One internship. Anaek stories.
This was written by Tanmay. Tanmay interned with us in July and his enthusiasm and eagerness to learn and apply new things was only matched by his interests at trying out all sorts of cuisines Gurgaon had to offer. He once envisioned a meal comprising a pesto sandwich, chass and gulab jamun, ordered the three items separately and consumed them with a look of a victor in his eyes. We had a great time having you Tanmay and hope our paths cross again sometime soon.
Grinding it out in an early stage start-up offers you a chance to learn and make a meaningful contribution. You get a chance to work with some really bright people, working on real world problems, with many unknowns and restrictions. I got this opportunity when I got an offer from Anaek, that is working on developing new age work products for businesses.
I made a cold outreach to the company after bumping into them on LinkedIn and reading their blog. What piqued my curiosity was that they were really trying to do something new — taking an entirely novel approach to building software with the objective of making work days of businesses more productive. They were taking an instant messaging approach to software and I was determined to spend my summer at Anaek.

After making the initial contact, I got a coding assignment as a first step of the evaluation. After completing the assignment I went through a Skype interview. Given how much I wanted to work for them, I was nervous but I guess I must have calmed myself down somehow to have a compelling discussion. It’s all a blur to me now but after just two days, I got a call and was asked if I was open to moving to Gurgaon to join them. I could not have asked for more. I accepted the offer promptly and was given some Python and Django tutorials to start ramping up so that I could land with my feet running.
On the first day, I was so nervous. I wore formals and I thought it will be all formal procedures and I’ll need to behave like an actual intern we see in movies and shows. After reaching there, it was the exact opposite of what I had expected. I never imagined that all the senior people, my mentor, the founders would be so friendly and helpful. I got assigned a mentor, Subodh, who was made responsible for helping me out in my work and other things.
My overall objective was to build over the existing invoicing service running on Stripe, to create a new invoicing bot for Slack, so more people could benefit from what Anaek was using internally. The timeline for this was around 6 weeks. As a first assignment I had to plan this out by breaking it down into smaller tasks. Subodh helped me out here and I understood how to approach a deliverable by breaking it down into smaller bite sized tasks. I spent the next few days in getting acquainted with parts of the existing stack I would use and add to. After that, I learned a new technology Amazon Lex, on which I would started building the new bot and needless to say, it was an uphill climb.
I stumbled into many roadblocks. Broke things many time. There was time I gave up and simply wanted to get out. Little did I realise that this was a process. The process of learning to learn. I was slowly becoming accustomed to the scientific process of going through the documentation, trying out api’s, experimenting with tiny hello-world codes and eventually building all of that to get to a working code. I think this was my biggest takeaway.
Finally finishing the work on the product, I felt so proud of my work as I never imagined that I would get so much to learn and actually be able to build the whole thing out in time.
It did have its toll on me at times. Too many things to learn together sometimes made it difficult to focus on one thing. In the first two weeks I was constantly stressed out and staying in late. But all in all I loved working hard and pushed myself by getting inspired by the hard work all my colleagues did day in day out.
I feel proud to say that I was one of the first interns at Anaek. As their website says, ‘Fully stocked fridge and pantry’ and ‘A second to none coffee and tea collection’, trust me, it is not an exaggeration. It was a great experience working at Anaek and I am glad to have the folks over there as my first set of professional colleagues.
Btw my 6 week long internship, eventually did make it to production. Head to www.invoicetron.com to start invoicing your customers directly from Slack!
