Episode Intro by Host:

Nirupama: Hello, and welcome to this special episode of the MathCo podcast. I’m your host Nirupama. You might be familiar with me if you’ve listened to our other podcast series, Coefficient. I’m a journalist, researcher and podcaster, currently the Content Lead for Thought Leadership & Podcasts here at MathCo.

Now coming to this episode and what makes it special. And that is the fact that MathCo just turned seven! That’s right. They grew up so fast! (in a fake teary voice)

So, seven years ago, in early September, Aditya Kumbakonam, Anuj Krishna, and Sayandeb Banerjee came together to set up TheMathCompany with just a couple of other people.

And today, with around 1,500 employees, presence in three continents, and with some of the biggest brands in the world as its clients, and also quite a few recognitions and accolades in the industry, it is very safe to say that this ain’t a startup anymore.

Over these years, MathCo has seen ups and downs—tremendous growth, as well as its fair share of challenges. Now there’s a lot to talk about how we got here. In fact, Aditya, Anuj, and Sayan have spoken a lot about this journey: what led them to start up, the challenges that they’ve faced, and how they navigated through all of it.

So on this seventh anniversary, I asked the Cofounders of MathCo seven questions, which were focused on the present and future of MathCo.

So in this special episode, you will hear Aditya, Anuj, and Sayan candidly share what’s on their mind right now, and how they’re thinking about the future of the company.

I asked each of them two unique questions and one common question that all of them had to answer. Make sure you listen to the whole thing because there’s a surprise at the end.

Great! Now let’s hear from the Cofos, starting with Aditya.

Episode Conversation:

Aditya: I’m Aditya Kumbakonam, one of the Cofounders of the firm. My role at Mathco is Chief Customer & Growth Officer. I’d like to believe that I’m fairly simple. In the sense that I don’t do too many things; work and family are pretty much at the centre of everything.

Apart from that, I regularly play computer games, Football Manager, Age of Empires, any RTS game.  For the last 18 months or so, I’ve gotten into running. I think that I spend an inordinate amount of time doing that lately. I’m also fascinated by chess theory. I spend quite some time reading and memorizing concepts.

So not too many things…taking vacations probably once a year, but work and family are pretty much at the centre of everything.

Nirupama: Wow, this is really fascinating. The last bit you said was chess theory? Can you tell me a little bit more about that?
Aditya: So I’ll keep this fairly simple, but I realized this recently and many people just play chess; they learn the rules and play chess. And that’s obviously great, but you may decide that you want to get better, or as you think about getting better, there are a certain number of combinations, permutations and combinations that the game is always constrained by.

So, pretty much every game has been played before. And I mean, that’s an exaggeration, but there is enough theory, at least for the first 20 moves, that this is the best move. The grandmasters pretty much have all of that in their head. And that’s called theory. And I think there was a show called Queen’s Gambit on Netflix that also popularized this.

So, pretty much the first 20 moves. If you don’t want to make a mistake, then you should know your theory.

Nirupama: Oh, wow. That’s something I learned today.

So the first question that I have for you is about where we are as a company. We’ve finished seven years and we are definitely not a start-up anymore, right?

So, as we grow from this start-up to, you know, a large organization in this stage, what are the things to watch out for, that we should keep in mind? And as a Cofounder, what are you thinking about?

Aditya: Right. There are a number of things. And I think we are still—as founders—still learning about some of those.
When we started MathCo, I always felt like—always thought that—things came naturally to us. We made the right decisions. But that was because we were good at starting up. I’m sure you’ve heard of many start-ups that struggle in the beginning. And of course we struggled as well. This is not to say that the initial years were not struggle, but I think we were a lot more confident and sure of ourselves than the amount of learning that happens today.

In the past, I think hustling every day, building a lean, successful company pretty much came from a desperate need to survive day in, day out. And we were good at that. Unfortunately, things are not the same. The same things that you do when you are a small company, even the same things that you do when you are a 500 employee organization, not the same when you are thousand five hundred and 2000.

