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The Clever Martech Pioneer | Anand Jain @ CleverTap
183 Plays4 years ago
In 2013, when Anand Jain left Network18, he knew one thing for sure: Communication in the digital world needs to be timely and quick. This led to the birth of CleverTap, a SaaS-based mobile analytics and mobile marketing company.
Today, Anand is the Chief Strategy Officer and Co-Founder of CleverTap, working on larger strategic goals of helping brands leverage user data, automation, and personalization techniques on CleverTap. But his rendezvous with technology began when he was in his early teens.
In a candid conversation with Akshay Datt, Anand harks back to his early years, when a life-altering moment made him take up part-time jobs to support his family. During these testing times, one thing he passionately held on to was tinkering with electronic appliances and this curiosity led him to learn numerous computer languages, despite being from a non-engineering background.
He further recalls how a meeting with a successful Bay Area entrepreneur paved a way for him to land a job in the States and then in China. But he moved back to India in 2005 to start Burrp!, which was later acquired by Network18. At Network18, he met his future co-founders Suresh and Sunil and in 2013, the trio quit to start CleverTap.
Tune in to this episode to hear Anand speak about how CleverTap is making the lives of numerous brands easy by providing them with meaningful data, which helps create successful strategies concerning their user bases.
Key takeaways:
• Perseverance is the key to success.
• Significance of customer insights.
• Customer targeting is important, so is doing it in a timely and quick fashion.
• How did CleverTap get their first client which led to several opportunities.
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Transcript
Introducing the Founder Thesis Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Take a minute. I'm dead. I'm dead. This could be a great intro. Hi, I'm Akshay. Hi, this is Aurob. And you are listening to the Founder Thesis Podcast. We meet some of the most celebrated sort of founders in the country. And we want to learn how to build a unicorn. My name
Anand Jain's Humble Beginnings
00:00:26
Speaker
is Anand. I'm the founder of Clematia.
00:00:29
Speaker
If someone was to make a slumdog millionaire type of a movie about a startup founder, then they couldn't get a better inspiration for their story than the journey of Anand Jain, founder of CleverTap. Anand's incredible story starts from him living in a small apartment in Ahmedabad with a single mother where he did everything possible to earn money from repairing electronics to selling detergent door to door.
00:00:54
Speaker
Anand was never academically inclined and doesn't hold an engineering degree, which makes his journey of becoming a tech entrepreneur even more inspiring. Listen to this conversation between Akshay Dutt and Anand Jain to get back your belief in the magic of dreaming big and achieving the impossible through sheer determination. I was born in Lucknow.
00:01:18
Speaker
My grandparents were originally from Pakistan. Right after partition they grabbed hold of their kids and whatever they could hold it in two hands and kind of ran across the border. They were like Punjabis. We are Punjabi Jains. A combination we don't see too much. We are one of the rare species. But they were given a space in Lucknow to settle. So all the migrants were given settlement camps.
00:01:45
Speaker
We got ours in Lucknow. I was born in Lucknow. And right after I was born, my dad got transferred. I was three months old to Ahmedabad. He was working for a private company and he got transferred and I grew up in Ahmedabad. So I've lived in Ahmedabad all my life until I left for the US. What was he doing? How did he restart his life in India? Yeah, so dad was very young when the partition happened, but my grandfather
Family Resilience and Childhood Aspirations
00:02:17
Speaker
was a literate man. He could speak and write in three, four languages. He got a job with the railways, but that was not enough to make the ends meet, right? So he would kind of set up one of those stalls outside, like a roadside selling cloth material and all that. And it was just so that his kids could study and all that. So it was like a very, and we were a very rich family back in Pakistan.
00:02:33
Speaker
had to restart his life. My grandfather
00:02:45
Speaker
side of things right my grandmother I mean god bless her she's around she tells stories of like you know how we used to have our own horse table and she used to go around riding and and we had a big Haveli of sorts so yeah from there like you know my grandfather kind of you know went to Lucknow and had to rebuild his life. So what kind of aspirations did you grow up with?
00:03:05
Speaker
Yeah, you know, I wanted to be, I grew up amongst a lot of, you know, business community, Gujarat, you know, I mean, my friends were Marwadis in these, some Punjabi families that you know, my were family friends, and I saw them very well off, right.
00:03:22
Speaker
And we were well off also until dad was around. Dad passed away. I will come to that. But my aspirations to grow up was I was not very good at studies. And I thought that this is just a passing phase. I will get better as time goes by. Absolutely no idea how that would happen. But at least that's what I was thinking. I wanted to be very well off in terms of money and work 9 to 5. I never thought of myself as an entrepreneur growing up.
00:03:52
Speaker
But yeah, that's what I wanted to do an MBA like, you know, and I don't ask me why MBA because I the MBA is that I knew were all cool people and they were kind of, you know, they were just to go to offices and earning good salaries wearing ties and, you know, like Belle dress, black shoes, you know, black dress up shoes. So I thought that this is they arrived. Right. So maybe an MBA will get you there. So what happened then? Like, you know, did you actually go on to achieve that dream?
00:04:18
Speaker
No, life happened. What happened was that I was very bad at studies. And when they say bad, I'm not being humble here. I'm actually being very, very truthful. Imagine single digit marks in subjects like mathematics or science or even languages. It's not that I had love for language or English or whatever. I used to suck equally across the spectrum. The only subject I actually loved was physics.
00:04:45
Speaker
And it was because you know I was I was still am like you know but a tinkerer from an early age I used to buy a lot of the DIY stuff electrical stuff and you know repair electric ions and
00:05:01
Speaker
antennas and those kind of things right for the neighbors. So whenever their geezer blew a fuse like and they would call me or whenever something stopped working in their household a bulb had to be replaced you know now that's not some big stuff but you know they would call me and I would be the one who tried to kind of put the filament together like you know in a broken bulb and all that.
Entrepreneurial Spirit in Ahmedabad
00:05:20
Speaker
So I you know I mean of course that is not physics that's more electrical stuff and
00:05:25
Speaker
But, you know, I somehow loved physics and everything, but that alone is not enough to get you into the science stream. And, and growing up. Why were your marks so low? Was it that you didn't care or was it that you were struggling? Yeah, I was struggling, man. I mean, I had, you know, my grandfather. So, you know, I'll give you a little, you know, when I was 12 years old, I lost, we lost our dad, right? So, my, and.
00:05:49
Speaker
And my grandfather was very good, like, you know, he would come spend some time because we were the only so of the family that we have, like the extended family. We have people in Punjab, we have people in Delhi and then we have people in Lucknow, right? We had no one in Gujarat or Ahmedabad, right? Absolutely no family connections or any of that. So why didn't you go back? Like once your dad passed away, was your mom working there? My mom was not working. She was a homemaker. And, you know, she
00:06:19
Speaker
My dad was very, very protective of the family. And, you know, maybe it's not appropriate for the times, but I think he thought that, you know, the females of the house should not venture out and all those things, right. And growing up, we led a very protected life. We used to live in a, and please, you know, this is a good contrast, right? We used to live in a rented apartment, a one bedroom, rent bed apartment, not so great neighborhood of Amdeberg, but we used to have a car and a driver, right?
00:06:48
Speaker
talking about living life king size. That's what Dad used to be a little bold. He liked all the good things, finer tastes of life and all that. After he passed away, we were in dire straits. We did not even know where the bank was, where we had the money and we did not know how much money we had in the bank.
00:07:10
Speaker
So the first time when mom stepped out of the house like you know on her own it was me and mom so a 12 year old and you know mom and then we were kind of we asked you know we asked the panwala like you know hey yeah union bank is somewhere in this neighborhood like you know where is it and then we could figure out the way to the bank. We introduced ourselves you know we told them what happened and then
00:07:33
Speaker
So my dad passed up in the 28th of the month and we realized that he had, I think, 59 rupees or something like that in the bank account. That was the only amount left with us. He used to work for a private company so you can, you know, it was not that, you know, that they would
00:07:49
Speaker
put me in the job, not that I was eligible for it. But mom gets a job. You know, the government has these kind of things, right? So we were, of course, not eligible for that. And that's a big shock, right? So as if the shock of losing someone dear is not big enough. You also have a shock of, OK, well, it's the 28th of the month, and we don't have too much money in the bank. It will be the first of the month very soon. And we are living in a rented apartment. We have to pay the rent. And we need to kind of make the ends meet.
00:08:19
Speaker
Now you were you know you asked why did you not go back to Lucknow right like I think and I am extremely inspired by my mom. She actually took the very hard decision. So after that passed away like you know we spent a few months like three or four months in Lucknow and then
00:08:39
Speaker
And then everyone told, you know, told her that, you know, that we will, you know, that Anand go, you know, we'll send them in a shop. You know, we have clothes shops and, you know, some of our uncles were doing some other things. Right. And they said, we'll take care of your kid. Don't worry about it. But I think she did not want to go back. She wanted to kind of come back to Ahmedabad and figure out life. And that's what she did. Right. So she came back.
00:09:03
Speaker
And she, I mean, most of Punjabi ladies that, you know, from the years gone by, like, you know, know how to stitch embroider, those kinds of things, right? That's like a skill that's been taught, right? As a community, you learn that. So.
00:09:17
Speaker
mom knew that and she started kind of stitching things, fixing, hemming, those kind of things for the neighborhood, I mean for the building neighbors. So we used to live in an apartment complex which had four kind of different building blocks. So A, B, C, D and 10 story building about five or six houses on each floor. So there's a lot of people, about a thousand people give or take.
00:09:39
Speaker
And when she started the home business, a lot of people just out of sympathy came to support her, right? Someone needed their trousers to be kind of refitted or someone, you know, tore their shirt and they wanted it to be stitched or whatever, right? So I think we started earning a little bit from that. Of course, it's nowhere near to making the ends meet. And while she had me 10-year-old and she had a two-year-old, you know, my sister was two years old when that happened.
00:10:07
Speaker
So it was kind of devastating for us. But I think, you know, I asked her a few years later, right, when I was a little bit more sensible, like, hey, mom, why did you not go back to Lucknow? And I think she said that, you know, we would have always lived a life with our arms or our palms stretched out, right? Always asking for help.
00:10:24
Speaker
And in life, I've never, I never want to do that. I want to be self. I want to be independent. I want to be, you know, I want to make whatever it is like, you know, if there is less, we'll make do with less, right? But I don't want to stretch out my palms. And I think that was such an incredible thing for a homemaker who's not been exposed to the world. That was just phenomenal. So you were also like under pressure to get some money into the house.
00:10:50
Speaker
No, but I mean, all I can remember from the ways was mom telling me that, you know, why don't you apply yourself to your studies, right? You have to study, there is nothing else that you should do. And, you know, but poor me, like, you know, I was so bad.
00:11:06
Speaker
I was incredibly bad at studies and you know the mind of a 12, 13, 14 year old right especially when you are super creative and dad's gone and you think like okay well you know I can now do whatever that prohibited me to do right.
00:11:24
Speaker
I can stay up the night. I can repair things. Of course, Dad did not like me going around repairing someone's iron or replacing the element of an iron and those things. So I could finally do that. Of course, you have no career consequences of that. It's not like that electronics was my passion or electrical stuff was my passion, et cetera. It was just like, hey, if I replace the iron, fix something for someone, I'd get 20 rupees of that.
00:11:53
Speaker
or and and mom she would stitch like you know the Indian saris there is a fall you know sari and fall so you stitch the fall right to a sari and that for the fall that you stitch takes you about half an hour you get 2 rupees for that.
00:12:07
Speaker
So, you know, that was some of the other stuff that we used to, mom used to do, right? And so we strapped along, right? It was, we didn't have a plan. We didn't have a method to the madness. It was more about like, okay, well, take every day on the face value and try to just not, you know, try to kind of
00:12:26
Speaker
and the day with the meal stomachs. I was extremely bad. I wish I had a reason. I wish I could tell you why I was bad. It was just that I was very mischievous in school. And maybe because we were away for four months, some of the foundational stuff that you're learning as a 12, 13 year old, that gets
00:12:47
Speaker
You miss those things, right? And I could never kind of recover from that, right? It was always fun and games for me, even when I came back. Again, it was not that I was spending time with friends. I was quite a loner actually growing up, right? I was an introvert. I did not have any friends.
00:13:08
Speaker
I mean people knew us in our apartment society like people knew us right like this is you know this is Anand right but we were not social enough mom was social not I was not right
00:13:23
Speaker
So it was just me and a variety of random things I used to do. So I would, as I said, I would get DIY kits from, so there was a flea market in Ahmedabad that every Sunday. Chor Bazar. Chor Bazar, exactly. It's called Ravi Bari. On a Sunday, under the Ellis Bridge, which is Queen Elizabeth's Bridge, whatever. So under that bridge, and I used to go spend hours there, go at 9.30 in the morning.
