Three Headed Lion: research, risk management, and advisory services

about us

Three Headed Lion (THL) is India’s leading distributed market intelligence, research & risk management company.

Our unrivaled last mile intelligence connectivity in India means we provide macro and ground-level insights and expertise through our operational network of 1000+ market intelligence and information (MIIPs) providers located in 640+ districts across the subcontinent.

We strive to:

Provide sound and timely expert analysis & judgment on developments and issues that impact India and the global economy.
Offer robust understanding of India’s risk environment through political, economic and societal lenses.
Drill down policy level/regulatory changes to reveal its impacts on sectors, companies & people with varying degrees of purchasing power.
Unearth what’s trending in India (not on Twitter), but in its buoyant emerging market at macro, commodity and micro levels.
Provide comprehensive market intelligence and micro level data on key sectors.
Objectively assess the effectiveness of citizen-centric government programs and initiatives.

Leadership

Javed Matin, President & CEO and Co-Founder

Javed Matin is President and Chief Executive Officer of Three Headed Lion, a leading distributed market intelligence, research & risk management company focused on India.

Matin has over 20 years of senior management experience working with Fortune companies in Hi-Tech and Oil & Gas sectors in the US and India. He is a versatile, “hands-on” leader who consistently creates and executes high results-based strategic and tactical plans for market and product development. Matin has comprehensive knowledge of technological and business strategies to compete and prosper in dynamic markets.

Matin earned his MBA from the Warwick Business School, UK and BE in electrical engineering from National Institute of Technology, India.

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S.K. Velath, Co-Founder

With 16 years of an expansive career in Media, Risk Analysis & Business Intelligence, Strategic Communications including Campaign Designing & Implementation, Defense-Security-Strategic Affairs Reportage & Analysis and Government Affairs consultancy, Velath has a wide network of contacts in government, civil society and media across India, South & South East Asia, Central and West Asia.

Velath's extensive experience stretches from being deployed as a war-reporter in the frontlines of conflict theatres—Afghanistan, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Central Asia, Nepal, Jammu & Kashmir and India’s North-East—to designing climate change campaign and communication strategies. He has acquired a wide range of skills over the years through his on-ground investigations probing insurgencies and militancy to unraveling coastal security deficiencies to developing high quality market intelligence reports. He has traveled widely in India and Asia and is well networked with decision-makers, influential opinion makers and with a variety of primary information providers. He has been a consultant to Greenpeace on communicating and disseminating critical climate change issues.

An inveterate multi-tasker, he is also a strategic communications consultant on renewable energy sector for Green Purchasing Asia. His research-based writings, reports and investigations regularly appears in magazines, newspapers and TV.

Velath is a Chevening Wolfson Press Fellow from Cambridge University, UK and holds a Masters Degree in International Relations & Strategic Studies from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India.

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Jace Heuring, Ph.D., Chief Data Scientist

In his role as Chief Data Scientist at Three Headed Lion, Dr. Heuring is responsible for company's market intelligence practice which includes data analysis and modelling, big data strategy, market, customer and competitor analysis, and segmentation.

Dr. Heuring is an expert in applied estimation with significant experience in the oil and gas industry. Most recently, he has worked as a consultant focused on quantitative data interpretation for drillers and upstream service providers. From 2005 to 2011, Dr. Heuring worked for Lazarus Energy Holdings to restart a small refinery located near the Eagle Ford formation. This included all activities from driving initial analysis and strategy through project planning and execution. Prior to joining Lazarus, Dr. Heuring was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence with Austin Ventures, one of the premier venture capital firms in the nation. At Austin Ventures, he founded, staffed, and successfully raised seed funding for a start-up company developing hardware and software components for sensor fusion, interpretation, and control.

Before working with Austin Ventures, Dr. Heuring was an Associate Principal in the Houston office of McKinsey & Company, where he focused on various issues (including transfer pricing and industry structure and conduct) in the oil and gas industry.

Dr. Heuring was the co-founder of IP-Mill, Inc., a technology start-up company which was acquired in 2000. While an undergrad, he was a research assistant at the Microelectronic Research Laboratory and the Applied Research Laboratories at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Heuring received his Ph.D. in Robotics, Computer Vision, and Applied Estimation from Oxford University, where he was a Marshall Scholar, and a B.S. in Electrical and Biomedical Engineering with Highest Honors from the University of Texas at Austin.