You still have to hustle, but that won’t be enough. You have to make an entire system—or a machine—work, and not just a bunch of individuals or a group of people. And I think that’s a big difference. It’s a lot more than the simplicity of the sentence itself. It means that as a Founder, you have to move from thinking about people and processes to thinking about systems and how you’re going to design them better.
Being able to say that you’re going to push through a particular vision is not going to happen just because you have the intent and the force to do that. You have to inspire people. You have to get groups of people to work together. And I think that’s how a company gets built. So that’s the first thing to answer your question a little more directly.

There are multiple things that we have to get right to build a best-in-class organization. I think the first thing is managing demand and supply better as we go through the peaks and troughs of our performance. When you’re a small company, you don’t have too much of a base and everything is growth. Wins and losses…if you have more wins than losses, that’s enough, you’re growing. But when you’re a large organization, at least a medium sized or a small medium sized organization, as we are today, I think you have to be very conscious of building a long term profitable organization. Otherwise very quickly, it can go downhill.

The second thing is making tough choices. That make us better in the longer term. As start-up founders, as problem solvers, our instinct usually is to fix problems immediately, with a very short term mindset. I think even today we find ourselves thinking about the first solution that comes to our mind and questioning whether that is the right solution in the longer term, because there are so many decisions that may seem right for today, or for the next year, but if you push yourself to think further and you really have the vision to visualize what can eventually happen because of that decision, you would realize that many times, you might make an alternate choice. Avoiding that temptation is really important.

Keeping the bar high in everything: the experiences that we give customers, the deliverables that we send out day in, day out, the kind of people we hire in the company, the interactions that we have. I think we have to keep the bar high.
And this is not just about trusting a few people, or yourself, because you—or those trusted few—can’t be there everywhere. And you actually have to design a system where what you’re doing scales really effectively.
Experimenting—you have to continue to experiment because the day you stop experimenting, you will stop growing. I sincerely believe that.

So you have to experiment, but you have to have the courage to call a failure when it happens, and cut your losses. And I think that’s really, really hard, because a lot of people wait for a long time to cut their losses. At the same time, you also cannot…you have to give it time.You have to give it critical time before you evaluate whether it is working. So really—finding that balance; and it’s not just, I think, for different people in the leadership team, we are making investments every day. And I think all of us have to inculcate that culture where we experiment, but we call a failure quickly if that happens.

And lastly, I think as a culture, we have to put enough systemic checks in place to avoid blind trust. I think that’s important. It’s not a group of 50 people, like I said, that you can trust to get things done, but it’s an entire organization. So you have to put in enough checks to ensure that everyone is not trusting somebody and then hoping that things will happen.
So those are some big challenges that are top of mind. As we go from a startup to a large organization, those are some things that we have to watch out for.

Nirupama: In the last seven years, I’m sure we didn’t, you know, MathCo didn’t get here without ups and downs. And I believe that, you know, part of the success is thanks to the leadership, all of you, your ability to predict and plan for what lies ahead and being proactive instead of just being reactive.
So from where we stand now, what challenges do you see ahead for MathCo in the next few years?

Aditya: First thing that comes to mind is that yes, we have grown 2x, 3x, year after year, but the path to growth as well as the growth itself is not going to be the same over the next few years. We’re going to grow differently. And it’s time that we recognize that. All growth so far was the same, right? And again, when you’re small and growing 2x, 3x, it doesn’t matter, but we have to recognize that services growth is different from product growth. Engineering growth is different from a particular industry growth. Capability growth is different. And all these things mean different outcomes for us over the longer term. So making sure that we are investing the right amounts of time, money in each of these levers and maximizing our growth is very important. And it’s a challenge because we have to grow up as leaders, and as a company, to be able to make these right decisions. That’s one thing that I think is important.

We have to build executive relationships with our customers. We have to go higher up the chain. I’ve been speaking about this for the last few years, but if you think about our vision, our vision is to build connected systems that enable our customers to make holistic decisions happen.

