AI Founders Podcast

Transcript

This is the SAS Universe podcast presented by Uber saga.

In this episode I interview Anand Jain, the co-founder and CPO of Clevertap. Clever Tap is a modern integrated retention cloud that empowers digital consumer brands to increase customer retention and. Lifetime wireless For brands that understand and value user retention, clever tap drives, context and visualization with the help of a unified and deep data layer. Aiml powered insights and automation. In this episode we discuss a lot of different things. The co-founder mix. How simple hustles go a long way idea generation to idea validation? Early stage go to market. How a team of engineers raised funding and many of the remarkable stories of the whole clever tap journey, I hope you'll enjoy it. Hi Anand, thank you so much for taking the time and joining us on our show. I mean it was really nice to know you get to know you as we just chatted right now and right before this podcast I I get to see a different Anand all together right? I mean I'm a multifaceted Anand who has been. You know, hustling through his life, you know, right from his childhood and doing different things really nice to know, I'm going to go and get to know you a little more better. A little late. Here, but right in the beginning I want to introduce clever tap and Anand of course is the the founder CEO of Clever Tap and Anand. If you can. Just quickly let all our viewers and listeners know about now what does clever tab do? What is this product all about and who does it help?

Thank you for having me on the show. I do appreciate it. Talking about clever tap, so clever tap is a retention cloud. What it does. Help brands digital brands too is gain insights on their own users segment users based on user profiles, user persona and then send out communication to them. Or engage them with personalized content and personalized messaging. We've built this platform from the ground up and we worked with some of the most popular brands globally which are digital in nature. So that's what Clevertap does.

Awesome and how? Did you know that clever tap is gonna work? So how did? You how did you actually like come up with? This idea and where did where did it originate?

So we are 3 founders and believe it or not, none of us are from the marketing background we are. We have all engineers and for those of you who can't see us, we are. We are. We have Gray hair on our head. A lot of it, so we are not. First time you know, like we're not out of college trying to build something very cool, but what? The experience? Does is it tells you the areas? That you need to invest in. The idea for Clevertap came when we figured that most of the brands, like no market or wakes up on a Monday morning saying that I'm going to spam my users, right? I'm going to send them a message that's completely irrelevant at the wrong time on the wrong device, which is not meant for them. Everyone tries to do their best, but the reason they struggle. Sending the right message to the right person is because they. Don't know the person enough. And they don't know the person enough. It's not, they don't have the data on the users first party data, right? They don't. They have a lot of data. The data source is not connected to the messaging, you know product and in most of the cases this data is gated by it or it resides in multiple products. So if you look at a typical marketing growth stack. There are multiple products that are brand users, right? There is email product to send emails. There is AB testing. There are web analytics there mobile analytics there is post notification. There is CDP and multiple other products. Now each product has a silo of the data. You know they maintain. Data and reports only for their aspect of the product, which makes it impossible for you as a brand marketer. To stitch the story together. It makes reporting impossible and it makes personalization even more. You know, harder like it's literally. I don't know what's more impossible than impossible, but you know, it's like much, much harder, exponentially harder. The clever that you asked me like how did you start the clever tab? We realized this was a problem, so we started solving it at a data layer. So for the first 30 months of our life. We were busy building the technology layer of Flavor tab, which is a database that we invented and we have filed some patterns on it. It's called tesseract DB. It's it's homegrown and what it lets you do is store granular amounts of data on the user on your own users that access your digital properties. You can use this data for insights for segmentation, personalization messaging, product recommendations and a lot more. And we built the entire product around this, so that was the idea for clever tap, you know. Like hey, we need to solve the data layer first so that there is a common. Data layer single. Source of truth across all your users. So literally, that was the starting point. We did not, you know, start with the. Market research or a Tam or a competitor. We wanted to disrupt. We were super naive. Like you know, we said hey, you know what? We are engineers. What do engineers do this solve problems? Hard problems first. So let's get busy solving the data problem. The rest of the. Product can follow after that.

Nice, really nice. So when you. Actually realize this was a problem, so was it like during a stint in Motorola or was it later? Like with with with News 18 in other places that I've seen you being part of right so the network 18. So where was this the moment of Epiphany? That hey, this is a real problem. We've got to solve this.