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Priyanca Mathur, Ph.D., Vice President, Market Research

Mathur has over 15 years of experience in the development research sector. Her forte is working at the grass-roots, using a ‘bottoms-up approach’ and making the voices from the ground move upwards to influence policy and processes, evaluating government and non-government programmes to influence policy and processes. She has been writing and publishing on governance, rights and forced migration issues and has travelled extensively in India and abroad presenting her work at conferences and workshops. Besides holding executive positions in networks like the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration (IASFM) and the Asia-Pacific Refugee Rights Network (APRRN), she is also on the editorial team of journals like the Indian Journal of Human Development and Refugee Watch Online.

Mathur has an M.Phil and Ph.D from the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and also an M.Sc from the University of Oxford, U.K. She graduated from Jadavpur University in Kolkata, India where she was awarded the University gold medal in Political Science.

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THL Strategic Advisory Board

Vijay (V.G.) Govindarajan

Vijay Govindarajan is the Earl C. Daum 1924 Professor of International Business at the Tuck School at Dartmouth. VG is an expert on strategy and innovation. He was the first Professor in Residence and Chief Innovation Consultant at General Electric. He worked with GE’s CEO Jeff Immelt to write “How GE is Disrupting Itself”, the Harvard Business Review (HBR) article that pioneered the concept of reverse innovation – any innovation that is adopted first in the developing world. HBR picked reverse innovation as one of the Great Moments in Management in the Last Century. In the latest global ranking of management thinkers, Govindarajan came in third place, ahead of Jim Collins and Michael Porter.

VG writes about innovation and execution on his blog, Harvard Business Review, and Bloomberg BusinessWeek. He is a co-leader (with Christian Sarkar) of a global initiative to design a $300 House.

Govindarajan has been identified as a leading management thinker by influential publications including: Outstanding Faculty, named by Business Week in its Guide to Best B-Schools; Top Ten Business School Professor in Corporate Executive Education, named by Business Week; Top Five Most Respected Executive Coach on Strategy, rated by Forbes; Top 50 Management Thinker, named by The London Times; Rising Super Star, cited by The Economist; Outstanding Teacher of the Year, voted by MBA students.

Prior to joining the faculty at Tuck, VG was on the faculties of Harvard Business School, INSEAD (Fontainebleau) and the Indian Institute of Management (Ahmedabad, India).

VG has worked with CEOs and top management teams in more than 25% of the Fortune 500 firms to discuss, challenge, and escalate their thinking about strategy. His clients include: Boeing, Coca-Cola, Colgate, Deere, FedEx, GE, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, J.P. Morgan Chase, J&J, New York Times, P&G, Sony, and Wal-Mart. He has been a keynote speaker in the BusinessWeek CEO Forum, HSM World Business Forum, TED, and World Economic Forum at Davos. VG is a fellow at Innosight, an innovation consulting firm.

VG received his doctorate from the Harvard Business School and was awarded the Robert Bowne Prize for the best thesis proposal. He also received his MBA with distinction from the Harvard Business School where he was included in the Dean’s Honor List. Prior to this, VG received his Chartered Accountancy degree in India where he was awarded the President’s Gold Medal for obtaining the first rank nationwide.

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Stuart L. Hart

Stuart L. Hart is the S.C. Johnson Chair of Sustainable Global Enterprise and professor of management at Cornell University’s Johnson School of Management. Before joining Cornell in 2003, he was the Hans Zulliger Distinguished Professor of Sustainable Enterprise and professor of strategic management at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, where he founded the Center for Sustainable Enterprise and the Base of the Pyramid Learning Laboratory. Previously, he taught corporate strategy at the University of Michigan Business School and was the founding director of the Corporate Environmental Management Program.

Hart has published more than 50 papers, including “Beyond Greening: Strategies for a Sustainable World,” which won the McKinsey Award as the best article in Harvard Business Review for 1997 and helped launch the movement for corporate sustainability. He also co-wrote The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid (with C.K. Prahalad in 2002), which provided the first articulation of how business could profitably serve the needs of the developing world. He has also authored or edited five books including his new book Capitalism at the Crossroads, which was published in 2005.

In 1999, Hart was recognized as a Faculty Pioneer by the World Resources Institute for work in integrating environmental and social issues into the management education curriculum. In 2002, he received the Gerald Barrett Faculty Award by the Kenan-Flagler Business School as the faculty member who made the greatest contribution to the MBA program through teaching and service.

