Video
Summary/Key Takeaways
Key takeaways from the recording
Early Influences and Academic Journey
Dr. Deshpande’s upbringing in a small town in Madhya Pradesh, within a community of engineers, shaped his values and ambitions. His academic excellence led him to IIT Kharagpur in Aeronautics switching to Computer Science in 3rd year and later to Indiana University for advanced studies and PhD, highlighting the importance of strong foundational education and curiosity.
From Engineer to Entrepreneur
Transitioning from an engineering career at HP Labs in Silicon Valley to founding Persistent Systems in India, Dr. Deshpande demonstrated the value of taking calculated risks and seizing entrepreneurial opportunities at the right time.
Bootstrapping and Resourcefulness
Persistent Systems was started with limited funds—initially bootstrapped using Dr. Deshpande’s tax return money from his time in the US (Filing US taxes jointly as Married as despite meeting and getting married within a week of returning to India in December!) This underscores the importance of resourcefulness and making the most of available assets in the early stages of entrepreneurship.
Leveraging Networks and Mentors
Dr. Deshpande leveraged his academic and professional networks, particularly from the database community, to gain initial clients and business insights. Warm introductions from respected peers to CTOs and Vice Presidents of engineering played a crucial role in establishing credibility and trust leading to early business development.
Sales as a Core Entrepreneurial Skill
He emphasized that every entrepreneur must become adept at sales. Dr. Deshpande found that selling was essential for growth and learned to enjoy and excel in the process, highlighting the need for a mindset shift from pure engineering to business development.
The Importance of Diverse Mentors
Dr. Deshpande described a structured approach to mentorship, referencing Hindu mythology to illustrate different types of mentors: those you follow without their knowledge, those you consult regularly for various aspects of life, and those who challenge you (like the “Narsimha” mentor). He recommends having multiple mentors like a personal BOD for different needs.
Adaptability and Persistence
The journey of building Persistent Systems was marked by overcoming significant challenges, such as limited infrastructure and communication facilities and redtape in India at the time. Dr. Deshpande’s persistence and adaptability were key to navigating these obstacles and building a global technology company.
These lessons that can be equally valuable for aspiring founders, business leaders and young folks entering the professional world
Additional Resources
Dr Anand Deshpande is involved in a variety of job creation, teaching, mentoring and collaborative and philanthropic initiatives after 30 years running Persistent as CEO. While hes still the Chairman there, outside of Persistent hes running DeAsra and involved in a number of noble philanthrpuphic efforts
His 3 current focus areas:
Entrepreneurship
a) Nano Entrepreneurship. Need to create 18 million jobs every year in India hence started this initiative Large number of SMBs . Support 410K businesses with a small team of 40
b) Second Orbit: Sequence of S curves to get to the next orbit. Transition is difficult for founders . 5 cohorts of 20-25 companies already taught
Education/Careers
Involved with IITs, interdisciplinary studies etc. Runs a program called Managing Careers with a framework of guiding folks on their 3 sets of 10 year experience tranches
3 Data Healthcare /Bio:
Promoting Open access data for research, philanthropy supported
Dataset for Cancer : India Cancer Genome Atlas: ICGA.in
An organic national mission for large scale multi-omics profiling of cancers in India, completely created by Indians, for contribution to the Global Cancer Knowledge Base.
Dataset for Diabetes : RSS DI Research Society, Clinitians, Government,
Transcript
Piyush: The digital agenda is all about data analytics, cloud. AI/ML and emerging technologies that are transforming not only companies, but also entire industries and even our lives. Hi, my name is Piyush Malik, who wears and juggles multiple hats as an engineer, management consultant practitioner, a builder, a thought leader, entrepreneur, and a C-suite. Executive. I have been in the industry helping organizations realize and navigate the value of data analytics, applied ai/ml and emerging technologies. I have created strategies and transformation programs that helps them compete with the digital natives. Welcome to the Digital Agenda
Today we are joined by Dr.Anand Deshpande founder and chairman of Persistent System, a true IT pioneer whose journey from a small town upbringing to building a global tech powerhouse is both inspiring and instructive. He's involved in a lot of philanthropic activities as well, and he'll have a lot of great things to share.