So in network heating we saw that they were running multiple digital properties. For example news websites, cricket score, eating out restaurant reviews and recommendations yellow. So this was a bunch of digital properties. In fact, even stock stock news and stock quotes, etc. The problem was that when they were sending a message out to users when they were talking to their users and they used our talk very loosely right when you're when you're sending a message, when you really, really want to send a. Deeply personalized message right to the users are they were struggling to do that like because of the reasons I mentioned earlier, which is that the data were deciding in silos in multiple multiple products. For example, if they wanted to send a message. Out to users. Who held a certain stock and the stock crashed? They would not be able to do that. They would send that same message to everyone else. Also that did not have that stock in their portfolio. Now it seems very common, sensical, right, but I'm talking about you. Know 9 years ago or you would you would like not be able to send user onboarding message only to people who have been struggling to onboard, not to people who are in the middle of the onboarding process because maybe you just let them be. And they will onboard themselves and the root problem, the root cause of the problem was no access to data limit. Amount of data that you have on the users but also the actionability of the data. The data was meant not meant for action. It was meant as a static store like it was meant for reporting. It was meant for a weekly review whereas the world was moving online very very quickly. What we noticed was that the phone. Or the mobile? Is going to solve more and more use cases right? Like right now? Food deliveries online watching movies. Is online cab hailing? Is online everyone's gone online? Everyone's like immediate like you press a couple of buttons on your phone. You can rent a movie. You can you know, hail a cab. You can order food. You can date, you know you can do multiple things right? You can make. Means to a friend, right? You can pay them. And the technologies that we were using back then were not built for this kind of a real time use case. They were built for like I said like non real time reporting etc. And when we looked around we couldn't find anything that was that would let you action the data in real time. And that literally was the starting point. That was the epiphany moment for us where we said that we will build this. There's nothing out there and let us solve this problem first, and the rest of the product. Can follow post to that.

Awesome, really awesome. So now to the next big questions to how did you onboard your first few users right? So earlier after is how did you get them excited and how did you attract and acquire them?

Yeah, no great question. You know. As you can imagine, it's very awkward for 3 engineers to go find customers.

And that was literally our case too.

Like you know we were. Busy building, you know, the core technology of. DaVita and then we built a dashboard of. Sorts like you know to. Let you kind of visualize the data, take action. On it. You know, send communication to users based on the insights that you're seeing now. But we got lucky there like you know. So Ashish Hemrajani, who is the founder of BookMyShow is also a very good friend. And believe it or not, coincidentally, he actually called me for a problem he was facing. He said that, hey, you know we are sending the same message, same emailer to people. Whether they watch a movie every week. Or they watch one movie every 3 months. It's same email that goes. Out which is like. Hey, these are the new movies that are. Coming out in. The multiplexes. And it includes every movie, right? It includes the Hindi movies, English movies, Marathi, so it includes regional movies, English, Hindi, everything because hey, we have got this one newsletter and we have to jam everything in there and we have to send it. And it was funny because I said Ashish, hold on like you know and and what do you want to do? With it like, how do you intend to solve? And said, I'm kicking off an engineering project in house and you know, we'll solve it and I wanted your advice on how to solve it. I said wait a minute for the past 30 months I've been building something very cool and I wanted to show it to you. I want to, you know, maybe we'll do a white boarding exercise first on what it is and I'll show you the product. And so I took an auto rickshaw. Went to his office so I'm in Mumbai right now. Those who are listening I'm still. I mean those days I was still in Mumbai and so his BookMyShow. So I took an auto rickshaw from Andheri to Juhu. And I met Ashish and I said, you know what, I? You know it's a startup that I've, you know, I've started up a few days ago. Like a few months ago and this is what it does, right? There is one source of data. It collects everything and this data depending upon who you want to target. So for example, if people who only watch like a movie every few months, like maybe the newsletter every week is not important. Or people who only watch English movies you. Can send them that email. To those people, right? College goers. Maybe you can send them afternoon shows like hey Bunk college and my advice. But you know that was a use case present like college. College education is important and he said bingo sign me up.

Yeah, absolutely absolutely yeah yeah. So that literally was.