And you have to go higher up the chain because the higher up we go, the more visibility we have, and the more value we can add. And I think over the next few years, we have to go to CXO levels.

To make that kind of impact, we have to keep a high bar when it comes to some of the services and products that we deliver. Scale itself breeds mediocrity. And I think we have to design systems to eat this out and fix it before it starts to affect that brand. This is a challenge that most companies that are traversing our path, or going from a start-up to a small company will face.

Culturally, we have to find ways to be honest and real. We have to understand that diplomacy and superficial conversations will just lead us to failure.

So these are some things that I can think of that are real time challenges for us and things that we have to overcome over the next few years.

Nirupama: For MathCo’s birthday, what is your resolution?

Aditya: My birthday resolution is that I’d like to build the next level of leadership from within.
I think we have a lot of young people that have to be given the opportunities to do things that they’ve never done in the past. I think it’s really easy to go out there and look for ready-made talent, but it’s against why we built MathCo itself in the past. So my resolution is: over the next few years, I think, take the risk with the younger folks. Give them an opportunity to do roles that they’ve never done before; invest in them, and build a better company.

Nirupama: Wow. The honesty and amount of wisdom per sentence in Aditya’s responses just blew my mind. There’s a lot to think about there. But before that, let’s hear from Anuj.

Anuj: Hi folks, I’m Anuj. I am the Chief Product Officer at MathCo. So I’m the one that focuses more on what are we building for the future. And also what our brand is going to look like, working in conjunction with Peeyush (Chief Marketing & Strategy Officer).
If not this, most likely I’d be sitting in a bookshop—hopefully owning it—and reading books. That’s probably what I’d be doing.
The one thing that most people don’t know about me—I think a lot of it has already been said in the past—but I guess one thing most people don’t know about me is that I used to drum in college.

Nirupama: Thank you so much for the introduction, Anuj. So I’ll get to the first question that I have for you. MathCo has heavily embraced GenAI in our solutions and we are going big on it. So how do you differentiate between a hype and something that’s truly valuable and path breaking, that you should definitely adopt?

Anuj: Sure. So I think…first, what is important to understand is that there are foundational elements to Gen AI. While there is hype around Gen AI, there are some foundations like the Large Language Model, which are the core of this whole thing. And I do believe that those foundations are here to stay.
Just like over a period of time, there are newer and newer tools that people have. This is one of those tools that has come into the picture.

What is important to also note is that, you know, businesses and their problems have not changed. I mean, for the most part, like 80% of the problems probably have not changed; they’re still the same. And now you have new tools to be able to answer some of those problems and questions that exist.

One thing I’m happy about is the fact that what this has done is: it has brought to the core, the importance of asking questions. It’s been formalized in the form of Prompt Engineering, but at its core, what we are realizing more and more is that, the people who ask the better questions, and who are able to construct questions better are going to be the ones who are going to thrive. Because answers have been more commoditized—or the ability to provide answers.

So in terms of how do you deal with other hypes like this, I feel everything will have that core element of something that you can take away. And it’s important to identify what that is, and it’s important to contextualize it to the things that you’re doing for different customers.

It’s through that process—whether it is us as an organization or customers themselves—that’s the only way that you’re really going to get value through the application of the foundational element.

Nirupama: Thank you. That makes a lot of sense. So the second question I have for you is sort of related to a question I asked Aditya. So Aditya spoke about the challenges that he sees ahead for MathCo and how we are preparing for it.
And I want to ask you: what are you confident about doing or achieving in the next year or two?

Anuj: Sure. So firstly, I think that, you know, obviously, it’s important to acknowledge that every journey has its ups and downs. It’s the trajectory that you’re on that matters. What is the overall trajectory that you’re on? For the nerds and the statisticians out there, I think it’s more about the trend, you know, that you’re on.

