I always love doing stories of my readers. Anand has been following the blog since 2010. He has built a terrific, fundamentals-focused AI company. And I am thrilled.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born, and raised, and in what kind of background?

Anand Mahurkar: Thank you for having me here. I’ve been following you since 2010. I’ve been a long follower of your blog. I have a little bit of soft corner for your blog as you are of Indian origin and doing this fascinating work in entrepreneurship. My father was actually a commerce professor. He used to teach cost accounting. He used to create balance sheets and profit and loss for his students.

I used to sit next to him and he used my name, Anand and Co, as a fictitious example. I come from a very small village in interior Maharashtra. My mother was a language teacher. I never spoke English until I was 21. Then I stepped out of town and worked in manufacturing. I’m a mechanical engineer by education. I was working for a company in hardcore mechanical engineering, working in three shifts at 1,200 degrees Celsius. We were suppliers of General Motors and Ford.

When you do forging, you hammer it with a big force. The engineering process changed where you can now do screwing. If you screw the stuff, it requires less energy and the wastage is less. There is a German company called Weingarten. They produce the largest screw press where you put a hot metal and a big screw will come rotating. It will press it and it will form the shapes.

A robotic arm does the work. I used to sit with them late evenings learning computer science. These German engineers taught me basic software programming. I switched and got into software. I started this company with the idea that the ability to find information is a key ability that every organization needs. I trademarked findability and built a data platform.

Sramana Mitra: You’re now based in the US?

Anand Mahurkar: I’m in the Boston area. I’ve been here for the last 20 years. I moved from India to US as part of my job. My then employer acquired a company here in Massachusetts. I came here as a pre-sales technology engineer. I started supporting the sales team. I grew the business from $4 million to $40 million. I decided to step out of corporate. Today, we are a fairly-leading enterprise AI company in the world operating in three countries.

Sramana Mitra: Where in Boston are you based?

Anand Mahurkar: Our office is in downtown Boston, but I live and work out of my home north of Boston City on the border of New Hampshire. I’m 30 miles north of the MIT campus.

Read Complete Article