Our first customer. There was no conversation of pricing or. Fast or you know how is he going to do? It I. Think he he was super excited that there is a product today in the market. That could solve this problem. And that became the first thing. First installation for clever tap where we said you know what put this on your website and we'll start observing the data before you can start sending the emails out and literally in a few months they were. Actually using the send to it.

Wow, so does your product? Also does do data enrichment, so there's of course event based data. Then there's also enrichment and then you can take all of that and then personalize. So does your product also do that?

Yeah, so let me qualify what I think enrichment is and what we?

OK awesome good. Absolutely yes.

Actually do right. Yeah, so for us we believe we philosophically believe that you can actually serve your users very well if you only have first party data on them. For example, if there's a restaurant that you go very often to these servers, know you the manager restaurant manager knows you and they kind of know what your allergies are, what your spice levels are, whether you like to have alcohol with your meal or not. You know what kind of person you are like? Do you order lavishly? Do you like you know, only order what you really? They know you now. How do they triangulate that the triangulate it from your previous visits. Like everything that you have done with them, they learned from that. Now they don't have big data, they don't have all this school. Technologies, but it's there in the brains. And this happens to us every single day, right? Like the the salon where we go to get our hair cut to people that we know like they kind of know our behavior etc, right? First party there is no triangulation from any other source. My restaurant does not go to my bank to find out. Like, you know, hey how much money does Anand have? So we can we can charge him more for the you know for food.

So that's what.

That is one of the philosophies on. Which we base the product. From a tech perspective. Like you know, I mean, I've been in the industry for long enough from the tech industry about 30 years to know that the 3rd party cookies were going to go away someday. Now you can learn a lot from first party data and to mean enrichment of the data means ability to predict. Ability to take parts of what you've just told us. Like for example, if you're browsing T shirts online like you know, just by knowing the brands that you often go to the size of the shirt, the colors that you browse. I can maybe recommend better products in that category for you, right? If you're a fashion forward person, maybe the messaging could be around like hey, here is new. A new drop from like like you might be interested in if you're the discount person like who buys end of season. Sale maybe end of the season when the discounts are the most. That's when we. Can message you. So the the messaging becomes personalized and that is the enrichment that we do. Like you know, we make sure that we. Are serving you. Well, with what? Data you give us, we don't enrich it from. Any other source outside? Of what the brand gives the data to us.

Awesome awesome, great. I think it gives a good perspective so. Very quick question is OK. You found this idea. This idea was good. This opportunity is big. You also found you know somebody got excited. I want to know how did you meet your Co founders and how did you all come together and build a team together. So how did you build early team and how did you meet your Co founders?

Well, it's a fun story, so I'll write it in detail. I moved back from the US in 2006. The Startup B 2 C company called Burp and Burp was all about restaurant reviews and recommendations. It was way before the flip charts and those matters of the world. So literally we were the first wave. If you will. Of a consumer businesses in India. In the early days it was very hard to find, you know good engineers. It was also very hard to find you. I had no idea about monetization models etc. It was very hard to find venture capital also so I ran this for 3 years along with my co-founder then and in 2009 we exited the business to network. And in network getting I you know I inherited a team. I became the CTO there and. And funnily, as I was recruiting people, I met my first co-founder, Sunil, who had just also come back to India in 2009 from the US. And you know he wanted to. Kind of, you know, just give his kids a. Flavor of. India, he met the CEO of Network team who said hey there is. So you are from info space there and there is a local team here like a team that runs a local business for Intermedia networking team. So you should meet them and that's how we met. Male Suresh was you know who is my 3rd co-founder? I met because he applied for a job in network ATM saying that hey, I'm an engineer from IT Madras and I want to kind of come, you know, work for some hot startup. Etc. So that's How I Met. I did not know that these people will become more Co founders, but we had a very good working relationship with each other. We respected each. Other for what everyone brought to the table. So when we started, clever tap actually went up to Sunil and I said so from a reporting perspective. Suresh reported it to me and I reported it to Sunil. So you know, as the corporate bowling jobs go, I went to swing and I said, you know what? Sunil, I'm done with. This place I do not know what I will end up doing next. There are few good problem statements including this. One that we talked about. Personalization user behavior, but it's impossible to solve it in this place, so maybe I'm thinking of that idea. And and advice for you is to also tag along with me. And maybe since we work so very well together we can start up something together and we said, well, you know the 3rd Guy, Suresh. He's a phenomenal engineer too. So let's take. Him along, so that's how the. 3 of us quit our jobs with nothing, no savings, literally and. Literally nothing in the you know like no hope of getting funding because we are 3 engineers we have never done this kind of we see backed business. We are not from the industry, etc. We set out to start clever tap, so that's how the 3 guys made now after the first round of funding. From Axel so Axel gave us a seed round of one. 0.6 $1,000,000 And after that I actually called up a few engineers who had left infomedia item or network 18 at that point of time. Again, great working relationships. Some people I respect a lot and I called them like hey. Where in life? Are you like hey, we just got funded like it's a cool thing? At least we have one more one one other person apart from the 3 guys who's convinced. That we could be on to something which is our investor. Their Axel thereby. And you should join our journey. So I would say 5 phone calls and 5 people showed up the next week itself. So that became my founding team and. We kind of solved the problem of, you know, like alignment, early, early engineering team, etc. Through that because we had worked with these people before and they still still with.