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Richard Saettone

Richard Saettone has almost 30 years of experience in investment banking, private equity, business development and corporate restructuring. During his career he has helped capitalize, grow and improve the performance of private and public sector companies in the United States and Latin America and has held CEO and other senior management positions in a broad range of industries.

Saettone is currently Managing Partner at Access SEAF, a mid-market Peruvian private equity fund, where annual returns to date under his supervision have averaged nearly 30%. He is co-founder of Cascade Hydro, a hydroelectric power company with operations in Peru and of Andean Mining Corporation, an exploration company with over a dozen copper, gold and silver mining projects under management throughout Peru. In addition to Three Headed Lion, he serves on the board of directors of Cascade Hydro, Andean Mining Corporation (UK), Bosques Amazonicos and Financiera TFC.

Prior to his current endeavors, Saettone spent over a decade building and turning around companies in the US and South America. He led the turnaround of a $400 million US-based furniture manufacturer and as CEO restructured American Glass Products, a leading Latin American windshield manufacturer. In the 1990s, he was Vice President of Operations and Business Development and had P&L responsibility for a $500 million Latin American consumer durables company and led the leveraged buyout, turnaround and merger of two underperforming financial services firms.

Early in his career, Saettone worked as an engineer in the oil and gas industry and as a management consultant with McKinsey & Company in Houston and Mexico, where he provided strategic and operational advice to major companies in the natural resources and chemicals sectors. He was also an investment banker with Goldman, Sachs & Co. in New York, where he executed approximately $1 billion in equity and debt capital transactions for a number of energy companies in the United States and Latin America.

He has been a guest speaker and business school lecturer, and has led numerous seminars and workshops for executives in the United States and Latin America on topics ranging from Value-Based Management to Applied Corporate Finance. He holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and an MBA with highest honors from The University of Texas at Austin where he was a Sord Scholar and was awarded the Dean’s Award for Academic Excellence.

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Christian Sarkar

Christian Sarkar is the founder of several entrepreneurial ventures, a marketing consultant, and the co-founder of the $300 House Project. Christian works with businesses, non-profits, and leading thinkers to challenge assumptions, grow good ideas, and develop ecosystematic business models.

Christian is an expert at leading co-creation/collaboration projects across multiple businesses, organizations, and institutions. He is the co-author of Inclusivity: Will America Find its Soul Again? with Michael Gordon. He has worked in a variety of industries, from Engineering and Construction to software and digital services. He has founded and advised several start-ups and non-profits.

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Raj Srivastava

Raj Srivastava is the Provost & Vice President of Academic Affairs at Singapore Management University and the Goizueta Chair in Marketing and e-Commerce at Emory University's Goizueta Business School. Graduating from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, Raj Srivastava earned his doctorate at the University of Pittsburgh. He joined the Goizueta faculty in 1999. Raj is a Distinguished Research Fellow at ISBM (Penn State) and is a Senior Research Fellow at IC-Sq. Institute (UT-Austin).

Raj's research, spanning marketing and finance, has been published in Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science and Journal of Banking and Finance. His current research focuses on the impact of marketing processes and market-based assets on corporate financial performance and shareholder value. His 1998 paper titled "Driving Shareholder Value Via Market-Based Assets" received both Maynard and Marketing Science Institute/Paul Root Awards for the Journal of Marketing article judged to contribute most to the development of theory and practice of marketing, respectively. More recently, he received the Mahajan Award for Career Contributions to Marketing Strategy from the American Marketing Association (2004).

Raj has served on editorial boards of Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing and High Technology Marketing Review. He was co-editor of a special issue on brand management (Journal of Marketing Research) as well as on the impact of marketing on financial performance (Journal of Marketing).

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industries

Three Headed Lion offers our services in the following industries and sectors:

Agriculture (brief)
Automobiles (brief)
Auto Components (brief)
Aviation (brief)
Cement (brief)
Consumer Markets (brief)
Education and Training (brief)
Healthcare (brief)
Infrastructure (brief)
Manufacturing (brief)
Oil and Gas (brief)
Pharmaceuticals (brief)
Real Estate (brief)
Retail (brief)
Steel (brief)
Textiles (brief)
Telecommunications (brief)
Tourism (brief)