Without much further ado, welcome Anand. How are you doing?
Anand: Thank you, it's a pleasure to be on your show. Really looking forward to chatting with you.
Piyush: Absolutely. And we are meeting after the IIT Bay area meetup that we had at Z 21. And before that when I visited Pune, your team gave me a warm welcome and I got a chance to meet you and your entire team.
So thank you for all of what you have done for the industry as well, both in the India and US sector. But let's get the audience to get to know you a little bit better.
Let's start at the beginning. Could you share a bit about your early life in Madhya Pradesh and then your family upbringing and what shaped your values and ambitions
As a studious child of course academically excelling because you were at IIT and then your journey to Indiana University. So let's talk about all of that.
Anand: Yes I grew up in Bhopal, my father worked for Bharat Heavy Electricals and we lived in the BHEL township. And it was a protected environment. A lot of folks.. almost everyone was an engineer.
And I went to CAMPION school, which was an all boys school in the city. And I was there from fourth to 11th. We had 11th as high secondary at that point. And then I cleared JEE and had a big rank and I went to Kharakpur. So I joined KGP in the aeronautical engineering department.
The two years there. And then we were very lucky. There was a new computer science department that happened while I was still in my first year, which had admissions directly in the third year. So I changed from Aeronautics to computer science and then graduated with a CS degree from Kharakput in 1984.
So 79 to 84.I was in Kaur for a five year course at that point. We had five year courses. And then in 84 I came to the US to Indiana University in Bloomington , did a computer science, MS &. PhD. Then in 89 I joined HP Labs for about a short period. And then I was in HP in Palo Alto for about 18 months.
And there's this whole home calling bugged me, and I decided to move back to India and start Persistent around in 1990.
Piyush: Awesome. Awesome. Champion School reminded me of the Cadbury's Bournvita Quiz championship that Campion school used to participate & win a lot of times. I'm talking about my childhood days ;-) I'm not sure if you participated in that.
Anand: No, there was a Campaign school in Mumbai as well.. And many of the other campaign schools such as Mumbai were more active in the Bournvita thing. Bhopal Campaign school.. It was run by the same Jesuits,
Where did you grow up?
PiyushI grew up in Delhi all throughout and my undergrad and my postgrad as well. But after my graduation, I was, globe trotter. I took on my first job in Gandhinagar with Tdata telecom. And then never really worked (long ) in Delhi. I was always on the road and after 40 different countries now I'm here. I've been in Silicon Valley for 30 years, but during that time I was in global roles, both with PWC and then with IBM.
And that made me travel a lot. Of course not, I'm not a billion miler like you, but certainly I've had my fair share of travel as well. Let's switch the gears and talk about what you took off from Silicon Valley and into India.
Anand: I was not married when I moved back to India.
Piyush: Oh
Anand:. In fact, I met my wife. Yes. Okay. Yeah. So I met her for the time a week after I got back, and then we were engaged for three days after that.
Piyush: Oh my goodness.
Anand:. And I think we married in five weeks.
Piyush: Wow! Oh my goodness.Interesting!
Anand: What happened was that. I worked in HP till October, 1990. And returned back, got married on 5th of December.
Anand: So I filed my taxes as married in rather than a single individual, and I got a decent, money back from the income tax department. And actually that was the main funds that I had for funding the company.
Piyush: Oh, wonderful. What a story. Awesome. Great to know that. Alright, great. Were there any mentors that you met in the US that shaped your initial approach as you were founding?
And I know you used, your parents helped you register the company initially, right?
Anand: Yes. So what happened was, I was in the Bay Area in 89, 90 and in 1990 N Vittal, Secretary. Department of Electronics visited the Bay Area. The Bay area used to have a precursor to the TIEi, used to be an organization called -S-I-P-A, Silicon Valley Indian Professional Organization Association.
Anand: And N Vitel came and talked to that group and he talked a lot about having to set up this stuff in India and he was looking for entrepreneurs to come back and he mentioned that there was something going on in Pune where he was gonna set up a software technology park. My parents had moved to Pune by then, so I was intrigued by the idea.