Wow, so you you had like culture fit at day zero like we were very lucky like incredibly lucky? Yes, absolutely.

For this week, you know.

Absolutely great. So I mean you didn't mention about funding and all of that. So of course you you you actually like. Went about, found a problem, build a team, solved it. Now the the challenge would be to scale right and hit the traction right so?

How did you go?

About you know meeting. You know investors. What is your cap table like? I mean engineers, how did you build your cap table so you don't have to get to specifics of what your capable look like? But like, how did you generally go about? Because it's it's. It's a whole. Different world out together for you.

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So you don't have to get to specifics of what. Your captain will look like, but. Like how did you generally go about? Because it's a whole different world. Out together for you.

It is, it is, and it's a world that we had not navigated before, right? My previous startup work, like I said, was very early and we could never raise funding in that business. We met a lot of investors, but everything came to a not no one invested in the business. And so if if someone said like hey Anand, how do you raise money from venture cap? How what is? How much money do you raise? I have absolutely no idea so. We had a few misadventures like you know, with some like some VCs, I'll skip their name. Who said, hey, give me a 5 year cash flow projection and I was like what 5 year cash flow like? What are you talking about? Like you don't like? No one knows what 5 years is going to look like in startup plan and we might not even be around like so. You can take your cash back if we have left anything in the bank. But we got incredibly lucky also, right? So like like I said, like we were building this school technology, we are actually inventing the technology. We now have few patterns we have filed on the core technology and we are in generation 3 of the technology but back then. We were introduced to excel through a mutual acquaintance and immediately they took a liking to us because, you know, they had not heard of any startup in India. Kind of inventing technology, they said. Why would you need you know, why don't you? Why don't you take something off the shelf? And build and you know, build on top of the product. Do an MVP, go sell to. The market etc. But we could. Convince them and and kudos for them to understand, like what we are building because you don't get funding in a in a pre product company, right? So that was series seed for us the following year. Actually the word spread that we are building. Something very cool. We got Sequoia to come in Sequoia, India. And they invested $8,000,000 in Series A in clever talk. And that's when we expanded the team a bit. That's when I said, like, you know, we are almost the product was almost ready. We're still not launched. We went out to market and I'll. Talk about that in a bit. And so we we got phenomenal success like not only with BookMyShow but also few other customers. Some names I'm allowed to say some. Cannot but think of year one. Customers as urban company, Zomato, Practo, these become my year one customers. We ended that year with 1.6 $1,000,000 of revenue of ARR which was incredible for like first time SaaS founders. In 2019, so then we went quiet on the funding front. We were very conservative in our spending. We actually bucked a few trends right we wanted to. Like we were in Mumbai, right of all places and we said you know what? So the conventional advice was to go, you know, build in India, sell to the West. And they said. But Indian consumer companies must be buying some product right? Why is it not ours? So we will not only build in India but we'll sell in India too. Like you know, hey, not a bad starting point. So we started selling in India and that's how we got some of the names. Today we are market leaders in this in this country, including Southeast Asia and the Middle East. And rapidly expanding the global, but in 2019 is when we raised our more rounds of funding Series B and Series C. Back to back rounds. Literally done 4 months apart and we added Tiger global to our capable.