So we have always been on that upward trend; that has not changed. And I think in the next two years, what I anticipate is for that upward trend to continue. We are getting more and more new customers. We are in a situation where we are considered to be at the forefront of some of these new technologies and new things that are coming up. What that means is new and exciting and fresh work for a lot of people. And also, opportunities, as growth happens, for multiple people to do bigger and better things.

I think what I see in the next two years is for that projection of trend to continue. For those new opportunities and exciting new work to happen. And for young folks to get big opportunities to do big things is, I think, what I anticipate and I’m pretty sure about over the next couple of years.

Nirupama: What is your birthday resolution for MathCo?

Anuj: I was thinking about this and, I was thinking about how birthday or new year resolutions usually are like: “Hey, I’m going to exercise this year,” or “I’m going to, you know, quit something this year.” And along the same lines, I feel that for MathCo, my birthday resolution would be that we train our muscles better.

When I say muscles, I mean our muscle of how we deal with customers; what are the experiences we provide on a daily basis—every interaction; how we manage our own company; how we set the bar high.

These are all muscles that need to be trained on a consistent basis to make sure they don’t atrophy. So I guess my resolution is that we work out properly over the next one year and train those muscles.

Nirupama: And have you thought of a regimen?

Anuj: They say that when you’re doing these workouts, the most important thing is consistency, right? You might see failure from time to time. You might have a day where you’re not doing nutrition properly, or when you’re not doing exercise. But what is more important is: how can you get back on track and maintain consistency over a period of a long time?
Because only through consistency are you going to get results. So same thing holds: consistency is the regimen.

Nirupama: From those answers, it is clear that Anuj is hopeful about what lies ahead. in terms of the new technologies we’ll work with and the new kind of projects and roles that people will get to take up.
And I’m actually astonished by how brief he was in conveying all of that. Now let’s move on to Sayan.

Sayan: Hi, this is Sayan. As you all know, I’m one of the Cofounders, and the CEO of the company. Being the CEO, I obviously play a wide variety of roles. In particular, you know, I work very closely with all the talent teams: talent acquisition, PSO, Co.ach (our L&D function), so on and so forth.

And I do a lot of work which are more external-facing. That is to do with our investors, on the PR side—with media and things like that.
If I was not doing this, if we had not started TheMathCompany—or even before that, if I have not been in this business altogether—I think I probably would be a musician today.

Many of you probably already know that I used to play. I say used to play because, you know, today it’s almost negligible. But I probably would’ve been a musician, playing sitar. Or maybe even being a music critic, you know, writing my own columns and things like that.

Other thing, which I think most of you probably know is that I’m a foodie, really like to experiment with food. I travel a lot for many reasons. But my travel rules are only eat local, right? Don’t eat, you know, dal tadka when you are in Cochin, for example, right? I could have been also doing a blog or a vlog on food. I mean, I would have loved to do that as an alternate.
Nirupama: So my first question for you is, you know, today there is a lot of debate about whether remote work can actually, you know, truly replace in-person collaboration.

And MathCo has embraced remote work since, I think, 2020-21. If you think about it, for about half of the company’s existence, we’ve had remote work. So I thought it’d be perfect to ask you this question now: where do you stand on this now, based on your learnings in the last few years?

Sayan: Interesting question, because we are sitting in a time where I think this debate is, you know, kind of going around us a lot. But let me take a step back, right? If you go about three and a half years back, when COVID struck, all of us were forced to start working from home, right? There was no option. It was not a choice that any of us made, but that was the necessity at that time.

Initially, I would be candid that none of us had a clue, right? First few weeks, I remember, all of us were struggling because this is not a mode that any of us were used to, right? We were used to working in the office with our teams, huddling around a whiteboard, solving problems. So this was very new for all of us.

However, as time progressed, I must say that I was pleasantly surprised by the way we could figure out how to make this mode work. Three and a half years later, if I look back, I would say that we definitely have made progress; learned how to work in this mode, no doubt about that.

