00:00:00 – 00:00:09 Nitin Bajaj

Hey everyone, welcome to The Industry Show. I’m your host, Nitin Bajaj, and joining me today is Anjali Kakkad. Anjali, welcome on the show.

 

00:00:10 – 00:00:13 Anjali Kakkad

Hello Nitin, thanks to you. Thanks for the invite. I’m so excited to be on the show. Thank you.

 

00:00:14 – 00:00:15 Nitin Bajaj

Great to have you here.

 

00:00:15 – 00:00:16 Anjali Kakkad

Pleasure.

 

00:00:16 – 00:00:18 Nitin Bajaj

Let’s start with a quick question. Who is Anjali?

 

00:00:19 – 00:00:41 Anjali Kakkad

Oh, that is a big question. So I’m a technology enthusiast. I have been in the IT industry for more than 15 years, and I work for Google. I do a lot of innovation on Google Maps, on the AI and ML area, the newest, latest, and greatest technology that we all talk about. We build it, so I’m pretty proud of that.

 

00:00:42 – 00:00:54 Anjali Kakkad

And as my passion project, I have been working on one of the alignment of employees and the organization to grow the organization. And I’m hoping that the product turns out to be really good and I’m going to use it.

 

00:00:56 – 00:01:20 Nitin Bajaj

Yeah, the little that I’ve seen, I’m pretty excited and to take it first. Tell us a little more about Aligned Rewards before that. Tell us why. What made you start this or delve into this? And how did you come up with the name? And where is it now in terms of the size and scale?

 

00:01:21 – 00:01:57 Anjali Kakkad

The product was, it’s all an outcome of many years in the IT industry and the technology industry. There was a phase in the industry where people were continuously working remotely during the pandemic. And we have, our generation has been through many different stages. Like we are the ones who learned about the internet era. We know about the cell phone converting into the cell phone and converting into the smartphone. We are the generation who has seen it all and building the words now.

 

00:01:57 – 00:02:29 Anjali Kakkad

So with all these different challenges and different phases of life, I’ve seen that there has been a big gap in the industry where the alignment of the organization and the business is not always there with the employees and the vice versa. So the connectivity between these two things has been missing for a while, and I’ve seen it at every single place I’ve worked. So I thought that it might be a good idea to kind of fill that gap. So that is how we created Aligned Rewards.

 

00:02:30 – 00:03:04 Anjali Kakkad

The goal of the tool is more about helping the organization and the business to create clear-cut goals, identify them, have a clear matrix on the success criteria, and what is the efficiency that we are accounting for? What are the different areas that are going to grow? And then share it with all the stakeholders, not just keep it to like one big pool of people, like just leaders. Share with all the folks in the hierarchy, including the bottom-level people or the bottom to top.

 

00:03:05 – 00:03:40 Anjali Kakkad

So if there are goals of people that I want to, say, for example, buy a house, being in the area, it’s very hard to buy a house. You need tons of money to buy a house, including the down payment. If I go and tell my boss, is there even a scenario today that I can go and say that, oh, I want to buy a house, can you do something for me? And then I can make a little more money than what I’m making today. So the goal is to really keep both the ends together and keep in alignment and grow the organization in such a way where it becomes harmonious growth.

 

00:03:42 – 00:04:04 Nitin Bajaj

Not bad. Now, obviously, building something like this, but also in your journey as an immigrant and working across different cultures, large organizations, startups, you’ve seen a lot. And if I ask you to call out the one big challenge you’re facing, what would that be?

 

00:04:06 – 00:04:39 Anjali Kakkad

First of all, every challenge has its own learning. So challenges can be different at different stages of life. Me being an immigrant, when I applied for my H-1B first time back in 2012, it got rejected. And that was one of the biggest challenges. I was like, I don’t know what to do now. My life is kind of done. I can’t do anything. I can’t work. And I was about to get married. And that seemed like a big challenge at that time.

 

00:04:39 – 00:05:03 Anjali Kakkad

But guess what? It got resolved in literally less than three or four months. So to me, it feels like anywhere you are, you feel like it’s a roadblock. There are millions of doors open up, and you just find your own ways to kind of recover from it or get better and just move away from the challenge or face it and win over it.

 

00:05:04 – 00:05:13 Nitin Bajaj

I love that perspective. So on the flip side of challenges from opportunities, what’s the one you’re most excited about?

 

00:05:13 – 00:05:33 Anjali Kakkad

There is a recent one that happened to me. So when I was working on Aligned Rewards, it’s just a passion project. It’s not like something that I thought of building a product as big or thought of creating a major platform or something. I wanted to just fill this gap. So I started building it, building it, building it. There are so many features now.

 

00:05:33 – 00:05:58 Anjali Kakkad

And when I had few features, I tried to kind of talk to a few customers like two, three months back. And I would talk to people, and I would ask them to use my product, and nobody entertained me. So at that, I was like, oh my God, what am I going to do now? I don’t think it’s going to work out. And then two months later, I closed four different customers just in one week.

 

00:05:59 – 00:05:59 Nitin Bajaj

Wow.

 

00:06:00 – 00:06:16 Anjali Kakkad

And never thought of it. So it’s me two months ago and two months after, such a huge difference. So I didn’t know that this can happen this quickly, and I didn’t know this can be such a disaster in the beginning either. So we just learned.

 

00:06:16 – 00:06:20 Nitin Bajaj

You keep sticking to your goals, be relentless, and just keep going.

 

00:06:21 – 00:06:22 Anjali Kakkad

Just keep going. Yes, just keep going.