Right?

As well so. Today we have secoya Axel and tiger glow. As our investors. And we're not raised since then 2019 onwards. Like I said, we've been super conservative in our spends and, frankly, a. Lot of the. Spends have been sold by customer revenue, which is the best way to kind of you know, Oregon spend money?

Yep, Yep. Absolutely, absolutely great. So I mean, you've been helping me a lot in this whole. You know, quick chat that we are having, so you're giving me questions like beforehand like I'm going to go talk about how we got early customers. So I just want to like ask you one or 2 like you know, good stories of your early customers. I mean for me book my shows I into my memory right now. So any any story that stands out for you.

I'll tell you a fun story and this is this is about BookMyShow. I hope they're not listening, but let's see if they if they are it's too.

OK. So in the early.

Days while we are piloting our product with them, we actually forgot to write the persistor Now what is the persistor that takes the data in memory and writes it to the hard drive just to take a backup? And you know they took a liking to the product in the early days and you know it was 3 months. And every day. We were worried because they were sending more and more data into clever tap and we did not have a way to restart the machine. The moment would restart. It would lose all the data in the memory. And we thought of multiple tech solutions, but nothing came close to actually being implemented since we are all 3 engineers we came up with multiple solutions, right? Hey, let's do this. Let's do that like let's take a dump of memory into hard drive and decipher it and whatever. And he said, well, this is the, you know, this is one of the first few. And then if we don't like, we if the data goes away 3 months worth of data goes away well. We are out of business for sure. So with a lot of fear, we actually went to meet them and just to tell them that hey, you know what we are going to do. A little maintenance on the server and then that will. At 3:00 months of data is not going to be there anymore and we'll start afresh. So Sunil and I went to meet BookMyShow so this was like one of the senior vice presidents in BookMyShow who actually. Love the product. He every day he would like load up graphs and he would start like he would be very happy with us like so we have to go tell him the news. And he said, you know what? Hey, 3 months for the data. Like you know we are going to wipe it clean and we're going to start afresh. Because we are doing some maintenance on the server. And it was funny because he said yeah, no problem till I see something better from now on. We said yeah, absolutely we are rolling out more features as well. So and we promise never to have this like this situation ever. Main So what turned in our own heads. It was like a big hill to climb. Became a very easy thing when in front of the customer and. This is, I would not say it's a funny incident, but it was one of the. Most curious things, because in the early days. So yeah, thankfully they took a very lenient approach on that. Let us go. So that's one thing that comes into mind. There is one other customer who thought that who called up from Delhi and said hey so you know we want to see you guys. In the office. So you show up in the evening and I said no. Hang on I. Actually cannot show up in the evening like you have to give me like at least 3. Days notice in advance. And then like, why would you? Why would why would we give you a 3 day notice? You know we want? And this was. A prospect, not a customer. We want to meet you immediately and I said, well, you. Know what I? The flights are very expensive I'm running. I'm running a very small startup and we are very frugal, so I need 3 days like last minute flights are extremely expensive. They're like, OK, so. Why would you take a flight to come to Delhi? I'm like, well I'm in Mumbai. In goregaon

They're like, oh.

We thought you were in Gurgaon but like. No no this is Gurgaon. OK so it. Was a really funny? I mean that's a funny. Thing like but. Anyway, we signed them up. They've been a customer since 2016 with.

Us great so.

Like really nice stories. I mean, this is just like good good anchors for me to go. Back and remember. You're talking about like BookMyShow and good that you didn't have a churn movement with them right with with what is happening but but your product helps people to like become you know churn proof right so? A quick question on that is what have you seen in terms of SaaS businesses who work with you are even businesses across right. What helps them? To retain customers and become churn proof. I mean things that are are not normative, right? Things that are you see, which are very very unique in your own purview.

