"The secret is to keep at it."
Adit Jain Tweet
Post a summer training at EY, and a marketing internship at IIM Lucknow, Adit Jain began his entrepreneurial journey with Chatteron in 2015. A study of why Chatteron wasn’t making enough money brought him and the other co-founders to the concept of Leena AI, and there has been no looking back since then. Today, with an annual turnover now coming up to $10M, Leena AI has become one of the leading SaaS products in HR Tech.
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Table of Contents
Welcome to your ValiantCEO exclusive interview! Let’s start with a little introduction. Tell us about yourself.
Adit Jain: I am the co-founder and CEO of Leena AI, and have been the face of Leena since the beginning. Being an IIT-D grad and Y-Combinator alumni, I pride myself on the astute understanding of what HR teams need to deliver a stellar employee experience.
My entrepreneurial journey started with Chatteron, a horizontal platform that enables anyone to create chatbots without writing a single line of code. In the first year, I, and my co-founders saw significant traction on the platform, with around 30,000 individuals/organizations coming to build these chatbots. However, we observed they were not able to generate enough revenue. We conducted a study on why Chatteron wasn’t making enough money brought us to the concept of Leena AI, and there has been no looking back since then. Today, with an annual turnover now coming up to $10M, Leena AI has become one of the leading SaaS products in HR Tech.
The three books that I draw inspiration from are; Zero to One by Peter Thiel, Founders at Work: Stories of Startups by Jessica Livingston, and Good to Great: Why some companies make the transition and others don’t by James C. Collins.
NO child ever says I want to be a CEO when I grow up. What did you want to be and how did you get to where you are today? Give us some lessons you learned along the way.
Adit Jain: Since I was a child, I have always loved and wanted to create new things with my own hands, from Legos to electrical circuits for school projects. I loved how things would come to life and add value to everyone around me. I’ve always had that mindset since I was a child, and that played heavily into my wanting to create a start-up. And that was the reason why I decided to take the plunge and become an entrepreneur myself. Throughout my IIT-Delhi days, I had been building and creating, be it as a part of expos or computer algorithm assignments, and trying to figure out ways to make people’s lives easier and better.
I never specifically thought of becoming a CEO, but over time with creating new things that added value to other people, I realized that I liked to maneuver to the next best thing that the world needed. That is one specific thing that has kept me going on and even taking up the position of CEO of Leena AI as well. Having the idea of continuously creating and evolving and getting better every day is what gets me out of bed daily; striving for becoming the best in what I am doing.
Tell us about your business, what does the company do? What is unique about the company?
Adit Jain: Leena AI is an autonomous conversational AI-backed platform that helps enterprises better employee experience. The platform is powerful, flexible, and made to meet the needs of any enterprise. With Leena AI, companies can eliminate the need for HR staff to work on tasks such as answering policy-related questions, knowledge management, generating employee documents on demand, and managing employee tickets so they can focus on high-value activities.
Leena AI plays well with 20 plus platforms, including SAP SuccessFactors, ADP, Oracle, Workday, and Microsoft Office 365, and is trusted by over one million employees across companies like Nestle, Puma, AirAsia, Coca-Cola, Lafarge Holcim, and Abbott, among others.
While working on our first startup, Chatterton, we found that companies with more than a thousand employees were using the platform to create internal HR and IT chatbots. So we spent the next six months trying to figure out the issue they were trying to solve.
We found that in big companies, employees have very little access to info about company policies, or their salaries and benefits and that the information was all over the place. That’s where we thought of building a Siri for these enterprises that ease the work. But with big companies and multiple departments, it was difficult, so we decided to focus on one department i.e. HR. With Leena AI, we have created a platform that knows everything about HR. Having processed millions of conversations globally each day brings us one step closer to the goal. You go to Leena, and she knows what you are talking about, and that’s exactly why we are the best there is.
How to become a CEO? Some will focus on qualities, others on degrees, how would you answer that question?
Adit Jain: For me, it is the hunger for continuously building and adding value. It’s about having a dead-drop focus on adding value to customers, users, people, teams, and stakeholders as well. If you have that focus, everything else just falls in place. When you are a young CEO, having a customer obsession works well, but as you continue to grow, having empathy across the organization as well as understanding and working for your people is equally important. At the end of the day, it is not one person that makes a company or an enterprise great, it’s the entire team.
These two things have worked well for me on my path of becoming and holding the position of CEO at Leena AI.
What are the secrets to becoming a successful CEO? Who inspires you, who are your role models and why? Illustrate your choices.
Adit Jain: The secret is to keep at it. Continuously maintaining the thought of how we can add value to the people around us, our customers, and users. We at Leena are focused on creating more each day to help our customers lead an easy life.
Another thing that makes a successful CEO is helping your people achieve what they want out of their lives and be a part of the journey.
