# Part 2: Anand Jain of Clevertap on starting with nothing and learning, building and leading as you go along

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/first-principles-5628315/part-2-anand-jain-of-clevertap-on-starting-with-nothing-and-learning-building-and-leading-as-you-go-along
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/first-principles-5628315/part-2-anand-jain-of-clevertap-on-starting-with-nothing-and-learning-building-and-leading-as-you-go-along.md
Podcast: [First Principles](https://stenobird.com/podcast/first-principles-5628315)
Published: 2025-08-18T00:30:00+00:00
Episode link: https://share.transistor.fm/s/e0dbcd6d
Audio file: https://media.transistor.fm/e0dbcd6d/76aad432.mp3
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Duration seconds: 4283

## Resource

Check out our corporate subscription plan: https://the-ken.com/corporate-teams/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=corporate-subscriptions Hello and welcome back to First Principles. I’m thrilled to bring you episode 46, my conversation with Anand Jain, the co-founder of Mumbai-headquartered customer engagement platform CleverTap. Anand and I were once colleagues at the media conglomerate Network 18. He got out before I did. In 2013 he and two of his colleagues, Sunil Thomas and Kondamudi, left Network 18 and decided to fire up their respective laptops and code a new customer engagement platform. In just a few months, WizRocket, as it was then called, found its first – albeit non-paying customer. Then, in fairly short order, word-of-mouth driven inbound Seed and Series A investments. Over time it became Clevertap, raising over $180M in VC funding and becoming a globally used and respected product. As it turns out though, one of Clevertap’s operating philosophies is, well, First Principles. A strong reason is because Anand himself is a strong believer in it. At the age of 12 he lost his dad. Thus, at an age when kids are taught to focus only on studies, Anand started tinkering, repairing and learning computer programming to earn money to put food on the table. His first business was a scheduling system for lawyers in Ahmedabad, written in FoxPro. That was in 1994. His friends in college called him “khurpechi” in Hindi. Literally, that’s a person who uses a khurpi – a gardening tool – to turn soil over to weed crops or plants. Colloquially though, that’s a person who is curious, restless and is always meddling around with things that don’t concern them directly. Along the way, Anand co-founded Burrp, one of India’s first restaurant review portals,…

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