00:13:50
Speaker
And just like look around, of course, I could not afford anything, right? But I would ask the price, I cannot try to kind of, you know, see if someone can give me something for free, whatever, right? Wires and, you know, sockets and plugs and those kind of things, right? Try to make some DIY out of that. So a tinkerer, I would say, you know, now that you're now after so many years, if you can ask me, Alan, what were you growing up, right? Very, very creative.
00:14:14
Speaker
uh definitely not the studious kind definitely not the ones that you know goes life with the checklists and says okay well 3 pm i'm going to work on x 5 pm i'm going to do something else you know not that kind at all but something very interesting happened right once you have passion for something right you actually get immersed in the in those things right and i immersed myself in the electrical stuff and very soon graduated to the electronics stuff also right so i
00:14:43
Speaker
would go again from the flea market. They sell gramophone records. They sell everything under the sun. So there were a lot of electronic books also that I could lay my hands on. I started reading up on electronics, what are resistors, capacitors, condensers, diodes, all those things. And I would kind of create DIY small projects.
00:15:09
Speaker
like a electrical bell that would ring, right, that would choke. So that means I knew what a soldering iron was, I knew what a timer chip was, I could put it all together. This would like the BTEC level project? Possibly, but I had no idea, right? Like, I mean, I sound like a
00:15:27
Speaker
dumb guy, which probably I was, right? Growing up, I had no idea that science is a stream, commerce is a different stream. It'll take you to different places in life, right? It shapes, you know, it'll give you different kinds of opportunities. And in my apartment building, there were some extremely sharp people, like, you know, a generation older to me, about eight to 10 years elder to me.
00:15:49
Speaker
And, you know, they were preparing for, you know, you're right, like, you know, they were preparing for the B.E. exams. And after that, they would go on to do advanced studies in the U.S. A lot of them have now settled in the U.S., right? So if I had any brains, it would have been very easy for me to go ask them, like, you know, hey, you know.
00:16:05
Speaker
say Rakesh Vayya or Bharat Vayya, like, you know, tell me how, you know, would you, you know, how would, what would, what's the path to get to the US, right? What kind of studies, like, you know, but I was just, you know, the teachers were kind of fed up of me. I did not, and I was having a ball, like, you know, I was having a ball repairing electrical stuff, repairing electronic stuff. Those were the days of the VCRs, cordless phones, televisions, like, you know, with the fact kind of backside, right, like the CRT televisions,
00:16:34
Speaker
I would have a ball repair. I mean, I would like be so my, my, my bedroom, which was like the one bedroom, right? Mom and I shared, right? I mean, under the bed, we did not have any storage, right? Was, you know, and I would, that would be my workshop, right? I would pull out stuff. I had opened up by the time I was, I would say 15 or 16, I'd opened up every single gadget in the house, including fans, tube lights, you know, everything electronic that we had, including our television, right?
00:17:02
Speaker
I had opened it up, I was curious to look at the parts, like at a multimeter, I would do random shit with it. And that was, again, a dreamy 12, 15-year-old, 12 to 15 years of my life. I did not have a plan. It was not that I'm inspired that I will want to become an engineer. I had absolutely no idea what an engineer was. A lot of my family back in Lucknow are all businessmen.
00:17:32
Speaker
couple of my uncles. So my dad has three brothers, so one plus three, like four brothers in total. So dad was educated. The one younger to dad went to IIT Madras. So again, like the best. And I think this was back in the 70s or even before that, right?
00:17:54
Speaker
The other two were just, I don't think so, they graduated or even passed the 12th grade. They were just put on the shop because grandfather used to then, from his setting up the stall outside of the market, he then eventually made his way into the market. And while he had a day job of the railways, because that was steady income.
00:18:15
Speaker
And you don't have capital to invest. You need a shop, you need capital. You need to buy things and then you can sell them. So he put one of my uncles on the shop and that uncle got the other one to help him out as business group. So I had no one to guide me, to be honest. And of course, not that I was seeking guidance. It was just very random in the early stage of my life. When did you get a plan? Or when did you get serious that you need to make a living, so to say?
00:18:42
Speaker
I never did. Again, let me, you know, it's okay. So let me, let's go back, right. So I was doing electrical stuff, then we were doing electronic stuff. Then, you know, I got enrolled in. So okay, around that time, in the I think I was in the ninth grade, a friend of mine kind of told me, hey, so I should live in one part of Ahmedabad and the extreme opposite end.
00:19:11
Speaker
of Ahmedabad, if you had to take a bicycle and go, it would be about 15 kilometers. There was Vikram Sarabhai Labs, of course, named after the very famous scientist, Vikram Sarabhai. So in Vikram Sarabhai Labs, you can get access to a computer. So they would invite kids to come on a Sunday, spend half an hour just playing some games. Computers was very, very new for the world and even for India.
00:19:39
Speaker
more so for people in Ahmedabad they had no idea what a computer was and we used to bicycle around and I think one of those incidents where I
00:19:52
Speaker
where I entered the edit mode of the game, right? So you press F2 and, you know, I was just a tinkerer, right? So I was screwing around, right? You enter the edit mode, you change some number, there was 20, I probably made it 25, and then I increased the odds of winning, right? So I won that game. And, you know, that kind of felt of a light bulb in my head, like, you know, hey, I can change this, right?
00:20:12
Speaker
For everything else, I required a soldering iron. I required some sort of a quiet setting in my place and all that, right? And I had no idea that this was called software or programming back then, right? But it was like, OK, if I change something here and I go back into the playing mode, I can change things. So fast forward, you know, a couple of years later, when I was in the I think in the 12th grade, you know, I
00:20:41
Speaker
between 12th and first year of college right again. So let me go let me go back actually because I mean I told you right there are multiple kind of story lines in my my story right. So apart from apart from you know repairing electrical stuff and kind of repairing or building this small DIY kits right DIY projects right like some remote control bell or infrared something right
00:21:07
Speaker
with a photovoltaic cell or infrared cell, you do these things. So that was one part of my personality. The second part of my personality was helping out mom with all the stitching work she would do. For a sari, you probably require a blouse and a petticoat matching. So I would take my bicycle, go to the
00:21:31
Speaker
go to the wholesale market, try to find some matching stuff, get it back, right? My uncles in Lucknow started sending us Lucknowy suits and dresses. So that would be sent, since we were not a commercial entity, like they would, and of course mom was running a home business, right? So they would send it through railways, like you loaded up in the cargo section of the railways, but it was for my dear nephew or niece, they would write those kind of things, right?
00:22:00
Speaker
And of course, the railways knew that, you know, such a package like so I would be the one because mom had to kind of take care of the home. I would be the one on a bicycle. I'd go all the way to the railway, you know, kind of where they were all those guys called the Octo device. And they would, you know, they would say, hey, what is this? Like I said, my uncle send me a gift. How come your uncle send you a gift every month?
00:22:20
Speaker
And because the commercial value would be some random order, would be like, oh, 1,000 rupees. And of course, it had stuff worth of 25,000 rupees. Because we were running a cloth business in Lucknow, my uncle knew other folks. And they would procure stuff wholesale to us. And Lucknow B dresses, there were no other kind of sellers of Lucknow B dresses. It was very exotic. And again, please go back in time. I'm talking about the mid-90s, early 90s.
00:22:50
Speaker
And everyone knew that we were from Lucknow, right? Because we were the odd ones out, right? We could not speak any Gujarati to save our lives and we were just like some Punjabi family, right?
00:22:58
Speaker
that passed away. So, you know, and then they were like, oh, wow, like, you know, you want the stuff. So people would come and buy the dresses from mom. So I had to negotiate, you know, with the guy I have to find with, you know, kind of say, OK, well, you know, you're poor, you know, whatever. I had to make up some random things. I somehow slipped a hundred rupee note and get hold of that parcel and then bring it back. So that was one side of my personality. That's the one thing I did.
00:23:22
Speaker
The third thing I did was, you know, find out odd jobs to do. So like repairing jobs or not? I mean, completely different, absolutely different. There's no bearing on the first two that I described. Right. So a friend, I mean, one day, not even a friend, like an acquaintance told me that, you know, his friend, right, got a job in Nirma factory to clean up the factory premises and
00:23:50
Speaker
was like okay and what does he do is like you know what by the time the production shift ends in the evening there is a lot of dust in the factory right. So, this guy has got a cleaning job right he kind of wipes the factory clean machines everything is wiped clean.
00:24:03
Speaker
you know in my head I kind of I said you know what hang on man what kind of dust would be there in a chemical factory because it will ruin your detergent right or whatever chemical you're producing right let's say producing talcum powder or detergent powder or whatever you're producing right cream shampoo right you possibly cannot have dust everything that's flying in the air is actually the Nirma washing powder right because as you're filling them in containers or what that's or filling them in the plastic pouches you know that thing will be the only thing in the air and they're actually paying this guy to sweep the factory clean
00:24:34
Speaker
So I got hold of that acquaintances friend and I said, why don't you sell? I mean, I'll buy whatever. I mean, don't dispose it off. Give it to me. And he says, what will you do with it? And I figured out a side business. I said, I'll package it in a plastic pouch. I've seen it with a candle back in the days. And I will sell it door to door.
00:24:59
Speaker
So I used to go, knock on doors, you know, talk to the housewives, show them the washing powder, the unbranded that I was, I was a kid, like, you know, I was probably 15, right? And then they would be like... But you were such a hustler, right? This is like unbelievable. Yes, yes. And I, you know, I've said this before that if you don't have a clear line, right, like an engineer, there are families of doctors, right? That the kids become doctors and, you know, they have
00:25:24
Speaker
dreams. The family has a dream right. We have a hospital and you know the kid when they become a you know or the family of lawyers or a family of engineers and you know industrialists and all that right. We were random guys when we had no absolutely no direction in life right. Mom was hoping that by the time I graduate you know I'll start earning and kind of you know she would not have to do all the drudgery and I was just having too much fun like you know I wish I had a direction in my life right that so
00:25:52
Speaker
I mean electronics and soap have nothing to do with each other. Like there's no direction in my life. So I'm doing that. And then I would go around, there's a variety of things I did. There's a variety of things selling sunglass cases.
00:26:12
Speaker
Someone gave me, again someone I knew, you know, they were manufacturing sunglass cases. They said, Anil, you know, can you sell this? I'm like, sure I can sell it. I went to the shop, you know, one shop, again, like when a kid shows up in a bicycle on a shop, there was the owner there, right? Very famous sunglass shop in Ahmedabad called Arakumar. I went to the owner, I said, Uncle, I, you know,
00:26:34
Speaker
You want to buy this, you know, of course, I had no idea how to sell right you but it's a bit of what are you doing here? You know, hey, how do you get all this? I said, you know, my uncle I made up some story my uncle manufacturers these and all this and this is my kid project You know, I have to do as part of my assignment summer vacation something I made up something right He's like sure how much and actually it was cheaper than what they were paying retail I mean what they were buying right from some manufacturer so he bought it and said come back to me next month and
00:27:00
Speaker
Of course, I never went back. But growing up, I think my life was made up of some massive amount of experience in unrelated domains that had nothing to do with each other. There was a lot of wandering phase. I was 16 years of age. So going back to that first one phase, then the electronics phase I told you, where I was doing these things. Then it becomes out of my labs.
00:27:28
Speaker
and then computers so after the 12th grade and on the side I was also assembling PC's okay so I graduated like you know I yeah I think I was in the 12th grade yeah so let me go back to the 12th grade 12th grade was when a friend of mine sorry you know friend as in like a school friend right
00:27:47
Speaker
Uh, he said, yeah, there is a thing called app tech, like, you know, the teacher computers and, you know, it'll be great. And again, it's not a career move. Like, you know, I'm talking about the year 1990 three, possibly two, um, right? Uh, computers, you don't even know whether they're a thing of the future, right?
00:28:05
Speaker
All we were told or what I understood was computers are fast calculators. So it's like, hey, what they teach you computers and the face is only 3000 rupees a month. Now 3000 rupees was like a very princely sum for me. To give you perspective, our house rent was 500 rupees a month. Yeah. Okay. That is a massive amount. Yes. Yes. Right.
