Anand did his engineering from IIT KGP. He is 59 years old, so I assume he would have finished around 1983. Went on to do his PhD from the US. Worked a few years with HP in the Valley. One fine morning, in what most of his friends labelled as a bout of stupidity, he decided to make the journey back to desh. Cut to 30 years later, the same friends would call this stupidity, vision.

His entrepreneurship started off, like most other entrepreneurs, in Kapil Dev style. Anand was the one man army who was there in all places at all times. 4 years later, when the company had zoomed on to a team strength of 70, he got questioned in an offsite. An employee asked him: What’s in it for me? This very innocuous question reset the path that Persistent would take. That was the day Persistent started scaling. Anand realised that he needed more employees like this one. Folks who worked with him, not for him. 

That day Anand hung up his techie coding gloves and became a full time salesman. Anand has an interesting selling style. He provokes his customers; challenges them. In order to do this, you need time to sharpen your own axe. Every year, Anand takes on a challenge of delivering a public talk on something that he knows absolutely nothing about. But that something is stuff that is going to be important for the company’s future. He spends a few months researching, talking to people – and comes up with this new PhD. This PhD topic becomes the poke point in customer discussions. And folks remember Anand for this reason. And call him up, when the orders arise.  

He has been helped in this journey by a panchayat of mentors. Anand believes that it is difficult for a single person to be a mentor. He uses Indian mythology to talk of the kind of mentors every person should have:

• A Vishnu, A guy who understands the overall business – and has seen you grow up. He has the context.
• A Krishna. Someone who can help you define your values. Who can help you choose the right paths – and who can help get you back when you meander. Who ensures that your mind is regularly decluttered. 
• A Narsimha. The go to guy when you get stuck in tech. The guy who knows which tools to use where.
• A Dronacharya. These are the guys you never meet, but you follow. You know them, but they don’t know you.

Note to myself: There must have been a 5th to complete the panchayat series. Need to hunt for this missing god.

The 2008 downturn was another learning opportunity for our salesman. With orders from existing customers drying up, Anand was busy scouting the US for new customers to keep the keyboards at Persistent tapping. He was advised by one of his mentors that in such times it is better to hug your old friends rather than make new ones. So he did that. He went and met each of his 150 customers. And all of them, as expected, had only one demand – discounts. Knowing the bleakness of the times, Anand agreed – but on one condition. He wanted the final negotiation to happen directly with the CEO. Now most IT services companies interact with the VP engineerings. The CEO has a vague idea of what Persistent does. Matters which have been delegated by the CEO need not worry her too much. Anand ended up meeting 150 CEOs. He should have written a best-seller about the learnings from the meetings, but alas, he didn’t. No worries, for here is a summary of the book that Anand never wrote: ‘‘How to win friends and influence CEOs’:

• CEOs are more oriented to relationships than transactions. They would be happy to share with you the contacts of their competitors, something a sales guy would never even dream of doing. 
• Though they have delegated most of the running of the organisation, they still retain interest in some areas. To really touch a CEO, you need to be relevant to their pet themes.  
• CEOs are more focussed on toplines than bottom lines. Tell them something that can scale – and they are excited.

Today’s Anand has now hung up his salesman gloves too – and for the last two years has hired a professional CEO who does all that. Small side effect: the share price has quadrupled in the last 12 months!!

Anand believes that companies don’t scale because founders can’t scale. As a company grows, the founder’s mindset has to change. In Persistent’s sales team, Anand jokes they have more firings than hirings. He believes that each person has limitations of scale. And once that person reaches that, you need to let go of that person. The letting go decisions instead of being viewed in an emotional lens, have to be data driven. If you don’t fire fast, you can’t scale. 

Most entrepreneurs find firing difficult, because they cannot draw a line between themselves and the companies that they run. This distinction makes it easier for you to understand that what is good for the company, may not necessarily be good for you. To gain scale, you need to lose friends. You can’t hug and shoot at the same time.

He has interesting advice for non-entrepreneurs too – about managing their own scaling up. He believes that the first 10 years of your career need to be devoted to learning and networking. He is an amazing networker himself. And it probably comes from his genes, His grandfather was a lawyer, who later on joined the government, retiring as the Income tax commissioner of Pune. He remembers going on a train journey with his grandfather to Nagpur. Tiffins would land up for them every 3 hours – the meeting being more important than the eating. 

The next 10 years of your career have to be spent in mastering something. At this stage, you don’t need to be known as Mr Jack-Of-All. Here is where I think most MBAs lose the race. Management is a generalised activity. The mistake that MBAs make is to not learn a specialisation in this time. The next 10 years are to be spent identifying which corner office you are best suited for – and hopefully sitting in it.

And for the rest of the years, you need to find out what you need to do to stay relevant. Anand is a big fan of Arthur Brooks, a professor of happiness at Harvard. One of his Dronacharyas, I guess. He particularly recommends this article by Arthur that was published in 2019 in the Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/work-peak-professional-decline/590650/
So what is Anand up to now? After being the IT robber baron for 3 decades, his plan is now to give back. In 2015 he started a foundation –  www.deasra.in  which helps improve the employment scene in India. deAsra helps people to start, manage & grow a small business. The Not for profit company provides a platform that provides standard checklists that an entrepreneur requires, starting from rent agreements to digital marketing. They seem to be doing some business consulting, but the site is not too clear about that. Even the testimonials require passwords to access! Am sure Anand’s salesman mindset is at work here. He has scaled up well, touching 100,000 entrepreneurs in 6 years of starting shop. I am sure the next zero should be happening in the next three!