I wanted to go back. I. It just seemed to all make sense. And then I decided that, let me take this opportunity because at that point, and even now, a lot of people who come to the US get trapped in the plus one syndrome, right? So you always do something and then plus one and plus one. I decided that instead of getting stuck in it, let me first go back.
And of course if it doesn't work out, I would've thought other things, but the shot to take it take a shot at entrepreneurship and going back to India, the earlier I did the less, the better it would've been or more easier it would've been, which was the case, meaning when I returned back, I had limited savings.
I did have mentors like you asked. So there was a fellow . He used to work at Putni at that point, and he had come to the bay to set up Putni's office in the bay. So he was able to guide me a little bit about the India offshore business model, what do you do and how it works, what kind of facilities you might get.
I benefited a great deal by that ans . A lot of the friends from the database community.
I did a database PhD in 84 to 89, and while I was doing my PhD, I attended several database conferences, the SIGMOD, , vds. And I met friends like C Mohan et all and many other people who were all very well known as established database people.
And I found that getting to use them to network was good. . They were my first set of calling cards for my customers as well. Because, trying to sell to them was easy.. So there I was
The name Persistent also comes from databases. So the intention was to work on, and my thesis was on query processing and query optimization of complex objects.
Anand: So it was one of those things where, this is a problem that is still, you can still go to a company and say, I can improve your zen. There's work to do. So at that point, of course there was a lot of object databases and other things coming in, and I was able to get some work from customers very early on through the network that I created, out of the database community and also some other friends that came and helped out in the early years.
So your first few customers are always the hard ones to get through, but once you get them rolling, then of course then you use the network in other ways.
Piyush: Absolutely. Did you ever use your mentors as a wedge to enter any big accounts or the first few sales?
Anand: Absolutely. So what was happening was that I was asking my friends to introduce me to CTOs in database companies.
So all of the CTOs in database companies, and there were lots of them at that point, right? Lots of object database companies object, relational, all of those kinds of companies. And I was able to get introductions to VP engineering or CTOs in these companies through very warm introductions from people like Mohan and others who have pretty good network of their own and people respect them in the data community.
So I was able to enter through a very technical way. This guy understands databases and optimization and query process, very tech kind of a discussion in the early days. And the first few projects that we got were all in that category. Broadly though, of course, you talk what you do and then you do what they ask you to do.
Piyush: Yeah. But that was a services entry point. At that time you did not have a product?
Anand: No, we didn't have a product and it was not viable. We had no money. As I said, I bootstraped the company out of the funds that I got from my tax return, so I had about Two lakh rupees as my investment that went into the company.
Two lakh rupees at that point would've been about eight to $10,000.
When I returned back. But it became 25 rupees after the devaluation, after Manmohan Singh became the finance minister. So it was a combination of those two, and it was about roughly, I would say 7,000 to $8,000 is what my investment was in the company when we started it.
So we had limited funds and India was a very difficult place to do business in many ways. Meaning it was hard to find, computing facilities were hard to get. We did not have enough access to communication facilities. Networking was very difficult. Yeah. Telephone lines, I'm sure you're aware you worked for Tata communications, so it would take six months to get a phone line.
Piyush: More than that. Much More than that.. 10 to 12 years in the residential sector. And that's a story even Sam Pitroda talks about as well
Anand: So it was tough and working in that category, trying to build products from India where the market was never in India, government had created these schemes specifically for export.
So it was mostly services in the early years and that seemed a least resistance path as well. And we were working with product companies, building products. But we were doing services for them from India. So even though we were building products, so you followed the product methodology, most of the work from India was on behalf of someone else, or someone had chartered us to do that work.
Piyush: Got it. So from an engineer mindset to a sales mindset as an entrepreneur. Transformation.. As an entrepreneur – everybody who starts a company has to sell. So how tough was it for you to change that light bulb in your head?
Anand: Two things. One is that there was no choice, right? So if you're selling, then you have to sell. The second thing that was true, that my first many customers were all engineers as well. So we were so we were establishing credibility using the engineer discussion.
And then picking up small amounts of work, which was. As a consequence of the fact that, “okay, you seem trustworthy enough and the risk seems to be low, yes, I could do this myself, but it'll take me a few years. It'll not be high on my list of priorities. If you do it for me now at this price, I can use it”
So it was mostly that kind of a sale.