00:28:25
Speaker
I mean, if my kid today walked up to me and says they want to do something that's three times the rent of my current house, like, you know, I own my house, hopefully, but, you know, some I would not I would not do that. Right. So anyway, like, you know, we started doing that. And in a couple of months, I met a very interesting character there who then became my business partner in a future venture. But in and he had a computer. Right. So on day one, like, you know, his dad, again, multiple stories here, but his dad was a chief justice in the high court.
00:28:53
Speaker
He had a computer because his dad would take dictation, the Chief Justice, they would read out judgments. He would take a shorthand like the friend's dad, come back home, type all those out, the judgments. Now he did not have to type them out. He could have just written them on a piece of paper. But you know what? His dad was a little progressive. He wanted all that. And this guy then said, hey, I have a computer. You want to see that? This Aptek has black and white computers. I have a color monitor.
00:29:22
Speaker
okay and color monitors for those you know who might listen to this later are not actually the color monitors that we have today they were you know they were called cga monitors so that four colors in total after which vga was tough after much vga after vga there was super vga which was 16.7 million colors which is now what we have and then now we are talking about resolution and all that right contrast ratios and all that
00:29:47
Speaker
But those were the days. And that's why. So in two months of Aptech, while they were teaching everyone Word, Star, and Lotus 1, 2, 3, which were the predecessors of MS Word and Excel sheets, right? These were DOS-based softwares. Actually, me and the buddy of mine, we were actually on to building a software in FoxPro.
00:30:11
Speaker
So one day on one of the Diwali vacations, I think I was in first year of college by then. I went to wish Diwali, Happy Diwali to this friend of mine who I'd met in Aptech. And his dad actually challenged me. You guys spent the entire day on computers. What good is it? Can you make a software? Can you make this software? So he showed us the software.
00:30:37
Speaker
And yeah, we said we'll do it. We had absolutely no idea how to do it. But we said we'll do it. And then I think it took us seven to eight months, and we built it right in Fox Pro. Fox Pro 2.0. So we had to first figure out what software, because this was definitely not WordStar material, right? We said you can't build software in WordStar or in Lotus 1.2.3. So you need a programming thing.
00:31:05
Speaker
And we got hold of Fox Pro. So there were three choices, Debase, Fox Pro, and Clipper back in the days. And we started with Debus, but very quickly went to Fox Pro because Fox Pro was faster, better, whatnot, right? And then we got Fox Pro. And so every night, so my schedule during those days was
00:31:31
Speaker
college, which I never, I told you, right? I went a total of 50 hours of college in three years of my, you know, three years of college, right? So to give you a sense, right, I graduated, I mean, 10th grade was, you know, I think I got a first class, 60% something, because typing and Sanskrit were two subjects, which I scored very good on. In the 12th grade, I was, I think I got my, I think I graduated with the second class. I don't even remember how much it was.
00:31:59
Speaker
and then college, right? So you're not really looking forward to college because you have no idea what is going to happen, right?
Breaking into the Tech World
00:32:05
Speaker
You know, programming language, you know, when we started writing code, then, you know, since he was PA to Chief Justice, he knew all the advocates, etc. So the next thing you know is that he says, can you go sell it? And we're like, okay, we will go sell it. And then we would, you know, we would hear about scooter back then. You would hop onto a scooter, go to some advocate, show them the software.
00:32:28
Speaker
code them some random price. We had no idea how to price software. Customer centric pricing, basically. We had no idea. We would look at the size of their office. Most of the high court lawyers have a very fancy office. They have bungalows in Ahmedabad. They have fancy cars, good offices, wooden full take word, like extremely rich looking offices. So if we saw someone who has a very good office, we'd code 5,000 rupees.
00:32:56
Speaker
And then we come back and tell his dad, like, hey, uncle, we know 5,000. He's like, no, no, no, no, no. That guy's a good friend. You can't charge him. So there went our money making mention out of the road. But anyway, this is the growing up. So I'll shut up right now. But this is what growing up for me was. Also,
00:33:15
Speaker
So like, you know, when did you get into that making a living world? So far, you've not given much thought that you need to make a living. So like, when did that happen then? So with my friend, right. So, you know, we were selling software. I mean, we are not really selling software, right. We were, you know.
00:33:35
Speaker
sometimes for 3000 rupees sometimes 5000 rupees and we would divide up the money while I was doing that I was also I was also tutoring a couple of kids I will not call them kids actually they were in the third third year of college I was in the first year of college now I was tutoring them on I think I was English and statistics if I'm not mistaken
00:34:01
Speaker
And you would ask me, Arun, how come that you were so bad in studies that you would tutor someone? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. They told me 500 rupees per student per month. There are two students that you need to teach. I said, no problem, right?
00:34:18
Speaker
and I actually did not teach them anything, I would just go them, motivate them, make sure that they were in front of their books for an hour, honest to God, looking at the book, asking each other questions, whatever they did not understand, jot it down, ask your professor,
00:34:34
Speaker
college come back you know share the answer with me and then scored I think 85% in both the subjects like you know an English 85 is like I mean their parents wanted me to continue I just did not want to continue because you know I mean I had no idea what you know you know I mean it was beyond my understanding right if you will right I mean so I think I got lucky with that
00:34:59
Speaker
But I did so many odd jobs that there's no, I wish I could weave a thread around them saying that, oh, this helped me in this thing. It was just very, very random. We used to trade. I used to go with moms. We used to go and we did a lot of seasonal business with my apartment friends. During the kite season, we would go buy kites from the wholesale market.
00:35:28
Speaker
get the manja kind of ready and because if you don't have friends right number one if you are not good in studies if you don't watch television and you are a loner right which is by not having friends right you actually end up with a lot of time in your hands and you don't like to read or get into books and any of that right you actually and I used to sleep about three hours every day
00:35:53
Speaker
from six to nine. And I've been there for several years. I think easily four to five years of my life. I've done that. Right. So on weekends also, like there is no weekend, right? I mean, every day is exactly the same, right? You, you sleep, go to sleep at six. You wake up at nine in 30 minutes, you shower up, you get ready and you're out. Okay. Doing whatever the world throws at you.
00:36:16
Speaker
And you end up with 21 hours of extremely productive day, right? Because there's no time pass, there's no way you can pass your time, right? So, and then you, and you don't have a career, it's not like, oh, well, I am, you know, I'm a graduate, I can only do these things or I, you know, I would do just any, about anything. So if someone said, Alan, can you do 3D studio? I'd figure it out and I would do 3D studio, right? Like, no problem, right?
00:36:42
Speaker
I will do that. If someone said, can you do data entry for me? Yeah, no problem. I'll do data entry for you. Because I took typing in the 10th grade. So I would just do anything that the world would throw. Because for me, it was just a way of making money.
00:36:56
Speaker
So, I did not you know get serious about a job like you know like you said like you know where is the you know when did you kind of get serious about money and all that. So, I will tell you now. Did you complete college? I completed college I will tell you a story around that part now right. So, I completed college in the year 96 right and in the third year of college actually in the second year of college I started a private limited company because you know hey why not right.
00:37:23
Speaker
We were, yeah, we were going, you know, it was the time of Harshad Mehta, you know, I mean, stock market, Ahmedabad stock market is kind of, you know, the company is going IPO. Actually, it was post Harshad Mehta also, right? A lot of pharmaceutical companies fly by night, you know, they would go rich. And I thought that my, my key to success or my, you know, goal to riches would be through an IPO of a company that I float. Now, I had no idea what the company would be working on.
00:37:50
Speaker
Uh, but you know, we, I, I, at that point of time, I taught myself programming. I taught myself programming in two or three languages. I knew database. I knew Fox flow. I know I knew C. I did not know C plus plus then, right? Um, so, uh, uh, private limited company, uh, we ran it for a year. I had a, uh, with other guy, right? The lawyer friend, uh, you know, uh, he did not want to kind of, he wanted to become a career lawyer, uh, later on. So I started a company. It did not go anywhere. One day we had a fight.
00:38:19
Speaker
and I walked away from that. So now I am in the third year of college and I am still doing odd jobs here and there but I had a private limited company, my grandpa and we got my relatives from Punjab and Delhi and Lucknow to come. It was a big event, inaugurated the thing and all that.
00:38:40
Speaker
And there were absolutely nothing going on because that business shut down overnight. Why? Because we had a fight. By the way, the business only had two employees, me and the other guy. And the reason we had two employees was because you have to have a minimum of two managing directors. But mind you, that business was an excise bonded warehouse. So we were actually running a manufacturing unit without manufacturing anything. It was me taking a train to Bombay.
00:39:09
Speaker
Of course, in general class, I would be sitting on the door of the general class because if you've ever had the pleasure of even seeing the general class coach between Andabad and Bombay, you would know that it's more packed than the local trains here in Bombay. It's extremely packed. There's no space to sit. There's no space to stand. So the only place is the toilets, which are also with people or with stuff that people carry.
00:39:38
Speaker
The only place I found out was on top of the door. So I would swing the door open of the bogie and I would sit on top of the door, right? With my kind of legs stretched across. Yeah. No, because you don't fall off, right? Because it's midnight, right? The train's Bombay on the other end during night at 11 to 5, right? So 5.36. So you land at Bombay Central. Then you walk to Lamington Road. You wait.
00:40:06
Speaker
until the shops open. So the shops open at 10. The staff showed up. But the main guy, the shop owner would not show up until 11.30. So you have to wait until then. Of course, I could not afford anything. I would just have a coffee, sit on the sidewalk, wait for the shops to open, buy my parts, one motherboard, four MB RAM, this, that, and the other. Put them in a briefcase. Walk over to the other TT.
00:40:35
Speaker
Take the bus back to Ahmedabad which would drop me off at some god-forsaken location at 2 a.m. And then you know either walk back to home or Take a bus to home spend the entire night assembling the PC And Sell it off, you know the guy who told us and gave us the order for the PC, right? We will give it to that person And you know take the money and the margin would you would used to be used to be four five thousand rupees?
00:41:06
Speaker
So, I did that for you know until the fight happened right until the fight happened and I said I have nothing to do with you you have nothing to do with me and and that's where you know and then I did nothing for a month.
00:41:20
Speaker
And mom was worried, right? Because I, you know, I mean, I don't have a plan, right? But I was very busy, right? Doing things and she could see that, right? And for a month, I did nothing like, you know, I was devastated, right? Because private domain company, I was the managing director, whatnot, right? And we had a, we had a horrible fight on some bullshit issue, right? It's not even a big issue, right? I mean, we were not making any money. It was just like some random stuff, right?
00:41:43
Speaker
And I still read my newspapers, right? So I have this habit of reading newspapers, like physical papers, right? So I used to read the newspaper. Sunday morning, I woke up around nine, I saw an ad in the newspapers, walk-in interviews for sales people. And I said, this is what I'm going to do. So I wore my, I did not have any dress-up shirts, right? Because I never had to dress for office, right?
00:42:07
Speaker
So I wore my dad's shirt and I think I had a trouser or whatever like, you know some borrowed shoes I walked over to that their office. Sorry. I took a bus. I think I had a Luna back then Yeah, I took a Luna. I took my Luna went to their office and I You know, I it was a small office like like imagine a five six people company, right a very small quote unquote telecommunication company and They were they wanted salespeople, correct?
00:42:35
Speaker
And I went to the receptionist and I said I'm here for the, you know, there was an ad in the newspaper today.
00:42:42
Speaker
I'm here for the interview. She's like, okay, well, what year did you graduate? I said, I'm not, I'm not graduated yet. I'm in the third year of college. She's like, oh, one more year to go. I'm like, no, this is the last year. She's like, wait a minute. What? We wrote that you have to have a minimum of a B.E. degree, right? Or if not B.E. B.S.C., right? I said, well, I'm not, I'm studying B.Com, but I mean, I'm, I mean, I can't tell you a balance sheet to save my life, right? I can't even read one. But, you know, I can, I can ace the interview because this is a technical job.
00:43:12
Speaker
She said, no, no, no, no, we don't do all that. Why don't you graduate and maybe next year you can come or whatever. She just wanted to put me off. I did not give up. I said, I'll sit here. Let me be the last candidate that you ever sent. So once all the candidates, all the walk-ins have exhausted, please send me in the very end. I just want to have 15 minutes with your boss. I bet I'll make an impression and I will come out with the job. Yeah.
00:43:37
Speaker
And I was there until I think from 10 30 in the morning, all the way to eight in the evening. A lot of people kind of went in, came out. And, and the reception lady then told me you're one hell of a persistent bugger, like, you know, okay, we'll send you in. The boss was very angry looking. I mean, he probably, I mean, he was brief, right? You know, they probably told you, right? So he was like, Hey, man, hang on.
