From Solo Techie Entrepreneur to High Growth, Profitable Enterprise AI Success Story: Findability Sciences CEO Anand Mahurkar (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How big is the team?

Anand Mahurkar: We are about 170 people. We leap to 200 worldwide next quarter.

Sramana Mitra: What is the distribution?

Anand Mahurkar: The largest population is in India – about 90.

Sramana Mitra: Where in India?

Anand Mahurkar: We have two locations. I decided to start the development center in a secondary town. Every big company is talking about secondary and tertiary towns. Mine is the first in India that started not even in a secondary town but a tertiary one. We have about 55 people. The second location is in Mumbai.

Sramana Mitra: Is there an engineering college there?

Anand Mahurkar: Yes, there are four engineering colleges there. We work with Worcester-Polytechnic Institute. I actually teach data science there.

Sramana Mitra: Excellent. The last question is, in your journey of going from being an engineer to becoming an entrepreneur, what have been some of your learnings? There is tremendous energy in the techie developer community. In 1Mby1M, we do a good job of teaching those basics. The question is what are your learnings? What do you want to convey to that population?

Anand Mahurkar: Every single person on the earth wants to be an entrepreneur at some point. The difference between entrepreneurs and those who are not is aspiration and perspiration. It’s hard work. I always say that what I am today is 99% failure and 1% success. The ability to handle failures and keep at it is what I learned the hard way.

Sramana Mitra: One thing I noticed while you were telling your story is the path of the sales engineer that sits at the cusp of engineering and selling. I would say it’s one of the best training grounds for entrepreneurship.

Anand Mahurkar: The same thing happened to me when I used to go with these sales guys. Customers want to talk to me directly because I can connect with them. I could solve their problems. In sales, that is what’s required.

Sramana Mitra: I did a turnaround for Cadence. It’s highly technical. This business was going down. I was supposed to figure out why this was going down. I have been consulting by this time for a long time. I have developed a process of interviewing the customers and interviewing the sales team. The maximum insights came from the sales engineers who could tell me why they won a deal, why they lost a deal. When they won a deal, what was the positioning point?

I had a complete understanding of the competitive scenario. I don’t think the salespeople can give me that. It’s very hard to become an entrepreneur if you cannot sell. The beginning is always founder-led selling. Sales engineering is a good starting point.

Anand Mahurkar: The other learning is that no idea is a bad idea. If you are convinced that an idea is great, you can convince others that the idea is great.

Sramana Mitra: You have to have domain insight though. That conviction has to come from your experience. The conviction cannot be vague. It’s a real pleasure to meet you. When you come to California, come see me.

Anand Mahurkar: We are actually involved in a project in California where we’re going to change the world of SMEs. We are building the Zillow for SMBs. Today, there is no asset in the market where you can find out the value of a restaurant or a bike shop. Using AI, we hope to crack that problem. We have actually made sort of a Guinness Book of World Record. We have valued 2.1 million enterprises without contacting the owners with publicly-available data. We are 85% accurate on valuations.

Sramana Mitra: Great, thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : From Solo Techie Entrepreneur to High Growth, Profitable Enterprise AI Success Story: Findability Sciences CEO Anand Mahurkar
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