But to the fundamental question that can this mode of working substitute…you know, be a good substitute for in-person collaboration? I would say that the verdict is, you know, not yet out. I mean, the verdict is out there. I don’t think there is one clear answer.
What I have learned over this period, and I can share this with all of you is that it depends on the nature of work that each of us do, right? There is some work that can be done very well by one single individual, right?

However, there are many more roles in our company—I mean, forget about, you know, what’s happening outside in the bigger world—even in our company, that require far more collaboration as teams. And I’m not talking about large teams. I’m talking about sometimes 3-4 member project teams working on the same problem who can probably achieve a lot more through constant communication, interaction, you know, huddling together. So that’s one big learning.

The verdict is out there. I think as time goes by, I have seen, you know, more and more people really wanting to also come and work together. And at the same time, there are many who have really got the benefit of this mode of working, right?
So, it’s a fragmented one.There is no…If somebody comes and tell you that, look, there is a clear yes or no answer. I can tell you that they are fooling themselves, or something like that. And so, I think we’ll all continue to figure out what is the right medium. How can we solve this problem? That, that’s how I look at it.

But having said that, you know, I’m not even, uh, you know, questioning when we had to make a decision. As you said, we declared way back, you know, in early 2021, that we will work from anywhere. Because at that time, where we were as a company, it was very, very important that we give clarity to people, right? You know, at least for a period of time, you have to give clarity—that at least for the next few years, we’ll continue to work in this mode.

And then look, I think the only thing—as they say—constant is change. So the world obviously keeps changing, over the years, over a period of time. So that will take its own course and things will happen.

I’m sorry, I’m not giving you one straight answer because there is no one straight answer. And that is the truth. It depends on, as I said, the nature of work, the roles. You know, it depends on a lot of different contexts.

Nirupama: Yeah, I completely agree. And the whole point of this conversation is to have a candid, honest answer, right? So, I think that was perfect.
And the next question I wanted to ask you is more of a, you know, a slightly broader question. You are the CEO of MathCo and you have worked for a long time. And you’ve been part of the founding team even at your previous workplace. So, from your experience and what you have learned, what do you think makes MathCo tick? You know, what are the things that make MathCo what it is today? And to put it in other words: if someone were to, let’s say, write a book on MathCo, what would the chapters be about?

Sayan: First of all, you know, what makes MathCo tick—I’m not necessarily claiming that we have arrived, or that we are the only one, we are successful or anything. But yes, we have definitely seen fantastic traction. There are definitely certain things working in our favor in this industry where there are so many players—literally in thousands—and who all are kind of in a similar space, trying to, grab a certain part of the market share. I think we have, you know, in a short period of time, in the last seven years, come up to a place where we get counted among the top four or five, right? And maybe even the first two. So, which clearly shows that there are certain things that are definitely working right, in our favor.

The first thing that I will talk about is I think what makes TheMathCompany tick—it may sound like a cliché—is the team and the associated culture around the team that we have been able to build. Let’s first talk about the team.

I feel immensely proud for the kind of team that we have been able to put in place right from day one, the kind of talent that we have attracted. And I’m not only talking about just purely analytical talent, but in every different sphere—be it marketing, be it sales, finance—we have really been, I would say lucky that we have also been able to attract a passionate set of people willing to go that extra mile to build something valuable, build something remarkable, build something long lasting, you know, and that I think that continues.
It’s not about the first five or 10 people. Even in the last one year, you know, when we have grown to such a large size, we have continued to bring in people of extraordinary calibre, but more importantly, with tremendous amount of passion to build something, right? I mean, if I look around, with our leadership team, with our managers, even the analysts who joined straight out of college, you know, the kind of energy and passion that I see is remarkable.

So, and the associated one, I think, which probably goes hand-in-hand, and one nourishes the other to some extent, is the culture that we keep talking about, right?

The culture of being a fairly meritocratic organization, the culture of really relying a lot on young people to do extraordinary things. The culture of being, you know, fairly open, even at this size of the company—every Friday, have an all hands forum where everybody can join and everybody can ask questions, everybody can comment, right?