00:43:59
Speaker
What are you doing? Why are you wasting my time? Sunday I have to go, I have to go to my kids. I said, sir, can you please leave all that chatter aside and ask me the questions that you were asking other people. You can ask me any question that you asked other people. He asked me three or four questions and he said, well, we have a problem. So the reception lady was also there in the room. I mean, I was standing, I was not even offered a seat because he wanted to kind of shout at me and then get it over with.
00:44:30
Speaker
So he looked at the reception and he says, we have a problem. She's like, what problem? She's like, I like this guy. He's a man. And well, she said, but we've already given an offer. And then he looked at me and he says, well, we have a problem. I said, but that's your problem.
00:44:48
Speaker
And so about 8.30 in the evening, he said, well, okay, I will deal with my problem. You got the job. When can you start? I said, you know what? I actually sleep at six in the morning. I can start right now. He's like, no, no, no, you don't get it. It's a Sunday one to the office timings. I said, what office timings? I work, you know, I work literally 20 hours a day, right? So I don't care if you have work, you can just give it to me. He's like, no, no, no, this is not how we do it.
00:45:14
Speaker
you go home and you know your salary so I got salary of 2500 rupees a month right petrol charges would be extra I think it was 80 paisa per kilometer something like that right and my job was to sell modems now modems you know back in the days in
00:45:33
Speaker
Yes, in 95, in the year 94, 95, 96 also, you needed modems to connect and I used to use a telephone line and a modem to connect to the internet, right? And internet was not the internet that we see today with Tinder and Facebook and TikTok and all that, right? It was just like plain text vanilla internet, right? That bulletin board vanilla era, basically.
00:45:54
Speaker
So, but, you know, those are not even the primary uses of the, of the modem, right? A modem was used more to connect to locations. So if you have an office in a central part of Hamptabad and your factories in the outskirts, you would buy a twisted copper cable from us, like a lease line or like a dark lease line, right? Like unactivated and you would, you would put one modem on one side on the other and you would use it to transfer data. So anyway, I was, I got this. You would have to lay down the line yourself.
00:46:22
Speaker
No, so we had people you know, we I mean, okay, you would lay down the line for the customer and okay. So these are called these lines, you know, you I mean, even now people when they laid on fiber, etc, right? So these were copper cables. And we would do that sometimes, right? So we would sell modems. And and I was very good with all the tech stuff, right? So I could get a hang of all that tech. So that's what was my first paying job. Now,
00:46:46
Speaker
And I used to, you know, I had a monthly quota and I used to meet and beat all my monthly quotas, right? So boss was very happy with me. I was having a ball. Of course, I was making a pittance, right? In terms of, but I was not complaining like, you know, hey, I have now a career, right? So, and, you know, I would, at some point of time, my boss trusted me with the keys to the office, right? And that's a big, big symbolic thing for a very small company, right? We didn't have any swipe cards back then, right? Or cameras or fingerprints and all that, right?
00:47:16
Speaker
So, getting keys to the office and I asked my boss, can I please, because we are selling modems to, you know, and also we were, and then we graduated selling Netscape Navigator browsers, which is, you know, for those who might listen later, like, you know, is what Mark Anderson of A16Z fame, he wrote that browser, right? So, I was saying... Before Microsoft was giving it free... That is correct. Absolutely right. So, I was selling Netscape Navigator 3.0, later 4.0, 4.0 Gold and so on and so forth, right?
00:47:45
Speaker
So again, you sell technical products, you know, you and you have an experience of assembling PCs and all that. So most of the businesses that I used to go, I used to take my Luna drive out to the far exteriors of Ahmedabad to an industrial area, GIDC, right, Gujarat Industrial Development Corporation areas, where there are factory owners and you would then tell them like, you know, you'd strike up a conversation with the guard, you go inside, sell the talk to the owner, right.
00:48:12
Speaker
tell them like there's internet and you know and but you start with the conversation where is your son like my son is in the US like okay well you can email the son you know and right and most of them are you know I mean most of these guys are driven by FOMO right so if you have sold one to the neighboring factory owner that's the second sale becomes very easy because you know what like said Karsanbhai bought this thing
00:48:36
Speaker
So he's like, no, no, I will want it. What does he do with it? I was like, sir, but he uses it to email other people. You know, this factory requires, you know, contacts in the Middle East and here and there and whatever Germany. So he emails them. It's like, really, I will email them also.
00:48:50
Speaker
But I want a computer also. So sometimes I would call up a buddy of mine to give them the computer, resemble them for them. Or sometimes we would just ask them to get a computer. So anyway, that was the thing. So the boss gave me the keys to the office. And I would spend the entire night just surfing around randomly on the internet. This is very, very early days of the internet. And one day I taught myself how to write HTML.
00:49:17
Speaker
And the boss showed up at 8.30 in the morning. He was a very disciplined guy, very organized guy. He shows up at 8.30 in the office and I'm sitting there in the office. He's like, hey, you didn't go home. I said, no, no, boss, come here. I'll show you something very cool. And I showed him a web page with his name on it. He's like, how did you know how to do this? I taught myself this over the last few days.
00:49:40
Speaker
And I told him that I want to do this because the industrial guys that we go to, they will require some sort of presence on the internet. And what if we could build their websites? That's more business for us. And he's like, yeah, bingo. Let's do it. But he says, you know what? In the daytime, you are still going to be selling modems and browsers. All this you can do in the nighttime when you're sitting here doing nothing.
00:50:01
Speaker
I'm like, okay, no problem. So you know, this is a very small shop. So it's not that the boss gave me a new title and I got a raise, right? It was just for the same amount of money. The only solace for me was at the computer where the in the small office where the computer was, right? So there will be two cabins in the office. One was the boss cabin here at an AC air conditioner. And where the computer was there was the second AC, right? So if
00:50:25
Speaker
You know, Ahmedabad Heat, you're getting an AC cabin to yourself, even only during the night time, right? You're very happy. It's an upgrade. It's a massive upgrade. I mean, I anyways to sit there, but now I have a reason to sit there, right? And the boss was a very progressive boss, right? He would kind of, you know, he bought a scanner to scan the brochures, like, you know, put it online on the website, you know, back in the days websites, people did not know how to make website, right?
00:50:48
Speaker
Anyhow, that's what I did. So during one of the days, there was an incident that happened around that time. One day someone called my boss and says, you know what, I've been struggling with an issue. I'm someone from the US. I'm doing a project here with a local company. But I just can't get my modems and these things to work, my internet connection and all that. So you send me a best person. I've heard a lot about your company.
00:51:17
Speaker
and my boss invariably sends me and the guy says, hey, do you, you know, so the guy speaks with an accent and I'm there, I'm selling a modem. He's like, no, no, I already have a modem, you know, but I just can't get, I want to configure a few servers here, right? Can you help me do that? I said, yeah, of course, like, you know, so what are you looking for? He's like, I want to set up an SMTP server and a web server. I said, of course, you give me half an hour, I'll set it up for you. I set it up and the guy was kind of, you know, pleasantly surprised to say the least.
00:51:45
Speaker
He was taken aback because no one spoke SMTP servers and web servers back in the year 95.
00:51:53
Speaker
And he said, well, how do you know all this? I said, I know all this because that's what I do all day, right? I do these kind of things all day. And he said, OK, do you know how to write code? I said, yeah, I know how to write code. I can program in C. I can program in FoxPro, D-Bays, Kipper. And it's like, OK, fantastic. So what do you do these days? I'm like, I know. I sell modems during great time. And I build websites during the evenings and nights.
00:52:18
Speaker
It's like come work for me. What's your salary? He's like 25,000. So I told him 2,500 rupees. He's like, I'll pay you 25,000 rupees.
00:52:25
Speaker
Oh, wow. Yeah, you come work for me. I said I never, I never, you know, I've never in my life valued money. I want to be very rich and extremely aspirational, right? But I never leave people because they were not paying me enough, right? As long as I'm having fun, I will always be with my buddy. He's given me a lot of opportunities, right? Including giving me the job, you know, you're trusting me with office keys, building websites, all of those things, right? I'm having a blast of a time, right?
00:52:54
Speaker
I will not leave the job. But I'm around like, hey, you can call my boss, ask me by name. And I will fix anything that you have ever trouble with. We won't even charge you for it. It's on me, because I enjoy these kind of things. And no one that I sell to understands these things. So hey, it's a good thing to meet you. So anyway, all that happened. And the chapter of selling and building websites came to an end. And I'll tell you how that happened.
00:53:22
Speaker
one of dad's friends, right, who was a sale tax consultant, one day came over for tea to our place, and he asked mom, what is Alan doing these days? She's like, oh, he's become a sales guy, he's selling modems and all that, right? At least he dresses up nice, right? You know, when he goes out in the morning, he makes up on time, and it was like a big achievement for mom, right?
00:53:40
Speaker
I'm like okay and you know he's like there is a this new computer course that's going on it's called you know it's I have no idea what it is but you know I know that someone who you know like he one of his colleagues right like he was a sale tax consultant right so one of his colleagues kind of you know his daughter did the course and she's got an extremely high paying job in Hyderabad this is the year you know late 96 if you've been right
00:54:08
Speaker
and so mom you know so of course uncle leaves you know because I don't just want to come back from office right I am doing websites I come back my usual time right six in the morning right so mom like wakes me up you know she's like you know what this uncle was telling about some course that you you know you're interested in all these computer things right so you better understand from uncle what it is about
00:54:28
Speaker
I'm like this uncle sale tax guy has no idea man we are doing the cool stuff right we are building websites this is the future what would the sale tax uncle do right so whatever man after a few times uncle again came back says well you know he never came to my office you know please Anand you know you send Anand to my office so whatever man some Saturday I went to his office
00:54:48
Speaker
And the other guy told me about the course, right? So he said there's an institute called CDAC. And they made India supercomputers. And they run a course. And there's an entrance exam. And you have to pass that. And only then you'll get selected. So you should totally apply blah, blah, blah. So talk to my daughter. Anyway, I don't think so. I ended up talking to the daughter. But I was convinced enough that maybe I should give it a shot, just to kind of shut up the uncle and mom. It's like, OK, well, yeah.
00:55:16
Speaker
check that checkbox right saying that okay I did it okay so thank you guys and you know so that I asked through the test I passed it right I was in fact among the top 25 so there are 10,000 people there used to be 10,000 people that apply they would select I think 150 or 110 people I was in the top 25 all programming logic all those kind of questions right and then
00:55:44
Speaker
I, yeah, so I, I, you know, then I got selected right now. That was a big question, right? Because now we had to go now. So there was no CDAC in Ahmedabad. There was centers in Delhi and Poona and there was one other place I think. And I wanted to go to Poona because Poona was considered like the best. But of course that meant that I had to go live in a hostel. Someone had to pay for my rent, you know, those kinds of things. We could not afford those things. So next thing you know, mom tells me, you know what?
00:56:12
Speaker
your aunt lives in, your Boa lives in Delhi. So why don't you go stay with the Boa and it's best because we'll save on the living expense, on the meal expenses. You can eat at Boa's house and you can just go to your institute and come back. So I did that. I went to CEDAC, I went to my Boa's place. Of course, Boa is to live in North Delhi. The CEDAC was in Hauska's Green Park, which is South Delhi. So I had to take two buses, two and a half hours worth of commute each side.
00:56:42
Speaker
and go to the institute, I absolutely topped CDAC, I scored you know I think the highest marks in the last five years or something like that. So, that happened you know and then you know I and then there were placement you know there were campus placement so to say right and there were companies that are coming in this was again the year 98, 99 the dot-com boom was going on in the US, the first dot-com boom.
00:57:09
Speaker
And there were companies that wanted to hire engineers, right? They had come to India because a lot of them were started by Indians, you know, companies like I2 and MicroStrategy and a bunch of others, right? So I did not want to go to the US because, you know, I had to take care of my mom and my sister, right? So I said, you know what?
00:57:31
Speaker
not appear for the campus placements, I'll go back to Ahmedabad. Of course, I had no idea what I'll come back and do in Ahmedabad because no one would, there was no programming jobs, there's nothing available. So I went back to my boss and I said, I'm back and now I can write code also. He told me actually very, and I respect my boss again, like, you know, a very inspirational figure in my life. And I've been blessed with good, good bosses, good managers, good leaders, like, you know, throughout my career, right? And that has shaped a lot of my thinking.