Yeah, that's a great question and again we think about. This every day. Right, how do you help brands retain customers for life? You can acquire users by spending money, right? You can run ads, you can lower them into using your product or downloading your. But how do you? How do you get them to keep coming back? How do you form that special bond with every single user? How do you make sure that? They go from being, you know, like a like a first time user to a signed up user from a signed up user to like someone who takes up the trial. For example, if you're a music app, or if you're a streaming app like it's very hard to get you to kind of. Do a fun month. Trial from the one month trial to becoming a customer to a repeat customer to a brand advocate like these are hard. Things right? You can't solve this with. You have to solve this with data you have to solve this with deep technology which is popularly called as AI and ML. You have to solve this with personalization and you have to solve this with automation, and that's what that's what we do right day in day out like we help all the consumer brands across the globe become better at that. By forming better, deeper relationship with their users so that they can retain customers for life in the early days. You know, for me when I when I was pitching the product then I would go into some board rooms etc. People said like no hey, but there will be natural churn like we will lose a certain percent of users every time like every few months. And you know it's funny, right? Because there's a statistic which says that an average app loses 90% of its daily active users in the first 90 days. And I was not ready to accept the status quo. Like you know. I mean, I said, why should you accept that? Also, that means your cost of customer acquisition goes up 10 X. If you're losing. 90% of The users, so we have to change this right? And why would you not like? You know, use technology to solve this. Like why would you not like you know, why would you? Still live in data silos, etc. So I think it was hard like to figure out the problem of like you said, like you know, turn it. It's not normal like you know, people don't think of it like that like they don't think of it as a technology problem. They think in terms of cash backs. And better ads etc. And we said that's. Not true. Like you got to like treat them like. Human beings you don't. So you want to end up treating these people as rows in the database like you know, like treat them, don't spam them, talk meaningfully to them, give them what they came looking for and you will have a customer for life. And today, like you know, after 9 years of you know, being in business, we can say that conclusively that you can prevent churn by. Having a deeper relationship with the users, which is a the only way to have deeper relationship, is to understand them better. Is through first party data on them and to serve them use this data to serve them.

Absolutely totally makes sense. I have a very. Like unique question, since you are an engineer, I'm. Like to ask this question. Which is more on the lines of we talked? You spoke about. Deep technologies and Mia, which is very loosely used these days, right?

But doesn't it take a long?

Period of time to build a data lake. Right, because people usually use systems very loosely and say hey we we have aim running and the question I usually have at the back of my head is that hey it takes time to build. It dira lake. And for you to actually look at, you know the right kind of patterns and then train the machine to see how it works. And then of course it picks it. Up from there, so let's. Say an average SAS company you know which which. Just starts off. You know in early. Stage, how much time would it take to build a? Data leak because these are. These are words. Very loosely used so I I am like very curious to know I I would be a layman in asking this question but yeah, I definitely want to know.

Yeah, so I'm going to break a few mental models here. One the core technology that David have invented was the database. The Tesla DB I was speaking about earlier.

Right?

That's the technology that stores 50 petabytes worth of data today.

Right?

So by the way, if you're building a data lake etc like these are not easy attempts to build it, you can build some. You can take something off the shelf, but like you said, so Data Lake is not the big thing here, right? What do you do with it? Is the important part so everyone has data like. I mean, people are collecting data since the 1980s, right? Like hey, I have a database. I have a database in the back. I can store data on the users, it's what can you do with it? I think the. Actionability on the data is the important bit. Here so now. Since we were speaking about data science or machine learning AIML. The core technology of clevertap. Lets you build a model on the family and train it on the data and execute it and come up with a prediction on the family. I kid you not, so you can actually. On your own data, for example, if you are a clever tap customer and you are on the dashboard right now, you could actually say of all the users I have in my database like it could be 100 million users. It could be 10,000,000 whatever. How many of them will perform a certain action by a certain date. And you hit a button. Now this certain actions certain date could be how many of them will buy a Nike shoe by the 31st of March or 31st of May, right? How many have been uninstalled my apps? It could be any action that you know you've specified like that. You're recording with clevertap. And believe it or not, in less than 10 seconds we will come back and we will give you a propensity score for every single user that you have and break them into 3 groups. People who are most likely to buy. People who are. Moderately likely to buy and people who are least likely to buy, so this is something that is very unique to us. You don't have to spend weeks and months. Training the model, and that's where everyone else fails, right? You know, because they spend weeks and months, and by the time they've got the perfect model, guess what the users have. On the patterns of purchase have changed, right? It it it is summer right now in India, right? It will be like monsoon in a few months right? So maybe by the time you're done training your model for weeks, etcetera, the seasons have changed. Like you know, people have gone away. Now you can't send them summer offers, so this is an important thing and this is the core differentiator from a technology perspective. The clever tap offers, right? We make it your data actionable, including machine. Learning and AI.