So it was an engineer oriented sale, but very soon I realized that I actually enjoyed the whole process of selling. And I got pretty good at it actually. So I would plan the sale deal, what is gonna happen, why would people buy from us, and things like that.
Anand: And make sure that, say the right things. Convince people of the right kind of things to get things done. So sales is very important and I got into it without really having any other choice. But having jumped into it, I feel I got good at it and I recommend this to everyone and I think people should be a little bit more, thoughtful about how the buying process happens. So that, that helps in deciding how to present yourselves when you're in a sales situation.
Piyush: Great. And a lot of entrepreneurs these days as well are using executive coaches. To help in areas where they find themselves lacking.
Did you use the services of any executive coach at that time?
Anand: In the early days not so much. At that time, though, I had lots of mentors and friends.
But I also agree that there are coaches can play an important role. I have deliberately used certain kinds of friends and mentors to get this to happen.
Now, I have shared I don't know if I should, let me give you an example of how I look at and how I classify mentors as such. And I'm gonna use a little bit of Hindu mythology as an example, but we can translate that for the other audience.
In India what I believe is that you need four kinds of mentors that you need to develop.
The first is the Eklavya- Dronacharya mentor. So the concept here is, Drona was the guru. Eklavya was the mentee. And the mentee did not meet the guru .. he was just following the guru, But the guru did not know that Eklavya was his mentee.
So you have this model of where you can have mentors, meaning mentors who don't know you are being mentored by them.
But with Twitter and all the other things that we have, bloga, YouTube etc you can follow mentors very easily and you should track your mentors and you can be selective about what parts of your mentors you want to track. So that's one category of mentors.
Second category is what I call the Dev Panchayat
So in most Hindu homes we have a place of worship, a local temple and at home. Usually a small one, and we usually have about half a dozen deities in that temple. These are typically things like Ganesh, which is the god for knowledge. You have Lakshmi, which would be goddess for wealth. Saraswati would be for knowledge and things like learning, and then you'll have Shiva and bunch of other gods. So there's about half a dozen of them. You should have half a dozen mentors who come from different aspects of your life. And the goal about having a temple at home is that every day you're supposed to tell the gods that things are well, or whatever is happening. So when you need help, you can get the help.
Anand: So like this, you need to keep your mentors updated with what is going on because if you, if they know the context only, then they can give you advice when you need them. That's the second category of mentors. So I recommend to everyone that you should have your half a dozen who are your different kinds of mentors.
So I would have. My professor, who I worked very closely with, a guy called Jose Blakely. He used to be at Seattle in Microsoft. I would go to his house every trip I came and ask him for a dump on what's happening on technology. And another friend Murli who I would work with take him for a walk every Sunday, once every Sunday that I was in the Bay Area.
And we would talk about my life, his life, what is common, what's not. So get a little bit of that. So we had Professor and I, so I had a few mentors that I would use for various kinds of things. Beautiful category.
Third category of mentors is what I call the Nasimha mentor. Narsimha mentor is the following, - I’m sure you're aware of this story.
There was a king called Hiranyakashipu who had a son called Prahlad
Hiranyakashyapu had all kinds of boons with him - so he could not be killed in the morning, in the evening, in the afternoon, and this and that. Inside the house, outside the house, not killed by human, not killed by animals. So he had created lots of constraints for how he became immortal by asking all these kinds of boons, right?
And he was starting to harass his son and son was an avatar of the Vishnu, who would've been somebody on your dev panchayat. Which would be your temple at home. So able to get in an Narasima who was a very specialized mentor. He was neither human nor. An animal, it was neither in the morning, nor in the evening inside or Outside. So he mashed all those constraints and basically killed Hiranyakashyapu/
Anand: So when you have complex problem that needs a very specialized mentor, then your category of regular mentors are the ones who will lead you to these kinds of mentors. So if you have to deal with some very complicated issues, legal or whatever else, you need to bring in someone who is an expert, but you can't have that expert as your daily mentor, because it costs too much. He'll basically eat you up, right? So you want to have that mentor as something different.
And the fourth category of mentor, which I talk about is Krishna . So if you're going to have the Dharma yudh, you need to bring someone special, bring Krishna to your fight, right?