00:58:00
Speaker
He
Career Growth and Challenges in the US
00:58:01
Speaker
actually told me, Anand, we are very welcome to, we are happy to welcome you back, we'll welcome you to Open Arms, but you are a little bit more qualified for this job. Deera, the world is open for you. You go explore something else. And to me, the words, you know, that's what he said. What I heard was, we don't have a job for you. So get lost. Of course, right? Because, you know, hey, that Sea-Tac fees was 30,000 rupees, right? And, you know, I had to pay that fees or whatever, right? So I applied to a programming company in Gandhira, called Software Frontiers Limited.
00:58:32
Speaker
And because of CDAC, I think, again, they had requirement that you have to be minimum of a Bachelor of Engineering or BSC. But I think, no, sorry, not BSC, BE or BTEC. And I think because of CDAC, which was like a hot thing back then.
00:58:47
Speaker
I got invited to the interviews and in the interviews, I actually ripped apart the interviewers. Yeah, because I told them that the questions are incorrect. You don't know the questions you should be asking and they're like, well, so what do you think young man is the question? I told them the question and then they went out, came back and then they said, well, you're right.
00:59:06
Speaker
and then they gave me a programming problem right I solved it for them and I got selected no and then again they said then can you join I said I'm you know I'm back I have nothing else going on we can join Monday morning so Monday morning I go to the job and then life is good like you know I my salary is 3500 rupees now
00:59:23
Speaker
Again, nothing to shine a light on, but it's 1000 rupees more than what I used to earn. Again, this is the year 1998. So mom is like, we spent 30,000 rupees and all you get is like a 1000 rupee bump in your salary. I'm like, but mom, I work for a private limited company now. It's a big company. They have a big campus. There are lawns. There's a mess, like a canteen where you go eat.
00:59:47
Speaker
And my title was junior programmer. So I'm a junior programmer now. It's a big deal. Being a programmer is a big deal. So like, OK, well, I think she said, what would I know? You are a programmer now. Good for you. And so I became a programmer, and I would go on. And then one day, there was an announcement in the company that, hey, everyone, there is going to be an important event tomorrow in the company.
01:00:13
Speaker
So, everyone please clean shave, shine up your shoes, wear a tie to work and you know and all of that stuff for everyone right. So, there was like a you know thing that went out. This is not an internet company right. So, there was no internet was only available to the vice president of engineering right. We all had email, but that was like the that was like email routing you know software back in the days.
01:00:37
Speaker
And we all used to work on desktop machines. Again, no laptops, none of that. So just go back in time. Imagine 98 and you know what? So we all showed up. Life is good. And I'm being my tinkerer self. I'm working on some new cool-age things, new age stuff that no one's heard of. And as I'm walking, so I'm going to the restaurant. And as I'm walking around, I spot the same guy that I'd met three years ago.
01:01:05
Speaker
when I was selling modems. And I walk up to him, he's like, hey, you remember me? He's like, yeah, of course. How can I forget you? Like, you know, what are you, what are you doing here? I said, well, you know, long story, but, you know, I went to CDAC and now, and now I know, you know, a few more programming languages. He was like, very good, very good. So why didn't I see you this morning in the, in the town hall? I said, well, I was never invited. And, you know, this company, this software filters limited had the cream of the cream, right? Back in the days,
01:01:35
Speaker
you know, electrical engineering or electronics engineering or having a computer degree, like, you know, if you have taken computers as elective, what's a big deal, right? And this was part of the TVS group, Ashok Muthunna TVS group, right? So it was like a big, big deal, right? And then I was some, you know, commerce graduate, you know. So, so of course, they did not want to kind of invite me to town hall, right? Town hall was done with like 20 people, all select cream of the crop, like, you know,
01:02:04
Speaker
And he's like, I didn't see you in the download. I said, well, I was not invited. But I said, forget all that. Let me show you something very, very cool I'm working on. And I took him to my kind of workstation. And I turned on a few other workstation. I showed him something which was like the seeds of distributed computing, if you will. And he was, again, pleasantly surprised, to say the least.
01:02:32
Speaker
Uh, he took me and he said, why don't you come to me to the vice president's office? And I was scared. I said, man, this is going to be catastrophe. Like, you know, I am going to do it because the VP is not going to be very, I mean, he was a very strict guy, the VP, right? So much so that if you're late by 15 minutes, you have to go sign a attendance register in the VP's office, right? And he would ask you, why are you late? It's the third time you're late in the last six months, things like that. Right. Like I don't even want to run in the hallway, right? Like if he's in the hallway, you would not go like, you know, you just sit in your seat, right?
01:03:04
Speaker
takes me the VP of engineering's office, and he points at me and says, I want this guy to lead the project. And the VP is like, no, no, hang on. There is some misunderstanding. What do you mean lead the project? It's like, I want this guy to be the leader of the project that we were discussing this morning. And the VP says, Anand, why don't you step out? And let's have a look. I want to talk to this guy about the project. And I step out like a principal's office. I remind you of my school days, but I was stepped out.
01:03:32
Speaker
After about eternity, which was 50 minutes, but it seemed like eternity, the vice president himself comes out and invites me back in and says, Anand, you are going to lead the project. And I have no idea what happened in those 50 minutes. There was a lot of shouting. There was a lot of kind of screaming. They were on the whiteboard, blah, blah, blah. And I became the leader of the project. Now, a leader is not a leader because someone told you that you are a leader. A leader has to have people who believe that you are a leader.
01:03:58
Speaker
So my problems only compounded, right? Because if they declared that I'm a leader, then I need to lead people, right? I mean, there's got to be a team and they have to believe and all the highly educated people have to believe that I'm the leader. But thankfully, I was able to pull that off. I became a leader that gave me a chance. Which client was this? This was a company called Registry Systems based out of South Seattle, California. And that became a future employer for me as well when I ended up in the US.
01:04:27
Speaker
But that gave me a lot of confidence. We were the ones that got internet. I set up a gateway so everyone in the company, very hushed, could want internet access. I democratized internet for the entire company. Because you know what? Previous job, I was selling internet. So how can you not have internet? Except for the VP, everyone knew that, hey, there's going to be internet.
01:04:50
Speaker
available to everyone. So anyway we did that and you know that gave me an opportunity to go to the US for the first time and there are several stories like you know that I'm skipping right now but you know just going to the US Embassy for a B-1 visa then your salary is 3500 rupees you know and you you know you are not a graduate I mean you're a graduate but you're not like a you know like an engineer
01:05:16
Speaker
is a story for some other day. But I got my B1 visa, B1, B2. I went to the US. This was my first time traveling in an aeroplane. I'd never even been to an airport before that. Took the aeroplane, went to California. And on my second trip there, this gentleman, the guy, our foreign collaborator,
01:05:41
Speaker
Um, he said, you know what, um, Eric is going to meet you for lunch. And I had no idea what lunch meetings were, right? Because we don't have lunch. I mean, now we have everything, right? But back in the days, uh, lunch was your home, right? You don't have lunch meeting, right? I mean, you go out to the evenings for a start, right? Um, the year 99, I'm talking about, right? So it's like, you know what? Hey, uh, you, uh, uh, you, uh, you know, Eric is going to have meet you for lunch and then we will whatever, right? So some, um,
01:06:12
Speaker
And, you know, Eric and I met and he got up and he said, Oh, I forgot to give you something. And he handed out a, so these envelopes are called Manila envelopes, right? They're brown in color. So he handed me a Manila envelope and says, Hey, sorry, I got this for you. And he left. And, you know, so after the server collected our dishes, you know, I think was clean, I opened up the Manila and there was an offer.
01:06:33
Speaker
in there, right? I mean, it seemed like an offer again, I had never seen offer letters, I had only seen one offer letter, right? My Ahmedabad boss never gave me an offer letter, he just said, showed up on Monday to the small company, right? Seminary people company. And the private limited company, the software frontiers, they gave me an offer letter, right? So I'd seen only one instance of an offer letter in my life.
01:06:53
Speaker
And it says we, you know, on and then software engineer, uh, 95,000 us dollars, uh, will be our salary and whatever. And at that point of time, you know, there were several questions that raised from my mind, right? Like 95,000 rupee dollars, even now is like a big sum, right? Uh, I mean, it's a huge amount of money, right? And back in the days also, it was like a massive amount of money. And I had no idea whether, you know, this is, you know, what is the duration? Like, you know, of course it's all annual, right? But I had no idea that the dump.
01:07:24
Speaker
But anyway, I got that offer, I came back and then we got our H1B. There is a subplot where I elope and marry with my wife, but I'll skip that for now. During office hours, during the lunch time, but I'll skip that. She was like a work colleague or something? She was like a work colleague for me, with me. Not in the same team, not in the same department.
01:07:50
Speaker
And the first time, you know, so it used to travel from Ahmedabad to Gandhiragar in a company bus, right? And one day I did not have enough place to, I did not have a place to sit. So I sat, so I was a loner, right? I told you I interval going up, right?
01:08:03
Speaker
I never used to be comfortable around women or girls or whatever. So there was no place to sit. I sat right next to her, almost at the edge of my seat. And I told her, hey, I'm off to the US. And she's like, yeah, good for you. Whatever. Because she told me, she asked me, are you the one that's giving internet to the entire office? I'm like, yeah, it's me. And I was like, OK. OK. So you were already famous. Yeah, and conversations started. I was not the one to start the conversation. And then the next thing you know is, I'm telling her I'm off to the US.
01:08:31
Speaker
And I, you know, I went to the US, you know, being the dummy that I am, right? You know, I bought three rings, right? One for my best friends, that lawyer friends kind of mom, one for my mom and one for her, like, you know, a ring. And when I came back, I gave it to my friend's mom. She was very happy. She's like, oh, you are the son I never had. Like, you know, you're like a son, better than all this, you know, this guy. My mom was overjoyed. And when I gave the ring to her, like,
01:09:00
Speaker
uh, you know, the girl I met in the bus, like she was upset. It's like, do you even know what, why are you giving this thing to me? I'm like, I got it for my mom and the same ring. Do you know the significance of giving a ring to a girl? I was like, no, I gave it to my mom. She's like, mom is not a girl. Like, you know, whatever. I went to Macy's, which seemed like a big store in the US. I asked the guy, I have $60 to spend. What is the thing that you can, and I don't want to spend on one gift, right? So divide by three, I get gifts of three women, right?
01:09:30
Speaker
So find me something that, you know, that's worth 20 bucks each, right? And he says, well, there is this ring that you can buy. And I bought three rings, right? That was it. I had no idea that I wanted to propose the girl or any of that, right? And then, of course, then we kind of, you know, over the fight, we kind of, you know, bonded up and, you know, we came, whatever, like, you know, fell in love. And then, then we married. But, you know, when the age one came, I was married and, you know, we went to the US.
01:09:58
Speaker
started life in that startup that I was given an offer for. After the startup shutdown in three years, again, dot-com bust happened. 9-11 happened in the US. A lot of businesses died around that time, because the economic situation was not that great. And the priorities of businesses changed and all that. I moved on, and then I joined AT&T Wireless, which again challenged the interviewer kind of scenario.
01:10:27
Speaker
I actually wanted to come back and we were just ready to pack up and leave and you know literally like a day before that someone from AT&T wireless called me and they said well you know we got your resume from a consultant blah blah blah there are questions we want to ask you and then it was a Thursday evening and Saturday we kind of wrapped up everything put a comforter and a desktop in the car and we drove from San Francisco all the way to Seattle. As in by Saturday you got the offer?
01:10:55
Speaker
Yeah, so the US is very quick in these things, right? They don't like, you know, notice period or any of them. You get it. So I got it immediately. They gave me a verbal confirmation. They said, you got the job and you can. When can you start? I said, I can start Monday. I'm in San Francisco right now. I can drive up to Seattle over the weekend. I anyway love driving, right? So it will be a good long drive for me. I'll drive up. So we drove up and in Seattle, we got the job.
01:11:20
Speaker
Yeah, it was a great experience. I worked, the previous stint, as you remember, was with Priyans, which was a startup. And this was one of top companies in the US. I worked for AT&T Wireless, which then later rebranded as Singular. And yeah, I think the experience was great. I worked with a very good set of people, and I had
01:11:49
Speaker
a super boss who was very confident on my capabilities, abilities, and she kind of, you know, we carved out a project for ourselves. And then we spent a lot of time working on that project, you know, in close contact. But this was like a shortage kind of a state. No, you didn't state you up there. I stayed if I remember this correctly for about a year and a half.