Now coming to the second part, there is no one single person that inspires me. I am inspired by the best. I try to understand who is best at what and then their work is what inspires me. If I am to name names, Elon Musk for his bold ideas, Jeff Bezos for his customer obsession, Steve Jobs for listening to his customers as well as knowing when to stop listening, and not just these people, I try to learn from everyone I interact with, including my employees. I learn from everyone.
Many CEOs fall into the trap of being all over the place. What are the top activities a CEO should focus on to be the best leader the company needs? Explain.
Adit Jain: According to me, a CEO needs to set the vision and understand where they want to be 10 or 15 years down the line. Creating a path for everyone in the company to achieve that. They need to be clear on the vision of the company i.e. the short, mid, and long-term goals of the company. In addition to that, having a planned path to achieve goals, a lot of leaders and CEOs miss out on the people element for achieving it.
But running an organization is always a journey and as the company evolves, people need to evolve as well. To enable the path or journey of your company, and become a successful leader, one needs to focus on enabling the people at the same pace as the company is evolving.
The Covid-19 Pandemic put the leadership skills of many to the test, what were some of the most difficult challenges that you faced as a CEO/Leader in the past year? Please list and explain in detail.
Adit Jain: When the pandemic hit, everyone fell into a pool of uncertainty. A lot of our sales pipelines stopped moving, and this happened on a global scale for us. Our targets were left out, cash inflow dried out with delayed payments. It became a difficult time for us as a startup. But one of the things that we did was have faith in our people. Unlike a lot of other organizations, we kept the faith, managed to get the cash somehow, and decided to not make any changes to our team in terms of furloughs, laying people off, and so on.
Another thing that we did well during the turbulent times was to keep transparency in communication. Our entire team was informed about the exact situation we were in and were aware of where the business was standing at that point in time. We communicated our plans about how we were proceeding and improving the situation. And we saw that our team appreciated the fact that we were trying our best.
What are some of the greatest mistakes you’ve noticed some business leaders made during these unprecedented times? What are the takeaways you gleaned from those mistakes?
Adit Jain: As I previously said, it was of utmost importance to us that we remain transparent with our employees across all our communication, and continue to have faith in them. During the pandemic, people around the world were being laid off, and communications were muddied for a lot of people as well. We had decided that we did not want to follow a similar path as them.
We never stopped believing in our people. We did not have to fire anyone, and in turn, our company grew leaps and bounds. Companies with cash reserves fired people, and that affected their team morale. The main takeaway, for us, was to be clear about what was going on. That brought us out of the situation that we were in. I always say this to people, “If we are not in control of the things happening to us, great communication and trust in your people will get you out of it.”
In your opinion, what changes played the most critical role in enabling your business to survive/remain profitable, or maybe even thrive? What lessons did all this teach you?
Adit Jain: The first and foremost change that we did was to start spending our monetary reserves strategically. Another thing that also played in our favor was figuring out ways to not let anyone go. Even during those difficult times, we were trying to find ways to retain as well as hire new people. The times were tough, we had to make cuts as the management so that our people could get their paychecks on time and in full.
The biggest lesson we learned was that people are resilient. As we were transparent with our communications from the beginning, our team understood the situation and stuck by us. It was about giving them a safe environment to do their work instead of worrying about their job. In return, everyone stood by us and gave their 100% to ensure our success.
What is the #1 most pressing challenge you’re trying to solve in your business right now?
Adit Jain: In the present scenario, high-tech companies are at war over talent. Everyone wants to get the best talents working for them. But I strongly believe that if we get the right people for the job, we will be able to create a company that impacts millions of lives globally in the next three to five years. And hunting those talents and getting them working for us is the biggest challenge we are working on right now.
You already shared a lot of insights with our readers and we thank you for your generosity. Normally, leaders are asked about their most useful qualities but let’s change things up a bit. What is the most useless skill you have learned, at school or during your career?
Adit Jain: Back in school, it was always history lessons. Especially rote learning the dates and years of historic battles.
Thank you so much for your time but before we finish things off, we do have one more question. We will select these answers for our ValiantCEO Award 2021 edition. The best answers will be selected to challenge the award.
Share with us one of the most difficult decisions you had to make, this past year 2021, for your company that benefited your employees or customers. What made this decision so difficult and what were the positive impacts?
Adit Jain: By the end of 2020 and early 2021, things opened up a bit, the markets started becoming more flexible. And the difficult decision was the question, ” What do you do now? With the cash reserve, do you go berserk with investing or not?”.
Deciding on that was tough because the world was divided on what was going to happen next, Will vaccines work? Will economies be back or another dip is coming. We decided to ramp up our marketing and sales departments as well as complete the pending appraisals for our people. Many deemed these steps as risky at that time, but we saw positive tailwinds out of the pandemic and made the call. This worked out wonders for us. Through September and October, we grew on a massive scale. And not just with targets, but as a company as well. We got our Series A funding, made multiple hires, only because we saw positive tailwinds come out of the pandemic as a business.
Jed Morley, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Adit Jain for taking the time to do this interview and share his knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Adit Jain or his company, you can do it through his – Linkedin Page
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