sridharvembu

14 ms·

61.
by sridharvembu 17y ago
As I said in the interview, I am a regular on Hacker News, and would be happy to answer any follow up questions (well, at least the ones I can answer ;-))
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by sridharvembu 17y ago
(Disclosure: I am the CEO of Zoho). We use Zoho Mail for our own 1000 employees. My company email address has been around and active for 13 years. I get 450 spam messages a day. Zoho Mail typically misses catching 1 or 2 a day; far more imp
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by sridharvembu 17y ago
Being Indian, this is a subject I think about a lot - I do mean a lot, almost as much as I think about our company (Zoho). I have also read a lot of literature on this subject - most recently the wonderful book Capitalism with Chinese Chara
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by sridharvembu 17y ago
At Zoho, we are thrilled to have jQuery hosted on Zoho Discussions. We use jQuery extensively, so it is particularly sweet for our developers. We plan to offer forums free for all open source projects. We have been strong users of forums so
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by sridharvembu 17y ago
My point is a simple, mathematical one: 80%. That is a good lower bound on the percent of kids in India that are not in the "system" as described by you, not because their parents are enlightened but because they simply can't afford the s
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by sridharvembu 17y ago
I have a different perspective on this, having built a product company (Zoho Corp) in India for the past 13+ years. Basically India's emerging IT industry coincided with the global credit bubble of the past 2 decades, which simply inflated
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by sridharvembu 17y ago
On Zoho, I want to clarify that we always were a product company, with product development based out of India from the beginning. We never followed the traditional offshore consulting model, which we felt would make it difficult to build pr
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by sridharvembu 17y ago
I meant mostly at the high school level. Particularly in the "high end" school districts. Loads of home work, drills, competitive test taking ... because, you know, the Chinese/Koreans are all "way ahead" and score so well in international
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by sridharvembu 17y ago
We were hunting for a domain in 2003 for our new initiative. We tried variations of SOHO (small office home office). Zoho happened to be up for sale. I was reluctant to shell out the $5K (I am cheap), but Raju Vegesna, persuaded me we shoul
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by sridharvembu 17y ago
I was always fascinated by Japan, particularly in the context of India . After we started, I started looking closely at Japanese companies as role models. They had figured out stuff over the years that is unbelievable. Even today, there exi
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by sridharvembu 17y ago
We plead guilty to having a fragmented suite - that was the price of rapid evolution. But they are coming together nicely now. Check in on us every few months (seriously!). We hope to surprise you.
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by sridharvembu 17y ago
I think he meant funding from already profitable products. If that is what he meant, that is true. Zoho quietly got funding from our own earlier products, which got funding from our even earlier products, and so on, until we reach http://w
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by sridharvembu 17y ago
An even better term for us is "and Indian company with an American HQ" - in early days due to foreign exchange restrictions in India, it was painful to have the HQ in India. Increasingly that has faded as India has liberalized. We just impo
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by sridharvembu 17y ago
Mix of both. Growth curve shifted back n years (in my case 8 years - I did a PhD too, whose main utility was in coming to the US and then realize that PhD was a waste of time - all I can say is that I am a bit slow!). And those were some of
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by sridharvembu 17y ago
Re: lack of quality, it is a classic "early days" problem. 1950s Japan had a reputation much like made-in-China has today. It is amazing Japan is synonymous with quality today. It is easy to explain: in a mature economy, any new company wou
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by sridharvembu 17y ago
Very organic ... 5 after first year, 100 by 4th, 350 by 7th, 1000 by 13. Steady stream of recruiting over time, no huge bump, except in year 2000, when our revenue tripled, thanks to that bubble. But even in that year our headcount did not
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by sridharvembu 17y ago
When I was in IIT in the late 80's, the hot topic was brain drain out of India. So it is interesting we are talking about returnees now. As the Indian economy liberalizes, talent naturally stays home to pursue opportunity. In any case, Indi
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by sridharvembu 17y ago
It is worth elaborating on bootstrapping. When we started, the hottest tech company in the world was Netscape, and Yahoo was still an infant. So you can see how long it has taken us - nothing much happens to you in 1 year, 2 years and so on
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by sridharvembu 17y ago
I am in India now, so was sleeping as this thread happened :-) I hang out at Hacker News a lot, in fact, almost everyday I send an article to someone or other in the company. I strongly recommend it internally - I love HN (thanks, pg!). To
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by sridharvembu 17y ago
I came to the same conclusion (based on my own experience in teenage, and observations later) that there is a lot of talent waiting to be tapped in teenage years, and treating teenagers respectfully as young adults and giving them responsib
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by sridharvembu 17y ago
"To my ears this sounds incredibly bureaucratic and unnecessary when you work with competent people" Here is my explanation based on my observations. - The mass expansion of IT in India, particularly in its second decade (late 90's to the p
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by sridharvembu 17y ago
Badri, I have a more radical argument: quality of education is irrelevant for the most part. Ultimately the real task of education (i.e imparting knowledge) is borne by the employer or done as a by-product (sometimes an accidental by-prod
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by sridharvembu 17y ago
This is exactly what happened in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. In 1985, when I finished high school, there were less than 10,000 seats in the whole state of (about 60 million people). Today, there are more than 150,000. Today, practical
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by sridharvembu 17y ago
India built a vast distributed system of small reservoirs - also known as village ponds or temple ponds. The fact that the rural system of governance was dismantled (and they realized the problem, and tried to reassemble it in a pale imitat
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by sridharvembu 17y ago
This is a quote from the article: "India's vast farming economy is on the verge of crisis. The lack of rain has hit northern areas most, but even in Mumbai, which has experienced heavy rainfall and flooding, authorities were forced to cut t
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by sridharvembu 17y ago
For your information, the government recently legally conceded a case of autism-vaccine connection where the parents (both medical professionals) had a perfect record of their daughter's medical history. Keep down-voting me; but if you have
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by sridharvembu 17y ago
This whole autism-geek connection is a useless myth. I have a son with autism, and we know a lot of parents with autism. Parents come from every income range, social class, profession and "geek orientation". And contrary to another myth, mo
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by sridharvembu 18y ago
I read this last time 20 years ago as an undergraduate student in India, and I still find it inspiring after all these years. I find it particularly relevant today, when the Federal Reserve and the government are intent on destroying the mo
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by sridharvembu 18y ago
For convenience, the JDBC client API is available at: http://zohoreportsapi.wiki.zoho.com/Java-Client-Library.html The Google AppEngine version of Python library is at: http://zohoreportsapi.wiki.zoho.com/Google-App-Client-Librar... Sta
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by sridharvembu 18y ago
Can you tell us which ones you tried? I apologize for this opening day glitch.

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