01:12:14
Speaker
So yeah, you can call it like that. There was a change of management in AT&T wireless. And I was hired as a contractor. And after the change of management, I think there was some other wireless or telecom was going through interesting time back then. This is 2004. And they decided to kind of get rid of all the contractors. And again, I got an ultimatum to kind of
01:12:42
Speaker
go find something else to do since that Friday would be my last day. Yeah. Yeah. So I, yeah. So I, you know, I applied in a few places. I got interviewed as well. But the one place that I, you know, I got selected in was Motorola and Motorola was, you know, like a dream come true. They were the pioneers of radio communication.
01:13:10
Speaker
which is the foundation of all things telecom. And I was working in Seattle downtown, Pioneer Square as it's called, which is iconic because there is the Starbucks and there's Amazon and we had a small little Motorola office. Motorola was headquartered in Chicago, but this was a company that they had acquired and that became the Motorola outpost in Seattle.
01:13:38
Speaker
We were not working, as you can imagine, on the hardware stuff. That was most of Motorola. We were, in fact, working on the software version for their newly launched Razer devices. If you remember Razer and the Rage, they were the iPhones of their time.
01:14:00
Speaker
Yeah, very, very popular. So we're working on some sort of a software for that, that while you're kind of while the device sits on your in your pocket, doing nothing, it receives things that you've subscribed for, for example, weather updates, traffic, stock news, health and fitness tips and so on and so forth. Okay. Yeah.
01:14:22
Speaker
And that was again a year and a half stint at Motorola. So again, why did you move? Yeah, it was a year and a half. I worked with an incredible set of people there. In fact, the best so far in my career, extremely sharp people and very, very committed. And I learned quite a bit right from them.
Returning to India and Entrepreneurial Ventures
01:14:43
Speaker
Now,
01:14:46
Speaker
I think, as I said earlier, that I never wanted to move to the US to begin with. I think it was only six and a half years of living in the US. And we were having thoughts of coming back to India and all that. workflow was a great job. Learning was good. All of that was good. But I just wanted to get back to India.
01:15:10
Speaker
So around that time, I started exploring ideas like what you could do. Again, I had a very bleak view of India at that time from a job perspective, whether I will be able to land a job. Because again, a non-engineering background, while I did have work experience in the US, but even to get the, at least when the India I left in 99, was the India where you had to submit your resume
01:15:39
Speaker
And they would look at the qualifications, education qualifications before they even looked at the experience before you got an interview call. And today's India is very, very different. It's actually much more open and much more inclusive and all that. But back in the days, that was the thing.
01:15:55
Speaker
I thought that I had absolutely zero chance of landing a job. So there were two things I started doing. One was looking or just ideating on what could I work on. Again, the entrepreneurial itch was strong, and I wanted to start out in India. So come here, start up, start up, and all that. And there were a few ideas I was working on in my head.
01:16:23
Speaker
One was like the classifieds idea for India. The other one was like a used car marketplace. Like cars 24 and all. Correct. Actually, more like Kelly's Blue Book in the US. So Kelly's Blue Book actually does not sell cars. You can list cars there. And the transaction happens offline. But that's like a ready reckoning for a certain model, certain year. What is the price? Yeah, what's the price and all that.
01:16:52
Speaker
And the third thing was working on this concept of restaurant reviews, recommendations. So anything that you did outside of sleeping and working, anything that you did for leisure, whether it was eating out or going to a gym or going to a lounge or whatever, we wanted to cover that. Build inspired heavily by Yelp.
01:17:22
Speaker
in the US, but that was the idea. We built it for India. So that was one thing. And the second thing is I started learning Mandarin for all things in Seattle. So I started taking some private classes. Like why Mandarin? Yeah, so that was my, I don't know, that was my
01:17:44
Speaker
like plan B, in case India did not work out for me. Again, if you look at it from the point of view of the West, again, go back in time, year 2005, you think the center of gravity is moving towards the East in terms of innovation, in terms of new things. The markets are opening up. There's a lot of opportunity and things like that. And India, I know, like the back of my hand,
01:18:13
Speaker
because having lived and grown here, so being here all my life. And China was interesting because there was a lot of stuff happening in China, primarily in hardware in those days, and a little bit of software. But there were all these things that were happening. And you think that if you knew Mandarin, somehow you could kind of link India and China. So you know Hindi, you know English, and the third language, the most popular language in the world, like Mandarin.
01:18:41
Speaker
If you know that, there could be something. I had no concrete idea of what it could be. But that was also one of the things that I started learning. And I actually became quite proficient. In six months, I had a good vocabulary. I could speak a little bit haltingly, but I could understand everything. And my teacher had just started teaching me how to write the numbers and things like that.
01:19:08
Speaker
And that's when I decided to move back to India. So I asked my wife. She's open to the idea. And she was, of course, thrilled to come back. I was missing her parents and whatnot. And the idea of Burp, which was going to be my startup in India, was taking shape a little bit more concretely.
Building and Growing Burp
01:19:34
Speaker
I started writing code for that.
01:19:36
Speaker
it started like ideating a little bit more and we started you had a co-founder also I had a co-founder yeah so I co-founder was based out of California the Bay actually yeah and
01:19:50
Speaker
that co-founder and I we decided that hey it's time and if we should be able to do it like you know so we said hey you know what we are going to he was also in indian origin personally indian origin but from the u.s so born and brought up in the u.s but uh yeah so uh indian american uh yeah yeah i mean we were both young but he was younger than me by a few years and uh we said hey you know what let's take the plunge he was eager to kind of come to india
01:20:19
Speaker
know experience it living here in India and all that right when you're in the best like you know everything seems a little bit exotic like you know Eastern philosophy living the way we live and all that right so we said okay let's do it what harm can it do to us right if nothing else we will actually have some sort of a formal entrepreneurship experience and we can then you know if nothing works out we can always find you know jobs that we can go back to
01:20:47
Speaker
Okay, so you went back to India then and started this off came back to India and I would I landed back in Ahmedabad because that's where my family was my mom and everyone else and then Then I would you know visit so we you know as as the all that was happening Bob was taking shape and The first city
01:21:15
Speaker
that we thought we would launch was Bombay. And because Bombay had a thriving nightlife, there were a lot of restaurants. It's a very big city. And we said, this city is going to be perfect for nightlife. Bombay has a certain image also. It's a very safe place. And people roam during nighttime, going from one bar to the other. And there is enough clubs. And there's a lot of activities or things available to do.
01:21:45
Speaker
there's endless things to do here in Bombay. So we thought that we would launch here first. So I would kind of take down trips to Bombay just to see what's going on, go back. And yeah, so that was the starting point in June of 2006 is when I finally decided to move or relocate to Bombay.
01:22:11
Speaker
And around that time, my other founder also kind of came down from the US. And we rented a one bedroom apartment. And I literally started life all over again, like having come back from the US and all that. But living in a one bedroom apartment without your wife and kid because they were in Andabad and starting up all over is like, it gives me a thrill. It's also a little scary because
01:22:39
Speaker
You don't know what's going to happen. You don't have money for salary and all that. But it gives you a little thrill if you're up for that kind of challenge. And this was like self-funded, like from your savings in the US. Self-funded. My other founder's name is Deep. And Deep's mom gave us a little bit of fun to kind of start the business. And it was their money and a little bit of the savings that I had accumulated in the US.
01:23:07
Speaker
not a whole lot of money. We were actually we were living off the Maggi noodles for most days and extremely cheap, like, you know, homemade meals not cooked at our place, but some, you know, the neighborhood auntie, as if, you know, right. Yeah, like 60 rupees a meal. We found a Punjabi auntie who would like send us a meal and all that. And that was that that was the start point of birth, like a very humble starting point.
01:23:36
Speaker
And you launched it as a like a desktop website. Obviously, it was time for a while up to Kastani. Yes. You know, 2006, there were no smartphones. People used to give each other missed calls as a way to signal that, hey, I want to talk to you on whatever, like this time to meet or something. And people would be playing the game of Snake on the Nokia phones.
01:24:07
Speaker
And and you know, it was it was challenging for us to say the least right so we of course launched in on August 15th 2006 and it was meant for it was a desktop site Listing you must have like manually done it a kick restaurant jacket Yes, so we hired a team of a couple of folks
01:24:29
Speaker
I wrote the spec for that, that, hey, we need to get the listings, number one. And we also need photographs. And please keep this in mind that there was no Google back then in India. So there was no Google local in India. So we had to either go down or maybe the couple of folks we had would kind of on a bike, they would drive down on streets, collect menus, again, the whole
01:24:59
Speaker
The menus were there to be kind of, they were not like the menus you have today, when you can go to Zamato or Swiggy and you can browse. The menus are meant for a home delivery only done by the restaurant. There was no aggregator of sort. And people would not go to a restaurant and ask for a menu, like a to-go menu. Most of the menus would be slipped under the door or through the newspaper, delivered to the newspaper. So you would know of the restaurants in your neighborhood.
01:25:26
Speaker
And taking a picture of a restaurant was an alien concept. The first restaurant we went to chased us away. We didn't time it well. We went a busy hour, and then the busy hour, there were people sitting in the restaurant, and we started making pictures like, who the hell are you and why are you doing this? Are you from some newspaper like, hey,
01:25:54
Speaker
or maybe income tax, I don't know, but they drove us away. And the second one that we went to, and of course there are all kinds of things, right? Most of the times the owners are not present at the restaurant. And the whole taking a picture, you know, people think that this is from competition or they're trying to scope how much business is my restaurant do and all that.
01:26:15
Speaker
So we kind of invented fake badges like CNN. There is India's top restaurants. There's a survey going on. And we need pictures and all that. And it could show up on CNN and all that. So anyway, we got our listings done. And we did not realize at the time, but that would become our IP.
01:26:42
Speaker
intellectual property, right? Because no one, and Yellow Pages had no business to list down the restaurants, right? Yellow Pages were more for the, you know, industrial and business B2B. Yeah, correct, B2B, right? So they had those, we had the restaurants and very soon we expanded into other categories like gyms and yoga centers. And of course, there are very few, like, you know, I mean, the scene in India has exploded now.
01:27:09
Speaker
They're all the home chefs and all sorts of dark kit, dark cloud kitchens and all that. Back in the days, life was a little simpler. And we started with Bombay. We had a very good listing. Like our database, listings of restaurants and these kind of things, bars and lounges and clubs and whatnot.
01:27:34
Speaker
And then it was hard to spread the word of mouth because how would you do that? There is no Facebook, there is no Twitter, and there's no Google. So we started reaching out to some of the bloggers.
01:27:48
Speaker
One by one, I mean, this, you know, this sounds so dated, like I can't believe it. Yeah. And we invited them to the platform and, you know, they, they started writing reviews and we had to bootstrap that like, you know, with, with their help and all that. So yeah, so that was work. Okay.
01:28:07
Speaker
And you eventually also raised funding in that. How easy was it to raise the funding for that time period when I think even Flipkart was not funded at that time? Correct. So there was no Flipkart when we started out. Flipkart came in a couple of years later. In fact, everything was a challenge, not only funding, but even to hire an engineer. Because we put an ad in the newspaper and people would show up.
01:28:39
Speaker
And one, they would walk into the office and the office was no office. It was like a one bedroom apartment. And the living room was converted into an office and the bedroom was used, shared by Deep and me. And people was like, okay, well, do I need to, are you like an offshoring agency? Are you going to send me on site? So it was hard to explain that, hey, no, this is where you are going to work. Like we are a product company and
01:29:06
Speaker
OK, and the second hurdle would be the parents, because the parents would be like, no, you can't go work for a faceless company, right? There is the PCS and the Vipros of the world and the Infosys of the world. Why would you? How much salary are they giving you? And all those things. So that was a challenge. Getting internet into the two-bedroom apartment, sorry, the one-bedroom apartment was a challenge.
01:29:35
Speaker
like how we went to MTN's office and kind of, you know, coerce them to give us like a dial up connection. And I think the biggest challenge was raising funding. In fact, we met, I would say about easy 25 to 30 VCs or anyone that, you know, seemed like someone who would give us money.
01:30:03
Speaker
The funny thing was that they were users of burp. So when we said, hey, we are founders of burp, they'd say, hey, we heard of it. And in fact, I used you guys last night to find a restaurant or whatnot. But if you said that, hey, we need to get funded and all, we'd get a very vague answer. So no one was ready or no one was ready to commit dollars to the consumer story of India.
01:30:29
Speaker
Right? And these were like VCs in India that you were meeting or also using your US connections? No, we didn't have any. I mean, yes, I did not have any US connections, right? I mean, I was like a software engineer in a company, right? And things were not as open as they are now with Clubhouse and Twitter. And you can go reach out to anyone, right? The circles were a lot closed back then. So I did not have any connections, any VC connections in the US.