 

00:06:23 – 00:06:51 Nitin Bajaj

Love that. So as we talk about the opportunities and what’s to come, I also love to pause and reflect and ask people to take us back in time in your personal and professional career and share two moments. One where things did not work out as you expected. There was disappointment, failure, lessons. And another where things exceeded your own expectations and became a success beyond your imagination.

 

00:06:53 – 00:07:24 Anjali Kakkad

It’s so funny and so unique in my personal life in this particular scenario. So when the pandemic happened, it was a bit of a shock that I had my first interview with Google. And the Google interview went fine. They accepted me. The first interview, I cracked it, and then they sent an emailright after the pandemic started. So we were all at home. Nobody knew what was happening at that time. No interviews. Everything paused.

 

00:07:25 – 00:07:42 Anjali Kakkad

And on the side effect, I found out that I was pregnant with my second child, which even I didn’t know at that time. So then when I got through all these news, it was like such a magic or such a tragic moment. Magic slash tragic,right? All these things are happening in parallel.

 

00:07:42 – 00:08:09 Anjali Kakkad

Now, through the pregnancy, I, of course, working from home, adjusting to the new norm with nausea and throwing up all the time with pregnancy, changing hormones, a lot of things are happening. And I was a director of product management at a mid-sized company, which was about to get acquired. So there was heavy work pressure. And I was working like 14, 18 hours being pregnant. I did not think of my time. I just wanted to get through that time.

 

00:08:10 – 00:08:49 Anjali Kakkad

And towards the end of mid or end of my pregnancy, our leadership team in the startup, not the startup, but like mid-sized company, we decided we’ll take 50% pay cut to show bigger revenue. So we all took 50% pay cut. And that time was like so dicey. Second child about to deliver, no money, less money. And you know the company gets acquired, there is more money that comes. But what do you do afterwards,right? So I was like into many different my mind was like continuously juggling too many different things.

 

00:08:49 – 00:09:26 Anjali Kakkad

But right after I delivered my child two weeks earlier, in the middle of the meeting, I had my contractions. I had to rush to the hospital, ended the meeting immediately, delivered a baby, came back home, decided that now this company is it. I’m going to move on. Week eight after my childbirth, I gave my final interview at Google, cracked it, got a job at Google with a way better package, way better authority versus what I used to have.

 

00:09:27 – 00:09:53 Anjali Kakkad

On top of it, in between all this, amidst all these issues, I started my own company that I wanted. It was always my dream to be an entrepreneur. So I started my own company of IT services. And guess what? Everything is still working fine. So I didn’t think any of these things. There are challenges, but there is a power that comes within the challenge itself. So I guess that’s my one unique example that I want to share with you guys. Yeah.

 

00:09:54 – 00:09:59 Nitin Bajaj

Yeah. With the challenge comes the opportunity, and how you show up for it is where the magic happens.

 

00:10:00 – 00:10:00 Anjali Kakkad

Yeah.

 

00:10:01 – 00:10:13 Nitin Bajaj

Switching gears, amongst all the different things you’re involved in, what do you do to de-stress, to break away, and not think about what you would call work?

 

00:10:14 – 00:10:54 Anjali Kakkad

That’s my favorite thing to do in life. So I am a pretty rigorous follower of spirituality. So I always connect back to my roots, yoga, meditation, classical dancing. I have a PhD in Kakkad. So I also dance, and I teach dance too to little kids, including my daughter. That’s my detachment. And I recommend everyone to have at least one passion or one hobby to detach and connect to yourself versus everything else. Because all these become a noise at one point of time, but the peace within stays with you.

 

00:10:55 – 00:11:20 Nitin Bajaj

So true. And there’s a magic in being able to connect with yourself and be able to ground yourself into the reality. So kudos to you for doing that. And amongst all these different things, having that discipline to stay grounded is extremely important. What’s a book or a podcast that is a favorite and you want to share with us?

 

00:11:21 – 00:11:50 Anjali Kakkad

Again, I’m going to go back to my roots. The Bhagvad gita cannot be any other book than that for me. Every single time I face difficulties, I have gone back to Bhagvadgita. And any page and every page that I open, I see some answer to my question and the intuitions and more. So I think Bhagvadgita can be the book to read. If you have not had a chance to read it, I would highly recommend it.

 

00:11:51 – 00:12:22 Anjali Kakkad

The podcast, I mean, there are a lot of podcasts that I follow, but the industry show is what I would recommend for everybody to kind of follow through. There’s one more podcast that I have been following for AI, extra AI. It has been pretty valuable in terms of understanding how the market is moving in the current industry. Like with every single shift, it comes every month and a lot of insights, and I have found it very useful for my education purposes.

 

00:12:22 – 00:12:33 Nitin Bajaj

I agree. On to my favorite part of the show. We call this the one-line life lessons. I would love for you to share your life lessons with us.

 

00:12:34 – 00:12:50 Anjali Kakkad

Life lesson. That’s a very big thing. There are a lot of lessons. But I would say that try anything and everything and fail faster than ever and learn from it. Don’t get stuck with the failure. Just move on.

 

00:12:51 – 00:12:52 Nitin Bajaj

Love that.

 

00:12:52 – 00:12:52 Anjali Kakkad

Yeah.

 

00:12:53 – 00:13:11 Nitin Bajaj

You have extreme clarity, which I really appreciate, thank you for making the time to be with us today and for sharing your journey and story. I know you’re just getting started with all the successes you’ve had. There’s a lot more to come. So congratulations and all the best wishes.

 

00:13:12 – 00:13:17 Anjali Kakkad

Thank you so much. I’m so grateful. Thank you for giving this opportunity, and I hope this relationship continues.

 

00:13:18 – 00:13:19 Nitin Bajaj

Looking forward to it. Thank you.