And there's another interesting story here that Krishna and Arjun had a very interesting relationship. Krishna actually joined Arjun on the Mahabharat battleground. He could have easily given him advice from his room and said, okay, this is what it is. But he showed up there. So the mentor actually likes to be involved in the mentee's actions and activity, so they have a vested interest. We feel good about helping someone when you get involved in it.
You don't want to just give advice and go away. So you want, you wanna be part of the action. So like this, you have these four kinds of mentors, which I really believe everyone should do, and you should have your own category of. Six, seven mentors that are different aspects of your life and you should keep them posted regularly.
And then you should have many of these that are online that you can follow and you should have your own plans. And I follow this for these guys, and I follow Navel for this and follow this.
Piyush: Very well articulated in fact, combining with human psychology. It's not only Hindu mythology and scriptures that you're brought in (to the discussion), it's applied human psychology that you need to have a personal board of directors.
It literally brings life mentoring for a lot of my listeners and hopefully for the next generation.
So that is a perfect segue to talk about your work with philanthropy and education and from Persistent to the DeAsra Foundation. Now, Tell us more about what is keeping you active and motivated to wake up every day these days?
Anand: Yes. So as I said, I started Persistent in 1990. In 2019. I was almost 30 years in the business, and I decided to move on from being CEO to being chairman. And that allowed me to do more things.
And I reached a point where, I was nearing 60. And I had worked in the same thing for about 30 years, and I was getting to a point where I said, yeah, I could do this for the next few years, but I don't see this for the next 30 years. So let me move on and look at what I should be thinking about for the next 30 years, rather than doing some small things here and there.
So I have a mission to be impactful and long term. So I picked three broad areas in which I'm spending time right now.
One bucket is around entrepreneurship and I'll explain why and what I do there. The second bucket, as I said I've been working in the data community, a little bit about data, healthcare, ai, science, bio, that kind of a bucket. And the third one, I'm very fascinated about education, careers, managing careers, things of that kind. So those are my three buckets in which I'm spending time right now. So let me peel the onion a little bit more.
Anand:So on the first one, when I talk about entrepreneurship, I work in two segments.One segment is where we call nano entrepreneurs. And I'll explain the context of why I am into this thing.And the reality is that I live in India right now. We have 25 million people at every age group in India, every age in India. So we say every 25 year or 30 years. So we have 1.3 billion people. Half of them are below the age of 35. So you calculated, whichever way you have more than 25 million people. And we need to create 18 to 15 to 18 million jobs every year. And so job creators is the key to creating jobs, and we need to help the operator as well in India.
Again, if you look at the demographics of companies. 98% of all businesses in India are what you call SMBs. So really small million businesses. Of those SMBs, which in India is up to 250 crores.. Okay? Which would be 0.5 billion rupees. Huh. It's pretty large number. Yeah. So most companies are actually much smaller than,
Anand: So that's where most of the companies end up and government programs tend to be for that whole group of SMEs. So they don't really work on the nano entrepreneurs. So I have a program that I have designed, it's my family philanthropy, personal philanthropy. I have a 40 people team now for the last 12- 13 years.
Okay. And we implemented and templated everything that nano entrepreneurs need so that they don't fail. And we have about 410,000 businesses in the network already. The aspiration is to get it to a few million.
Piyush: Great. And this is only for India, or are you planning to scale globally, right?
Anand:No it's India only. It can be scaled in other places, you have to be nuanced about every region. So we worry about compliance, access to compliance, access to regulations, and a whole bunch of things which are very specific to our region. So a little bit regional thing is there. It can be modified to other regions, but I'll have to do some work, which we haven't done, but we have no shortage of these kinds of small businesses in India right now.
So I'm just. Staying focused on that.
Piyush: That's great. Great.
Anand: The second program I run is a program I call second orbit.
And the concept here is that business growth is a sequence of s curves. You do something, growth, and you flatten up, and then you have to change orbit. And unfortunately, what works in one orbit actually doesn't work in the next orbit.
So what got you there will not get you to the next level.
And this happens at every change of orbit. And at Persistent ic, we are in our sixth orbit.
But the transition from the first orbit to the second orbit is very hard for the founders. It's where the founders include other people to be in the founding team.