Nice, really nice because I was very curious because I mean when I meet some of these early stage startups they were really excited about these these terms and they say that they're building something cool like lately I met somebody you know in in a, in a college, and that person is trying to. Build an AI model for hiring. Uh, but again, you know these these. These things take time, right? So that that's why I asked this question. Great so I'm I'm almost done. You know, with my interview with you, but I have a rapid fire you know round with you. So this is just to get to know you as a person. And before I get to rapid fire I just want to know a little bit about you as a person, right?

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Episode and before I get to rapid fire, I just want to. Know a little bit about you. As a person, right? So how did you get into entrepreneurship? I mean we did have this little chat right in the beginning of this, you know podcast that you you have. You've delved and. Then a lot of different things, right? So if you can just let us know like what was your first brush with entrepreneurship and how did you land up.

Yeah, so you know. Very honestly, I was not very I was not good in studies at all. I was a middling student and and when and you have no hope of being like like you're scoring marks in academics. You start looking for other options in life and I've you know, I think, as by nature, I've always been entrepreneurial. So I I've sold soap. I've packaged soap and sold them from plastic bags. Including sealing the bags with the, you know, like a wax candle. I have I have sold modems. I have sold Netscape Navigator browser and these are not even like so-called tech entrepreneurship like these are just entrepreneurial. But I think being an entrepreneur is a state of mind right you even when you work in large companies. When you're part of something. That you did not. Start right, you are an employee of a. Company you have to. You know what would I do if this was my business? What is the right thing? To do, how can I grow 10 X from where I am right now and he has an entrepreneur? Also, I think exact same questions. I'm nowhere happy where we are, where I am right now, right? If you are content you're you're done really right? And I see people much better than me and my objective is to become better. I think one of the natural kind of outcomes of being an entrepreneur, and again you don't have to start the business to be an entrepreneur. You can be an entrepreneur even when you're an employee, is to become better every day. Like how can you learn from what's going on? And improve things so. My most recent stunt obviously is Kenneth Abbott. Prior to Clevertap, I found it 2 businesses which had nothing to do with each other. One was restaurant review recommendation company called Bird which was a PRC company and prior to that I had never done B 2 C, much less in India. So I just moved back in 2006 from the US and I started. Burp and alongside. I also started a bird spike manufacturing. And installation company so I would I would manufacture world spikes. These are the spiky things that you see on building ledges and on top of air condition. And etcetera. I was India, 's first manufacturer of bird spikes. And again, like I said, like being an entrepreneur does not mean being a tech entrepreneur like you know every entrepreneur that you know figures up. See, here is the thing I learned about entrepreneurship in my in my commerce stage, right? I'm a commerce graduate. Anyone that? Can assemble resources to run a business. That means its people 's money and the willingness to do it is an entrepreneur? There is no scale to entrepreneurship like you can be running 100,000 people company. You can be running a 5 people company. You are an internal.

Wow, that that that really sums up. Like you know, very interesting like selling soap, selling spikes to. Selling tech right? Very, very interesting journey. Of course learning the ropes one. No one step at a time. Right, so I'm going to go to my rapid fire here. Sadly I am sitting extremely far away from you in a whole different location, so I can't send you a hamper. I'll definitely send one you know across to you to your address, but yeah.

Let's let's do this.

For your window.

I'm sure, but it depends on how you answer, right so?

You gotta win it, yeah?

So, so the the first question is, you know, is it a book that you're reading right now?

And a book that reading movie that you're watching, something that that that you feel is is really good. Like you want. Go with this.

Yes, I am reading the book. The book is called the. The moment of truth, and it's written by an airline executive. The President of Scandinavian Airlines. It's it's not a a more modern book. It's like said in. The past. I am not a TV guy at all, but I did watch the doctor. Strange, you know, travel through the multiverse. Movie that came out. It was poorly due to family pressure I. Admit to that.

OK. Yep, absolutely. I I get that. The question too that I have for you is that is there a CEO or a leader that you follow or you been studying or you know you you've been inspired?

