Aneesh Reddy shares insights on founder mental health, mindset transformation, and navigating business challenges.
Aneesh Reddy shares insights on founder mental health, mindset transformation, and navigating business challenges. The discussion emphasizes the importance of mental well-being for entrepreneurial success.
I do believe that spending time on your own mental health, making sure you have outlets beyond your business, right, which is you have a good family, you have a good friend circle, I think really adds back to the success of the business. You know you being less anxious or less fearful or less greedy and hence means that you take better decisions as a founder. [music] All righty. Hello everyone and welcome to the deal maker show. So today we have an amazing amazing founder, amazing leader. You know, I think that what he's been able to accomplish is really remarkable with his company for so long, too. Uh and and also the team that he's been able to build around him. I mean, think about this. Over a 100 employees that have been with the company for over 10 years. I mean, that's absolutely remarkable. Uh on today's show, we're going to be covering all the good stuff that we like to hear, the
building, the scaling, the financing, but then also taking the company public. Uh we're going to be talking about two secondaries, how they work, you know, why they make sense, why not? And then also COVID, how to think about pivoting your business, adjusting. I mean, they've been at it for a long time with the business. So the business has really mature and transformed itself several times and I think that you're all going to find that super super inspiring. So again, brace yourself for an amazing conversation ahead of us. Without further ado, let's welcome our guest today, Anish Ready. Welcome to the show. >> Thanks Alejandro for having me today. Uh looking forward to the chat today. >> So born in Hyderabad and grew up there in India. So give us a walk through memory lane. How was life growing up for you Anish >> you know um Hyderabad is this uh IT uh city in the
south of India. Uh both my parents are doctors. uh you know uh uh lovely fun upbringing um you know went to IIT for my undergrad that was uh you know I went to IIT Karipur and u that was a time when I thought I really grew as an individual those four years in in college and campus uh and then went and joined this uh cigarettes to hotels conglomerate ITC it's a top five public company in India >> but before even that Anish why engineering out of all things I mean I know that in India there is a lot of pressure on on on the cultural side of things to either become a doctor or or become an engineer. In your case, it was mechanical engineering. So did you have like something going on there with problem solving that you got excited about like early on when you were a kid or how did the whole problem solving come knocking to you in your life? Yeah, India as you know is uh it's more
fashionable to be a doctor or a engineering and engineer in India and uh both my parents were doctors and and my dad sat me down in my uh 9th or 10th grade saying uh look you need a lot of patience to be a a doctor and I was someone who needed a little bit of more need for speed and some senses you know and uh and so he sat me down and said probably you should you should explore uh you know engineering uh and uh And I was pretty good at math, you know, I was pretty good at math and physics and some of that. So, uh, it it kind of came naturally, right? So, uh, and then I had a pretty good four years in, uh, in campus as well. You know, I used to run a robotics club. Uh, then in 2005, I had set up the entrepreneurship cell uh, on campus. So, yeah, I think one thing led to another and I realized that uh, you know, I loved uh, solving problems. >> That's amazing. So after that you know
you got the degree and you went to uh work for a large uh publicly traded company in India which I think you know it played a really nice role for you because that was the most immediate step before you kind of like revisited your sense of purpose in life which led you to entrepreneurship. So walk us through the sequence of events that that happened there leading to 2008 where you started to really rethink your life. >> Right. Yes. So uh 2006 is when I graduated from uh IIT and like I said you know in 2005 um you know we had set up this entrepreneurship cell and the idea for that came from um you know we were running a robotics club and we had to buy these you know motors and IC's and all that stuff to uh you know uh build build stuff right and uh procuring them was a headache so we thought why not build a company which you know like a hobby kits type thing and we realized we
didn't know how do it. So that's how we said okay let's set up an entrepreneurship cell first and um that meant that there was this bug of saying let's solve a problem uh and so I joined ITC great job amazing first pay uh it's a top five public company in the country was doing very well there you know uh had moved two roles in like a 2-year period and uh but there was this it saying you know like what am I doing right where am I where do I fit in this big uh which which small dog am I in this big wheel and uh thankfully you know we were uh I was also I didn't need to send any money home right so my parents were taking care of themselves so I was like it's a good time to do something and try something out right so this question of you know am I adding real value what's the purpose of doing all this I think uh uh drove me to say okay let's take a few years and start up and see where it
goes right so you know this was uh early 2008 uh 2 years into uh job so and uh as you know uh you know it's not like I had much of work experience so I kind of went you know me and Krishna who's uh used to stay with me on the same floor at IIT both of us said uh let's let's go the investor way of picking two sectors that are doing very well and do something in between them right so as those sectors grow you will grow with it right so uh this was 2008 retail was just beginning to happen in India the country had opened up you know for uh international brands like a Walmart a Levis etc to come in uh and at the same time you know the mobile story in India has been crazy right it's been like unbelievable uh the mobile story so we said let's do something between retail and mobile we went back to IIT took a small $30,000 seed loan uh IIT took 4% of the company for that and um came back uh you
know and started up with that and we then spent the next uh this was August of 2008, just a month before Leman Brothers tank, exactly a month before, right? And we would kind of go meet everyone in our networks who were in retail and mobile and ask them this question of uh you know, we took kids from IIT, we can build good software, tell us uh what your problems are, right? So uh so it was a very so we we we said that we won't write a line of code till someone is willing to pay us for it. Right? So that was the that was the bar kind of we set for ourselves. And uh to our luck, you know, Lemon crashed September 11, 2008. You'd remember the the you know, the meltdown that happened afterwards. And as we would meet these c these these customers in retail, uh you know, we would keep hearing this thing saying our same store sales are down, customers aren't coming back to stores. Pretty
obvious, right? In a recession, you you uh and if you can solve that for us, uh we'll buy what you're selling even though it's a recession, right? So, and we would then ask saying, you know, who are your customers? Uh, you know, do you have a do you build a, you know, and this was back when, you know, you had to fill a long form to sign up for a loyalty program. You had to carry a card. And we were like, u less than 5% of customers would sign up because no one wants to go through that fixtures experience, right? We said, look, we'll run this on the mobile. Uh, everyone has a unique mobile number. We'll use that as the unique identifier. uh and whenever you need to redeem a uh redeem points or redeem any currency, we'll drop you a OTP like a bank, right? So simple idea. Now what that meant was suddenly instead of 5% of people filling a form, we would have 80% of customers signing up in a
store for a program, you know, because you had suddenly removed the friction of 2 minutes to fill a form to just telling your name and mobile number at the casher and the the casher would like sign you up right there, right? So uh so very simple remove friction and you like really see a big adoption curve right the other thing we did was till then you would typically have you know customers being sold or a a business being sold a big enterprise software we said we'll we'll charge you like $50 a store a month really sass you know took some space on AWS this was 2008 AWS had just started up in in India back then and uh solved that also right so we said you can try for 3 months if it works then you roll it out across the the estate right so uh so we really got into the retail loyalty space SAS also very accidentally because customers would tell us look we can't buy this big license software
so that's how we said…