Anand: In the first orbit. It's only the founder and their goal is to do product market fit, so respond to whatever comes in. By the time you're at the top of your first orbit, your business is stable. It's doing relatively well, but it doesn't scale anymore because all what you could do on your own, you have already done.
There's nothing more that you can do that changes the game. So that's the challenge and that's where I have a course now. I teach a course once a year. You meet once a month for a year and have a whole program on how companies scale at that point. And this program has done quite well. I have five cohorts right now.Across in different categories. Each cohort is about 20 to 25 companies, so about, roughly a hundred companies in the network that we are observing on how to help companies scale. Now, the number at which these are typically in India context is about about $5 million to $6 million is the US equivalent of a startup in India or US business.
Anand: Forget about startups. You get to five, $6 million on the founder's team, but then getting a 5,800 is a very different ball game. So that transition is what I have been spending time. So that's my second orbit program
Piyush: Great. Great. And you also talked about education.
Anand: Yeah. So let me explain that as well.
Anand: I got involved in a bunch of IOTs and other institutions to be on their chairman boards and other things. I've been a little bit concerned about two aspects of it. So one set is that when I work with at Persistent as somebody who was hiring a lot of people, including talking to a lot of senior folks, I found that in India especially, we find a lot of people who have.
Anand: You meet somebody, they'll tell you have 20 years of experience. I worked six years here, five years there, seven years there. But if you push them a little bit and say, okay, 20 years, yes, but what has that 20 years done to you? Who are you because of that 20 year experience? And then people are not able to give any good answer for it.
Anand: And they're always saying, I've always done what the company asked me to do,
Piyush: but they're
Anand: not able to who [00:20:00] they are and what their brand is. How do they see themselves and what is their purpose and all that. So I have a program which you call Managing Careers, and I have a framework for that.
Anand: Give you the framework as.
Anand: In the first 10 years I tell companies that individuals, that they should focus on learning and networking in the second 10 years. I encourage people to good, be good at something specific not just be a generalist at that time, 20 years of experience and just general things is not very good.
Anand: But then you should be good at something that you can say and the world should stay. So you should have a personal brand around that. In the third 10 years, I tell people is that, you max out, or your corner office will happen in your early fifties at the sort of end of your third year.
Anand: Or whatever else. So from 2030, you need to know where you are going and then plan away to get to where you are gonna be, what your ultimate goal is. I say this to people who have completed 20 years rather than those who are starting up.
Anand: Because if I'm a, I don't know where I land, it's too much to think that far.
Anand: But if I'm already 20 years into the business, I know where the organization is and what is my ultimate corner office, and how do I plan to get to that? And then finally, when you get past that, you have to think about how will you mentor people and create the next level of [00:21:00] leaders. And then when you retire, how do you set yourselves up for retirement?
Anand: That's the program I run called Managing Careers Program. And there are a bunch of other things that I've been working on in terms of education, better courses. How do we look at now? I'm part of a bunch of committees right now. I'm trying to think about how to create more interdisciplinarity on the course.
Anand: How do you bring continuous learning into practice in various places and things like that.
Piyush: This is very impactful work that you're doing. In fact, a lot more today, I have uncovered than I knew about you earlier on. And so this is, thanks for sharing and I would say. What can my viewers and listeners do to help you and what would be the message that you would want to send out?
Anand: Okay, so let me give you the third thing that I'm working on where I can get some help, which would be me. So I got involved in this in the, in our cancer community because of family reasons. And I realized that in India, even though, or across the world, Indians, we are almost one sixth of the world population or however you look at it.
Anand: But we. Our medicines are not coming about India. So we are using other people's data for our cures. And this is true for cancer. So cancer, you'll find [00:22:00] that you need to find some biomarkers. And those biomarkers are coming from research studies done abroad in the US mainly, or Europe. So we need our own data sets for our own people.
Anand: So I set up along with a bunch of cancer people, something called India Cancer Genome Atlas. It's for ICGA foundation. The idea here is that we should build our data set for Indian cancers or cancers for Indian people so that when somebody is trying to find cures, they look at our data and if they find, use our data, we'll have cures for our people.
