Jayantilal Gada

Jayantilal Gada is an Indian entrepreneur. He is the founder of PEN India’s number one software library. PEN was founded in 1984 and today it’s a name to reckon with in the gigantic Bollywood Industry.
Early life
Jayantilal Gada was born in Mumbai and is a Kutchi wagar from Gujarat. He studied till class IX in a Gujarati Medium school and then started assisting his father in his Grocery shop. He also did two small courses, one in radio repairing and one in photography.
Personal life
He married his first wife Hansa at the age of 18 and they have one daughter Bhavita and one son Dhawal. He has another son with his partner Reshmaa Kadakia who is a CA and now the CFO of his company. His youngest son is studying to be a film director. They all live in Mumbai.
Career
A completely self made man, Jayantilal Gada proudly speaks of his humble beginnings as the son of a “Kirana (Grocery) store owner” in Ghatkopar (Mumbai). As a young lad, restless with the monotonous goings on in the shop, he started a small video library in a section of the shop and grandly called it POPULAR VIDEO CASSETTE LIBRARY - little knowing then that the world “POPULAR” would become prophetic.
Though India was teeming with video libraries at that time, what differentiated him was his sharp focus on ‘what works’. Constantly alert to what kind of films were fetching high rentals and what were not, he soon developed a sharp instinct for audience tastes.
During the time of the big video boom, when it used to take 3 hours to make one copy of a film, Jayantilal Gada, armed with his analysis of popular tastes, began selectively buying the cassettes from various producers for distribution.
He soon became the biggest dealer for all the major producers. In fact his Popular Video Cassette Library at Lamington Road soon became not just India’s but Asia’s biggest video library.
By 1992 Popular Video Cassette Library was restructured into PEN ENTERTAINMENT NETWORK LTD- brand name PEN.
The next logical step for him was to start acquiring copyrights of films. He then expanded into supplying Hindi feature films to Doordarshan(DD). He was the one who first came up with the idea of FCT (Free Commercial Time) for feature films. This was a novel concept that created history both for DD and for the producers.
In the early ‘90s when the satellite boom began Jayantilal Gada’s PEN was best placed to begin supplying films to all the major networks like Zee, Sony, Sahara, Star etc.
With his growing success, Jayantilal Gada began buying world rights of Hindi films as well.
In 1995 his PEN created another record by telecasting the landmark film Sholay 20 years after its release. To everyone’s surprise -but his- this created an unbelievable record TRP of 76 points
By 2004, Subhash Chandra, the promoter of Zee TV had begun to notice that all the really successful films on Zee were being supplied by Jayantilal Gada. This led to them meeting and soon PEN became the exclusive agency for Zee- a mutually fruitful relation that has endured over time.
By 2011, Jayantilal Gada got into film production as well - and with his very first film Kahani he hit bull’s-eye.
Jayantilal Gada considers himself a very “family oriented” person. The three films he first green lit were the babies of 3 of his family members and each one was allowed to choose the film of their liking. He did not interfere in any way creatively. This led to 3 different films of 3 very different genres. While his nephew Kushal Gada, a management graduate, chose Kahani, His son Dhawal Gada chose a love story Ishq, based on Romeo and Juliet and his daughter Bhavita chose an animated film- Mahabharat.
All three films were managed independently by the three family members with no interference.
Today Bhavita heads their animation content. His nephew Kushal is handling production and his wife Reshmaa, a CA by training, handles the finances of the company along with Jayantilal Gada’s brother. In 2014 his eldest son Dhawal expanded into TV production and has now taken over the reins of the business from Jayantilal Gada.
His company has now begun getting into big-ticket films with various partners.
Despite his big success in all facets of the film business, Jayantilal Gada still prefers to call himself a trader. He perceives his success to be a result of 3 decisions he made early in life. The First was to ensure he focuses and goes by “content” . The second was to ensure that he is completely transparent and fair in his dealings with people . He believes that in an industry where one is dealing with non-material things and it is IP that is bringing in the value, one has to respect people’s creativity and minds and unless one gives people their dues, they will not trust you again. The third decision was to focus on relationships, a natural extension of his “trader” talent required to forge deals. In fact he is famous in the industry as the “master of goodwill” whom the movers and shakers of Bollywood trust.

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