Having an organization where there is definitely, you know, less worry and concern about hierarchy, right? “Should I be asking my Lead?” The Lead then asks their Manager…I have seen so many young people come up and ask very interesting questions to me, right? So that culture of meritocracy and openness and, you know, not worrying about hierarchy and having that sense that, you know, we are building something meaningful altogether.

I think that combination, I feel is what has worked for us so far. The other thing that I’ll talk about is our whole approach to ensure that, you know, we make consumption of our work happen. One of the big tenets on which this company was built is that we will not only produce a lot of insights, you know, whatever you call it as—AI, data analytics, et cetera, et cetera—but we will constantly work with our clients to ensure that these outcomes or outputs are consumed, and hence value is realized.
The fact that we are building more and more business applications for our clients and not just producing insights and numbers or summaries is because we want to make that consumption happen. A lot of that happening on a platform like Co.dx is definitely a big advantage. It’s a big differentiator.

All of these, you know, kind of comes under that big umbrella of consumption, right? In order to make consumption happen, you want to build applications. To build those applications, you build a platform Co.dx that makes it far more easier to build or, you know, kind of makes it much more efficient to build, the quality is much better. Therefore to build the application, you have to build, an end-to-end capability. So not drawing a line between—Oh, this is all machine learning algorithms, data science. This is all tech. This is this engineering, you know, data engineering. Or this is all MLOps or DevOps or, you know, kind of things like that—really going across the spectrum in a lot more seamless manner.

And starting with the source data, building the applications on the platform Co.dx to make consumption happen. I think that whole phenomena has also helped us to stand out, you know, in the crowded marketplace. And that has definitely ticked for us. So this is one big angle which I described in one shot.

But I think all of these starts with people and the culture that you have built. I mean, without that, none of these, I think is possible and I’m very confident about that.

Nirupama: What is your birthday resolution for MathCo?

Sayan: I think my birthday resolution for MathCo is to really imbibe and bring bigger focus on our core values that we call as BASICS (learn about it here) in everything that we do, right?

What I’m trying to say is that…let’s start with talent acquisition. When we bring in somebody to the team, make somebody our colleague, are we ensuring that there is enough Ambition & hunger in that individual or that person? Does that individual exhibit Speed and really enjoy, you know, being in an environment that, you know, definitely speed is the essence of that.

Or when we talk about Co.ach, right? Our whole learning program—are we really creating an Elevated experience for everybody there?

Are we making it complex or are we keeping it Simple enough? Are we imbibing the whole mantra of simplicity around it?

All the work that we do for our clients. So, so important that we really create an elevated experience. We exhibit ambition, anger. We show speed to deliver value.

When we look at building our team and constantly nurturing and growing them, are we thinking of Individuals? What are their needs, what are their strengths, weaknesses, how can they leverage the ecosystem that we have created, and how can we leverage the best out of them?

So in every stage, I want to ensure…my resolution would be that please use basics, B A S I C S, as we call our values, as almost a guiding principle, right?

If we go back and ask questions, are we imbibing the values in any of the work that we do? And if the answer is: “Well, I am not sure,” then that’s not good enough, right?

It has to be a thumping “Yes!”, that “Yes, we are imbibing those principles, those values,” and I’m sure we’ll be an even better workplace for all of us and a much, much bigger and a better company if we do that.

Nirupama: Lots of great resolutions there!

That brings us to the end of this special episode. When I set out to make this episode, I did not expect it to be, you know, truly candid and as grounded as it turned out to be.

There’s so much to take away from it. And I’m sure some of us might want to listen to it one more time. But remember, you don’t have to bother pausing to take notes, because we upload transcripts of all our episodes on the website. You’ll find the link in the description.
And now, we’re coming to the surprise I was talking about earlier.

As an anniversary gift from our side, we are signing off today, not with a generic outro music, but with a beautiful Sitar piece played by Sayan that he was nice enough to record, just for this. It’s called Bhatiyali dhun, a folk river song from Bengal. Thank you so much for tuning in. Enjoy!