Anand: So that's one program I set up, and that's where I'm trying to do some fundraising as well, because the goal of what we are trying to do is to make this data available through open access, which means the data should be available freely to anybody who wants to do research on this topic. I'm not saying open source, but data should be you.
Anand: You put some, submit a proposal, and if the proposal is accepted, you get access to the data.. And for that there's no business model, so it becomes philanthropy supported and we need to find ways to collect that data set. And I'm doing something similar on the diabetes front as well. Wow. So I've been working with a group called R-S-S-D-I, which is the Research Society for Study of Diabetes in India.
Anand: And here again it's the same problem. We in India, don't know. What our problems are and we need to find cures and solutions for our people. Its high time we did it ourselves rather than depend on somebody else doing it. So I'm working with a community of people where I'm interacting with five to six different communities.
Anand: One is clinicians, the other one is computer science researchers in India. Third is biology researchers, fourth is philanthropy and fifth is the government. And there's a lot to do here and I can take any amount of help that I can get on this topic for sure. I think the US, of course, is well set up, but Indians in the US will also benefit from us finding India oriented cures because of some of the DNA genetic kind of diseases or the impacts of various biomarkers or food habits and all that might have a consequence on how we respond to some of these diseases as well.
Piyush: Absolutely. I think we could do a detailed follow up discussion on that itself as a topic at some future time. But next time you are around in the Bay Area, we can meet. I'm assuming you are collaborating with Stanford and hospitals here in the US
Anand: We are not collaborating a whole lot with Stanford and others yet. I have met some of them in the past, but most of the work that we are doing at the moment is in India, I mean for the US cancer thing, we are working with TCGA. This is the genome atlas.: And on the diabetes side, we have a few doctors in Harvard that we have collaborated with, but most of the work is happening locally in India. Unfortunately, the diabetes problem is a much harder problem than the cancer problem because it's a long gestation, long period, and it's a lifestyle and longitudinal disease in some sense, and everyone, to some extent, responds differently. So I have not figured out exactly how to address this problem, but at least I'm learning at the moment.
Piyush: We should definitely have a follow on discussion because there are organizations like AAPI, the American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin and I've been volunteering for American Society of Engineers of Indian Origin and TIEi and some of these organizations can bring this to visibility.
What you are doing is very noble and this needs a little bit more collaboration and spread the word. So I’m happy to be your volunteer, and I would follow up on that on a separate note.
Anand: Yes, absolutely. And just to give you a link the work we are doing at Cancer stuff is under ICGA, India Cancer Genome atla.in. And you should be able to see we have a conference we put together
Piyush: That will be in the show notes and definitely the message will go out.
So thanks for all the great work and to wrap all of this up - wonderful conversation today.
What would be one last message that you want to give for the young folks who are just entering the workforce? because that's something which ignites me and makes me passionate about serving the community. So please tell us.
Anand: So I tell people who are young and starting out that yeah, meaning the world that we saw in our lifetime is gonna be very different from the one that they're gonna see. I think everyone is gonna get fired from their job five, seven times.
You're gonna see series of gigs as a career. You'll have many different things you'll do along your life. So it's not gonna be a linear path that young people have to take, but that can be exciting and challenging as well. So what should you do now so that you can be successful in this kind of a career?
Anand: So I give three things that I would say here:
One is focus on good discipline and habits because that will help you in terms of whatever you want to do in future.
Second, learn to learn because we don't know what might come. So the earlier you figure out your learning style and everyone learns very differently.Learning how you learn is a very important skill to acquire.
And the third thing is to learn to network. I think there are more people, and how you work with other people and all that stuff, the network that you build is actually what's gonna take you a long way.
So those are the three things that I tell a lot of people this and that is what I give people in terms of their first 10 years of their career that I share.
Piyush: Yep, yep. Yep. Wonderful. Dr. Deshpande, this has been an amazing discussion. Thank you for sharing your remarkable journey and vision. Your story is definitely going to be very useful to our listeners and your the power of curiosity, perseverance, and giving back. That's your motto.
And we wish you, and your companys and your philanthropic operations great success and from me, Thank you very much and hope see soon.
Anand: Yes, thank you. Enjoyed talking to you. Stay in Touch.
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