01:30:57
Speaker
I had, you know, we went here. We were quite popular. We were quite enraged. Like, you know, back in the days, we'd get covered by the press quite a bit. And so we became very popular. A lot of people would come in, write reviews, upload listings, you know, tell us about what's happening in the neighborhood, like a new restaurant opened up or something shut down, add pictures, food pictures, whatnot. So we attracted our fair share of interest from the VC community.
01:31:26
Speaker
But these meetings led to nowhere. When we told them, hey, we don't need a lot of money. We need 500k. And they'd be like, no, no, you need to take more money. It's like, OK, well, we can't think anything beyond. What will we do? 500k is a lot of money, if you don't want to blow it up in fancy things. But we got passed by everyone.
01:31:53
Speaker
Then we happened to meet the CEO of Network 18, who kind of took a liking to us. And he then told us about Info Media 18, which was like the largest publisher of Yellow Pages and a super brand in India listed company, erstwhile known as Tata Yellow Pages.
01:32:21
Speaker
Infomedia had just acquired it from Tata, the Tata group. And they said, hey, we could acquire you here in this company. And, you know, because Yellow Pages was a line kind of business, right, or maybe a stagnant business. And this was a newer way of doing things. Going online was like a big deal.
01:32:42
Speaker
And we had a very, very cool looking site and all that. So I think that happened for us. We ended up getting acquired in 2009 by InfoMedia18. And Deep and I landed up there.
01:32:58
Speaker
So how well were you doing when Infomedia acquired you? I assume it would have been ad revenues, right? There were no ad revenues. So, funnily, we did not know either we were oblivious to business models, right? We wanted to... We did not have... I mean, how do I say this? We had some ad revenue, not a whole lot. We had enough to kind of get by.
01:33:29
Speaker
But please understand there was no Google, right? So you can't like plug in a Google AdSense or whatever. And there were no local advertisers. So even if you see ads, they're from place, you know, they're for US brands or European brands that you don't have any business with, right? So we and we wanted to keep everything nice and clean. So we didn't have, I mean, in terms of revenue, it was nothing.
01:33:48
Speaker
I'd say and but in terms of the brand we were a cult like you know we had cult level followings we one of the initiatives we did in burp was to put out these certificates burp certified restaurant
01:34:03
Speaker
of burp certified bars and they took off. Like lot of restaurants and bars published like x rating. That's correct. Yes. Except for in India, no one did that. The only brand to do that was the times food guide. And they had stopped a couple of years before burp started giving these certificates out. Right. And ours were not rigged. Ours were done, you know, by the popular, I mean, by, by users. So any place that had a consistent
01:34:32
Speaker
four or five star rating for the entire year, not one dip would get that certificate. So you could not buy your way into it. So we would buy the people for the people kind of mold. And that kind of helped us a lot. That made the brand real for a lot of people who were just accesses online. They could see this offline. So we were real then for them.
01:34:56
Speaker
So when Infomedia18 acquired you, like you continued to work on scaling it up further or what happened? Because I mean, burp is not around today as such. So, you know, so we did. Yeah, we did for a few years. And then I think Netforg18 lost the appetite for a local kind of business because they were primarily television and media and movies and all that. So they
01:35:25
Speaker
they kind of merged Informedia 18 into Network 18. And therein I met who would become my future kind of co-founders in Trevatap. But that's where me and the other founder of Trevatap, we were running all the digital assets. So Burp literally was also one of the assets, but the other assets were like First Force, Money Control, Cricket Next, IBM Live,
01:35:55
Speaker
and all those kind of things. So we acquired a much bigger portfolio of products to work on. And Burp was just one of those things. And yeah, a couple of years working for InformaD 18 and a couple of years working for Network 18, I think the larger companies, the wheels grind very slowly. And you kind of sometimes miss the action.
01:36:23
Speaker
So I went to my boss at that time, Sunil, who's my co-founder now in in habitat, that, hey, we got a like, you know, I want to quit and I want to do something else. And we make a great team and it'd be, you know, if you could do something. And there was the third guy also. So who is also co-founder Suresh. He said, hey, this guy is an extremely smart chap also. So we should take him along and the three of us can do something like we
01:36:51
Speaker
We share similar thoughts. We have the right mindset. As a team, we play very well. And we can figure out the idea what product or what kind of problems we will solve.
Founding CleverTap and Innovating User Engagement
01:37:04
Speaker
But let's get out of this place first. So that was the start of end of our journey, network 18, and start of Clavata. OK. OK.
01:37:14
Speaker
So you quit without a clear business in mind. So how did that conceptualization of the business happen? Yeah, no, that's a great question. I think the starting point was in networking team because what we discovered, one of the things is when you're running multiple digital properties, you said, OK, well, how many users do we have?
01:37:41
Speaker
And how many common users do we have across all the properties? Same guy going to money control, then consuming news on first post, and eating out, using burp, and so on and so forth. And there was no system in place that could do this math for us, including internal systems. We had some log files, and we had all the engineering solutions, but nothing from a product perspective.
01:38:10
Speaker
that put it all together. And so that was one thing. Second thing is if we know that it's lunch hour and this person is hanging around on a stock market side, they could send them an alert. Or if we knew that they had a particular company stock in a portfolio and they're hanging around on some other side, we could target them, saying that, hey, do you know this? They just released their annual report or something like that, breaking news, things like that.
01:38:40
Speaker
So the idea was there, we executed a very engineering heavy version, very custom version, more like an ad model for Network 18 also. So we built a little bit of an ad thing that based on if a user, I mean, as a user traverses all our properties in Network 18, we can target the user better. So if we knew that this guy, say, for example, in Bombay,
01:39:08
Speaker
is in South Bombay goes to all the five star hotels as a portfolio of like, you know, a lot of money in money control. Then we know that there's no point in showing discount deals or things like that to this person, right? Maybe we could pitch luxury items, you know, international vacation, whatever, right?
01:39:27
Speaker
So we built a little bit of an ad server there, which is probably still working. But the idea was never fully accepted internally. I think they wanted more of the, hey, let's keep things in maintenance and no wait and all that, while people are itching to do bigger and greater things. And hence, we quit. And we said, OK, well, we don't want to build an ad business.
01:39:51
Speaker
like an advertising business. But what if you could use the same similar thing to engage the users better, to retain them better? For example, to carry forth the same terminology or same example, let's say I have a stock of a certain company in money control. And if there is some breaking news about that particular stock,
01:40:17
Speaker
or if some, or if that stock has gone below a certain price point or there's something else that's happening right in that industry. And if you send me a notification, right? Now that would be not spam for me, right? That would be like, wow, like, Hey, I did not know that stock market crashed today and I should have sold my shares yesterday or whatever. If you were sending me irrelevant stuff, like, you know, AGMs of all the companies in the BSE 30 list, like, you know, I couldn't care less, right? Because I don't have stocks of those companies.
01:40:46
Speaker
So how do you make communication more meaningful for the user of an app by knowing what they did in the app? What are their activities? For example, if you are a vegan guy, and if you only order vegan food from Zomato or somewhere else, they probably should not pitch you barbecue nation or those kind of places.
01:41:10
Speaker
And so better targeting leads to a more happy user, better targeting with the right time, right level of personalization, and the right amount of personalization leads to better outcomes. User is happy. They will come back to your brand. These are timely interventions, as we call them. And that leads to a retained user. And that was a thesis. And we said, OK, well, we can build a solution.
01:41:38
Speaker
And that is what we will do because there are companies where companies try to communicate with the user. For example, even in networking, no offense to them, but we would send emails to users. And there was no targeting. Everyone would get the exact same email. And as the IT or engineering guys, we were told to kind of, hey, can you get that database and this database and merge them and whatnot.
01:42:07
Speaker
Like make it more intelligent, right? And that was like a Herculean task, right? You had to put these things together and Yeah, we we asked we looked around we asked around like everyone's doing the same thing like and everyone's doing this manually by hand I'm said no you guys can't be serious like, you know, there is nothing right now. That's make this automated that makes it intelligent The world was kind of opening up to big data and all sorts of AI ML things, right?
01:42:37
Speaker
And why couldn't you put this alter? Why can't you learn from my behavior and only show me things that I care about? If I've only bought books from Amazon ever, why would you show me a pressure cooker or a rice cooker or whatever? Don't show that to me. Show me a new book. Show me the New York Times bestseller. I'm more likely to buy that. And if I've already bought that, don't show that to me again. So make it intelligent.
01:43:03
Speaker
like how you talk to a friend. They don't talk about the same things again and again, unless they really care about that thing.
01:43:09
Speaker
Right, right. So, you know, this sounds very good on paper, but, like, why would a company give you so much data on their customers? Why would Amazon share so much data about their customers with you for you to create this? And to what extent are you getting plugged in? Are you, like, providing, like, an AI engine for Amazon to use on their own and not share any data with you and
01:43:38
Speaker
build their own emails or do you take care of the whole experience where you actually look at the data or your software looks at the data and then decides this promotion should go here? Like, you know, help me understand the nuts and bolts of it. Yeah. No, another great question. I think it's not that the companies are giving us the data, right? We don't, we don't, we have no business being in their business, right? They run our own business. So what we do, what they do is they store their data with us as Clavata, the product, not the company.
01:44:08
Speaker
And then they use that data. So what we provide are tools for them to, one, discover insights on their own users. For example, Akshay is a new user. He just downloaded and started using RAP today, while Anand has been a longtime user. He's been very active on your app every day since the last 30 days. Now, you'd imagine that they get different treatment.
01:44:35
Speaker
Right. It's only natural, right? If you go eat out at a restaurant, if you're a frequent patron at a restaurant, they know what your preferences are, right? Maybe you like your spice level to be mild, right? Or you have allergies to a certain thing, and they know about that. Why? Because you go there like three times a week. And because you enjoy their food, right? If every time you had to go over the entire list of, well, the spice level is mild, and I am allergic to something, something, you would not
01:45:04
Speaker
You know, that experience would not be as much fun. So, the companies, when they send this data or they record this data with Kiavata, they're actually not giving the data to us. They own the data. It's theirs. They provide tools. Exactly. Right. Like they can, yeah, they can analyze this data. They can slice and dice this data and they can, you know, they can extract insights out of that.
01:45:28
Speaker
That's one. Two, they can use these insights to then meaningfully target their users. And when I say target, I mean communicate, engage, and reach out to them. So for example, if the new user, let's say you were the new user in the example, let's say after 15 minutes of using the app, you could not complete the registration process. Or you did not come back the following seven days.
01:45:54
Speaker
versus Anand, who was a loyal user, used it every day, did not come back for the following seven days. The treatment for both these users will be different. In this first case, they might assume that this person has lost interest in our app, or could not figure out, or there are lower trust levels. In the second case, they might say, OK, Anand's gone away too, but there might be a different reason. In the past, we have seen him disappear for seven days, but he comes back on the eighth day. That's his style.
01:46:24
Speaker
Let's say there's a, I mean, this is a little ridiculous example right now, but let's say there's a new movie in town and there's a flurry of activity today, right? It's Friday. Hey, let me go look up, you know, which movies are there and, you know, seats available, our seats available. And is this near my home and is the gold class or not, right?
01:46:41
Speaker
I won't perform the same activity on a Monday or a Tuesday. So there's a flurry of activity and then it dies down, right? Or if there's an IPL season, I might watch a cricket match every day, but then once the IPL is done, I will not go back to the app for a long time, right? Maybe I'll go back to watch the highlights of the matches I missed or watch my favorite cricketers like interview, but it's not as intense as watching IPL three hours, like stuck on the phone, just watching the match, right?
01:47:09
Speaker
And if that, if you can learn from that pattern, so if you learn that, okay, well, you know, this guy goes away for a little while then comes back, you probably will not spam the person with messages and, you know, all sorts of irrelevant things, right? So is this meant for a sophisticated user or for a dumb user, for a lay user? Let me not use the word dumb.
01:47:32
Speaker
For example, do you need to be very sophisticated and understand how to create cohorts of your customers and accordingly what kind of communication to send to which cohort? So does it need a sophisticated user or is it for a lay user that it will automatically suggest to you that this is what you should send to this cohort? Correct. So it appeals to both. And again, there's no dumb user, right?
01:48:00
Speaker
there are novices, I would say, and there are advanced users, right? And these are kind of the persona for them would be sometimes they are product managers, sometimes they are marketing, but more often than not, these days, they're growth managers. And growth managers kind of marry product functions and marketing functions. So they look at the data, they understand what's happening, who are the users, they microsegment those users, and then they use that data to personalize the communication and microtarget those segments of users.
