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Shout out to Sridhar Vembu, founder of Zoho http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sridharvembu http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sridharvembu
by tinuviel 4y ago
Shout out to Sridhar Vembu, founder of Zoho
http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sridharvembu http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sridharvembu
- ignoramous 4y agoThere are a few more co-founders: I want to provide details of our early history because they are not well-known. There were two bootstrapped entities, one in the US and one in India back in 1995. In the suburb of East Tambaram in Chennai, India, my brothers Kumar Vembu (now founder and CEO of GoFrugal and also active in Zoho Corp) and Sekar Vembu (now founder and CEO of Vembu Technologies) and Shailesh Kumar (who heads our Engineering and Zoho Labs today) started a bootstrapped operation at home. Kumar returned from the US after a very brief 1-year stint, and found some contract software development work in the field of telecom software and that was how he paid the bills. In the US, our co-founder Tony Thomas, who I talk to almost daily to seek his wisdom, my personal daily Buddha, started a bedroom operation in New Jersey in 1995, and he brought in our co-founder Sreenivas Kanumuru (CEO of vTiger). Tony’s elder brother Joy Thomas, who recently passed away (RIP, Joy) and one of the all-time great students from IIT Chennai, helped Tony with a personal loan. Tony had started to work on a library for the SNMP API protocol in Java. As of late 1995, I was not in the picture, other than advising my brothers. A common friend from IIT introduced me to Tony (who was 3 years ahead of me in IIT and I did not know him during my student days). I then introduced Tony to my brothers in India. They started working together in mid to late 1996. - Sridhar Vembu, 25 years of Zoho (2021), https://archive.is/bpfUC https://archive.is/bpfUC