TRUST ME I KNOW WHAT I'm DOING

I can’t repeat it enough, but I’m so grateful to you for listening and subscribing and for sharing it with your friends and family, and if you’re enjoying them, please feel free to rate and write a review. So we sometimes find ourselves in the presence of people who are simply humble titans. They may not be the loudest or flashiest in a crowd, but their incredible actions, capacity for growth, and impeccable vision all magnetically draw others to their inspiring well of leadership. This is most definitely how I felt when sharing a conversation with Anand Deshpande, the founder, chairman, and managing director of the tech company Persistent Systems. Anand grew up in Bhopal and now lives in Pune in Maharashtra. He’s graduated from IIT grad and then, like a lot of his classmates, came to the US to study and completed his masters and PhD in Computer Science at Indiana University. After spending some time in Silicon Valley at Hewlett Packard, he decided to return to India where he founded Persistent Systems in 1990 and served as CEO as it grew to a multinational publicly traded company, with digital engineering and enterprise modernization solutions for all sectors. By the way, just to give you some scale of this journey, when Anand started Persistent, the IT export business from India was less than 50 million dollars. Today it’s around 250 billion dollars, so it’s fairly safe to say that Anand has been part of a transformative revolution with global impact. His skills as a servant leader helped his company to scale through many successes and challenges and navigate thoughtfully through its natural orbital leaps with humility, innovation, and execution. Anand stepped away from his CEO role a few years ago, and has been using his immense knowledge, energy, and network expertise to now help build and elevate ecosystems in an evolving India, whether in the biotech sector understanding cancer genomics or for the millions of nano-entrepreneurs out there or for helping founders scale beyond that first plateau of achievement into a second orbit of growth. His broad portfolio of non-profit and philanthropic work also magnify his superb commitment to giving, constantly uplifting others, and learning through collaboration. I was grateful to catch up with him for a conversation about everything from creating jobs to the identity formation of today’s Indian entrepreneurs. But I was first curious to know what he was currently learning and if he was comfortable being a novice with a new skill…