in Chicago on a
block where there was no Indian
people around me and I’ve
grown up in this country, and I
know what it is to be an immi-
grant in this country. And, I
know, how it is to have most of
my parents’ relatives still in
Bombay, and me sitting here as a
complete American.”
In a wide-ranging interview
with India Abroad, Gandhi said
that although some may have
perceived him as a Trump sup-
porter from some of his writings
advocating deregulation and
lowering of taxes, he was defi-
nitely not.

“I was very vocally against candidate Trump in 2016, and I made this very clear on many CNBC appearances, advocating for Secretary [Hillary] Clinton,” he said.

“I was very publicly against
him in 2016,” he recalled, “but
after he was elected — and I was
also very surprised along with
many progressives — unlike a lot
of people who chose to be hys-
terical, I actually tried to be non-
partisan. I tried to see the posi-
tives of a Trump presidency and
I wrote an op-ed in February say-
ing that here are some positives
of his economic agenda.”
He said that as an entrepre-
neur he understands that lower-
ing regulations and taxes can
stimulate the economy. So, he
said, “I tried to be positive all the
while giving a caveat that if he
doesn’t seem really presidential
after a year, I’ll turn my sup-
port.”
That time came sooner than
he expected — with
Charlottesville.

“So, I feel now, actually much more comfortable because I believe I’m being much more true to myself –being very authentic,” he said. “I’m against the man [Trump], but I am never going to be against the country.”

He said the best option now is to “use the platform that I have now to call for bipartisanship, and to call for the extremists to shut up, and to have the middle