Yeah, sorry, I can go a little longer here, but I am inspired by every leader right? Most obviously the obvious ones being Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos. But also, people like John Chambers like you. Know they they ran like a. Phenomenal MNA machinery at Cisco. You know, and the 3 videos are described like Bezos Elon Musk and Steve Jobs. They ran 3 very very different companies by culture by their attitude and they had different personalities. So these ones I admire a lot. I do admire Indian CEOs also especially names like Anand, Mahindra and even even Mukesh Ambani. Like you know, to be honest, like you know the way he's. Redefined his business. What is his business like? You know in the last 2030 years from being a refinery LED business. So like. So, from hydrocarbons to like you know, data LED is is nothing short of phenomenal, right? Absolutely absolutely.

Right?

Of those people.

3rd quick question. What's your favorite SAS app?

My favorite SAS. App is, let's see. It's a slack. It's both a pain and a it's a bone and a pain at.

Slack OK?

The same time I.

Right?

I wish it had.

An email like interface, but you know Slack lets me do very quick communication with everyone else so that I love that actually. And of course I also love Google. G suite as they call it. And zoom, these are lifesavers. You can't run a business without these couple 3. Absolutely great question number 4 for you is how many hours of sleep do you get every night? Very little is the answer. OK, it's funny because I read a book called Why Do we Sleep a few weeks ago? And I'm a big believer in getting proper sleep etcetera, but depends on different days. I try to get a minimum of 7 hours. Sleep, but that does not happen every night to. Be honest.

Get it, I totally get it.

That's why very less is the answer.

My last question to you is how has pandemic changed your life like what's what's the big impact?

Yeah it is. It has changed completely. I would say like as you know, as a son I spent time. At home, as a father, I spent time with home as a husband. I spent time with home that was a good. That was a good bid. I used to travel like crazy prior to pandemic. I actually traveled 200,000 miles in 1212. Months not counting domestic travel. So this was all international. It was crazy. The pandemic kind of put like slammed the brakes. And that's why I said I was able to spend time. But you know, I missed the office vibes. I I don't get to hang around with, you know, the people I enjoy working with. Sometimes I have to get them on a phone call. It's hard, right? Because as humans we are. People who make connections who like to see other. People face to face so. It has changed me. I would say you know, I hope the world comes back to normal and I see you know folks back in the office. But maybe I'm just giving you my age by saying that.

Great and my last question for you, which is we're we're done with rapid fire, but this is my last question for you. What's something that you wish you you really knew when you were 20 years old?

You know there is not a thing I would want to change to be honest. I have gone through so many twists and turns in my life like when I was I moved. I moved back to India after I withdraw my green card application which was 2 months away from being. You know, like like no one does that right. People like it's like 2 months away. Come on are you nuts?

Yeah, absolutely.

Like why would you do that? And I started a B 2 C business when there was no. VC funding available in. India, I started the B 2 B business which you know people would. Have said hey second. Things you can do, something you will see because you've learned so much. So I think being ignorant is a bless and I I really mean it. Like in a. Very good way right? I think life is about discovering new things. If you already knew something, don't you know? Like try to. Discover something new and. That's the mantra I go by. I don't claim to be a. An expert in B 2 BI learn a lot by reading. I learn a lot by talking to other entrepreneurs by talking to my own employees. And I I wish to things to stay like that forever like I wish to learn and grow.

Awesome, that's really nice. Great, so thank you so much for your time Anand. I mean it's it's so like good of you to actually come show up and share. Lot of interesting stories. I can remember a lot of it from the show I mean. And for me the personal take away as a learning that I took was more in terms of I think what you just shared. You know towards the end about being ignorant and it it being, you know, a blessing in disguise. It is so true at times when you know things. I think you become so binary. And looking at the variables and making decisions on the based on the variable. But it's.

Yeah, I mean you.

Know someone said like you know, hey, selling soap. You know at the age of you know 15 years and like a few years later you will end up to be. You would have never sold soap like you know you have said oh, you know what I'm going to. I'm testing for this thing so let me build upon that. That's why I said, like you know, ignorance is in a good way like you know you just.

Absolutely, absolutely great. Absolutely thank you so much once again and and it was. It was a pleasure talking to you.

Trying some things.

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