01:48:29
Speaker
what we do to answer your question is we make it dead simple. So if you are a beginner, like let's say you have a brand new app and you're just starting out, you could still use cover tab because we make it simple to realize these easier, easy to use cases. As your user base grows, let's say you start with 10,000 users, monthly active users on your app. That's a different thing as opposed to you have a million people active on your app.
01:48:58
Speaker
your concerns will be very different. In the first case, your concern might just be, hey, is my app even functioning? Are there any bugs? Yeah, product market fit. Do I have a segment? Did my developer skip up a quality check and all that? In the 1 million, you're all about, OK, well, I've got a million people on my app. How do I make sure that they don't disappear? Don't forget about my app. How do I micro-segment them?
01:49:28
Speaker
For the 10,000 MAU guy, maybe they can use a spreadsheet to do their things. Ideally, they should not. But you can still manage with that. For a million plus, they probably will never be able to use a spreadsheet. And that's where systems like CleverTap come in and we help you with two or three important metrics, increase the monthly retention rate for the customers.
01:49:52
Speaker
increase the click-through rate for your communication. So anything that you send, the click-through of that is measured, right? That means was this communication meaningful to the user? Was it timely? Is it in the context, right? Do you also drive the communication? Like say, if there's an email campaign, does that email campaign get created on CleverTap so you can see the click-through rate? Absolutely. All notifications, all email, SMS, WhatsApp,
01:50:21
Speaker
including pop-ups that happen within your app, they all get triggered from CleverTap and by CleverTap. So you don't have to go then integrate, like the same problem I was describing earlier, right? Like we were the engineers integrating these multiple systems, right? And the systems had no incentive to work with each other, right? So every day that we knew crisis in your life, some system would break down and you rush with the engineers to fix that system. With CleverTap, we built like this single platform
01:50:49
Speaker
the single solid stable platform that we can bring as much data as you have, use it to understand your behavior, analyze it, perform a variety of functions on top of the data, maybe run machine learning algorithms on it, run predictive stuff on it, like how many users will not come back tomorrow? And is there something I can do to bring them back to my app tomorrow?
01:51:14
Speaker
how many people will not buy during my sale that I'm going to do this weekend? And what will be the right amount of dollars, percentage of discounts should I give to those people who are not going to come so that they are tempted to come? So discover these things, and then, of course, close the loop by communicating to your users at extremely high speed and massive level of personalization.
01:51:39
Speaker
So if I was to like simplify clever tap, maybe oversimplify, it would be like a Google Analytics plus MailChimp on steroids. Yeah, that would be a yes. That's yeah, of course. Yeah. But like, you know, like if you put two scooters, if you connect two scooters with an axle, that does not give you a car.
01:52:00
Speaker
So yeah, because there's a lot of synergy you get in one platform. If you have one platform, for example, the entire platform becomes real time. That means if you can see that there's a person who's at the airport right now who has launched your app and has probably seen search pricing because you are a car company, a taxi company, and has decided not to book
01:52:27
Speaker
But that person has been a loyal customer for the last, I don't know, three years. In this instance, he's willing to try out competition because you showed him search pricing. Can you, at the very instant, take an action, do an intervention to make sure that the person stays within your app? Can you say, hey, we notice you are a loyal customer? No search pricing for you.
01:52:53
Speaker
Or if the app is already shut down, can you trigger a contact center workflow? Someone calls from the contact center and saying that, Mr. Dutt, we noticed that you were at the airport. Our apologies. It's a crazy day in the city right now. There's a lot of conferences, all our caps are booked. But let me send something for you right away. And it's an upgrade of the usual card that you select, but it's on us. Wouldn't that experience be a very delightful experience? And that's what we enable. So this whole understanding where the user is, what is their context,
01:53:23
Speaker
What are they trying? Where are they in terms of location? And then marrying that with an action so that you can actually change the drop off became a converted user or a happy user for life. This happens all the time in restaurants. If you look at physical restaurants, if you go there dressed nicely, you and your girlfriend or you and your family and someone wished you a happy birthday right there on the table, probably the chef will send you a cake. They'll send you a cake.
01:53:54
Speaker
or they start playing their happy birthday music over the restaurant sound system. And that shows that they're listening. They are not listening to creep you out, but they're listening to personalize your experience as much as they can. Or if you ate the soup and you didn't like it too much, maybe if the chef is sensitive, he'll come out or she'll come out and ask you, hey, can I make this better for you?
01:54:18
Speaker
And I've been to such places. And trust me, and of course, running Burp, I read a lot about these kind of experiences. And that was at some point in time, I think, a fundamental level that drove us to build level tabs, saying that, hey, why can't we make this happen for all the digital brands? Physical brands do this all the time.
01:54:38
Speaker
Like, there's a certain shop where I go buy my shirts, right? It's a certain showroom, right? I always go and buy there. Now, the guy does not ask me my sizes. He does not ask me what colors do I want. He knows from the last three years, like, you know, what kind of size I wear, what kind of shirts I want to buy, right? And what occasion do I wear my shirts? They're formal shirts, right? So the person knows they're nothing fancy, like, you know, and all that, right? And no bright colors, no bold colors and all that.
01:55:04
Speaker
Yeah, like when I open Zomato, it automatically shows me like it knows that I eat a lot of pizza, so I'll always get a combination. That takes the two of us, yes.
01:55:15
Speaker
And yeah, but wouldn't you, as opposed to imagine, you had to wait through a bunch of crap and then they showed you your pizza, right? These are intelligent things, right? These are intelligent, very small, but very intelligent things that a user will appreciate, right? And that might be the reason you go back to Somato, because you think they understand what you want or what you like. Even the newer restaurants that they recommend, that comes from machine learning, and a lot of heuristics which say that, you know what, he's eaten at this
01:55:45
Speaker
these kind of places, he's given a five star rating or has probably gone back again. So maybe the person will like this new restaurant also, which has similar characteristics. So let me take a couple of minutes on the clever tab journey. So, you know, I think all our listeners understand the product and its value as well. How did you actually build the company? Like how did you get the first customer? How did you find the company? You know, tell me about that journey.
01:56:14
Speaker
interesting journey we had so we quit our jobs at Network 18. We started up and while we were busy ideating on you know what's the best approach and to build it and all that right like maybe not to build the company but to build the product. I mean we were not really bothered about the company aspects of the thing right. It was more of
01:56:39
Speaker
what database do we use, and what will be the front end, and things like that. As three engineers, you can imagine what we cared about, what these geeky things. So one day, I get a call of the founder of Book My Show, who's a dear friend. And he says, hey, Anand, I'm thinking of an idea. And I want to ideate it with you.
CleverTap's Global Impact and Future
01:57:04
Speaker
we send the newsletters to all the users at the same time every week, right? And it goes to the same, you know, it has the same five movies that are playing in the theaters, right? Irrespective of whether you watch movies once a week, like every week, every Friday, or whether you do it every, you know, only the award-winning movies or whatever, like, you know, we send the same thing. So I want to change that. Like, you know, I said, OK, OK, Ashish, let me drive down. Let me take a hop into an auto rickshaw.
01:57:33
Speaker
come to your office and describe you something that I'm working on. And that was that. So we did. We had a wonderful whiteboarding session. And literally, within less than an hour, he said, you know what? I'm going to trust you with this system. I will stop the project that we are going to work on, start on, working on. And you built it for me. And I said, yeah, well, this is the new company that I started. And I'm going to, this is the product that we're working on.
01:58:02
Speaker
So give me some time. He says, time I don't have any, but I give you three weeks to go put this up in production on my website. So that was a good deadline, because then we got super busy three weeks, the three of us. And we came up with the first version of CleverTap. And we put it upon.
01:58:27
Speaker
OKMyshow is a pretty great customer to launch with because they check all the boxes in terms of large amount of data, very diverse type of customer needs. So, I mean, they would really be a good showcase on what all you could do. That's correct. And they were unlike others, right? They were, I mean, they're e-commerce, so to say, but they don't have a shopping cart. They don't have like checkout, you know, and the checkout step, if you think about this, is like a 12 step checkout process, right?
01:58:52
Speaker
So it was great actually to launch with them. And they were very, I mean, they have spiky traffic also. Like the example I gave earlier, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, as you can imagine like this.
01:59:05
Speaker
There are people who go watch movies, right? But there's not too much happening, right? The family crowd like this. We taste are so varied, you know, like you have languages, you have the genre. And so I mean, that way it's like a extremely interesting client where you could actually show to other potential customers on the power of the idea. Yep. And we never let go of that opportunity that we got, right? So we started building on that. And through Ashish, we got introduced to Accel.
01:59:35
Speaker
And we landed our first round of funding seed capital from from Excel. And that was $1.6 million. And so we started out in 2013. In 2014, we got our seed round of capital. And the subsequent year, we raised our series A, where we got Sequoia to come in.
02:00:03
Speaker
and Sequoia led the round with the $8 million check. And so with two highly respected... So after my show, what about the customer side? Yeah, so we did not... Actually, even to book my show, we did not sell the platform. We said, let's procreate. I don't want to sell you half a product. The product is not complete and we will come and have the pricing discussion the day it is complete.
02:00:30
Speaker
But we are extremely driven to build something very, very quickly. So we will build very, very fast. And you will literally see a new update in the product, like something more than yesterday, every day in the product. So just trust us. And I think they took a bet on us. We took a bet on them to not send a list of, not a list of requirements, et cetera, to us. So that turned out to be, I would say,
02:01:01
Speaker
And there were a few other friendly, I would say, installations, but we never kind of charged money to anyone. We said, you know what? We just need some traffic, real-world traffic to come hit our servers so that we know whether the servers can scale, whether we can, you know, whatever technology we were building, will it work with this wide variety of data and so on and so forth. You know, the core technology of CleverTap is data processing and storage technology we've invented.
02:01:32
Speaker
So, yeah, and that is, you know, so we did not know how it would hold up to traffic, right? To invent is to one thing and to like, you know, for it to work in the real world is the other. So, yeah, so it took us the first 30 months of CleverTap starting from 2013 was building this technology out. It's an extremely complex technology.
02:01:56
Speaker
that lets you put everything together in one place, lets you process literally unlimited amounts of data in real time, and show you all sorts of insights and lets you send communication across a very wide variety of channels or communication formats to hundreds of millions of users, literally in a matter of a few seconds.
02:02:22
Speaker
So we built the engine of a Ferrari, if you want to use an example. That's what we built. It's extremely complex engineering, but we did it. And until it was complete, we did not want to go sell to anyone. So it was good that we raised a couple of rounds, because you need money to survive. You need to pay salaries of engineers and all that. And once we had
02:02:47
Speaker
a version that we liked, like minimum viable product, as we call it. From 2016 onwards, we started selling the product. And I would say we had a great run since then. We started selling in India. So Book My Show and a few others kind of that the selling to them gave us confidence that India can be a big market.
02:03:17
Speaker
And prior to that, the other product or enterprise companies were not selling in India. They were building in India. They're not selling in India, or selling to India rather. And there are several examples. I won't name names, but there are several of those. And we kind of bought that trend. We changed it. We said, you know what? These companies also buy some product.
02:03:40
Speaker
the, you know, that thesis fanned out nicely. Who are some of the companies that use Clever Trap? Are you at liberty to share names? I can share a few names. So, Somato is one of them. We have Dream11.
02:03:56
Speaker
We have India's largest telecom operator. We have a very, very wide variety. We have pretty much everyone in the FinTech sector is a client of ours. We have pretty much everyone in the food tech sector is a client of ours. We have big market share in esports. Mobile Premier League is a client of ours. Time's internet.
02:04:25
Speaker
We have, so these are Indian customers I'm talking about. Globally, we have Daimler Group. We have Pfizer in the US. We have Treble, UNO. We have MBC Broadcasting, which is a large broadcaster based out of the Middle East. We have Gojek in Indonesia and Southeast Asia, Krausell,
02:04:51
Speaker
So we have a very wide variety of customers across the globe. We worked with a few banks in Latin America, worked with a lot of starters, food delivery, FinTech, et cetera, in Latin America also. So customers across 100 plus countries. But the journey has been nice, because for the first 30 months, we did not charge anyone. And then all of a sudden, boom, you get to where we are. Seven years later, you have customers in 100 countries and some extremely
02:05:21
Speaker
big customers that we are very proud of. So that was the incredible journey of Anand Jain and if you want to learn more about CleverTap and how it helps businesses to grow through better data and customer targeting then check out their product at clevertap.com
02:05:39
Speaker
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