Anand grew up in India, where his circumstances at birth could often define his prospects in life. So when he read Only the Paranoid Survive, Andy Grove’s 1999 memoir about leading Intel, he knew he had to find a way to Silicon Valley – a meritocracy where immigrants could change the world. He threw himself into electrical engineering at Stanford and founded a software company just as the dot-com bubble burst. The company survived the tech crash and was acquired, but adversity taught him that founders need the most support when they are struggling, not just when they are succeeding.
Even as the world evolves and Silicon Valley now moves to the cloud, that became one of his keystone principles as a seed investor in more than 80 startups across consumer and enterprise. As a company builder and investor, he is committed to a sense of long-term partnership and to getting 1% better every day. These values have helped keep his feet on the ground even when the products he built reached tens of millions of users globally – more than a billion in the case of Facebook Messenger.
