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The Zoho Journey

The Zoho Journey. My Background (Not a born entrepreneur). Perfectly ordinary background, lower middle-class family. Easy-going Tamil medium schools, no academic pressure at all (I have never had any homework ever in school, don't tell that to your kids!).

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The Zoho Journey

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  1. The Zoho Journey

  2. My Background (Not a born entrepreneur)

  3. Perfectly ordinary background, lower middle-class family

  4. Easy-going Tamil medium schools, no academic pressure at all (I have never had any homework ever in school, don't tell that to your kids!)

  5. Later went to IIT & Princeton but those weren't important to starting a company (no fancy background necessary!)

  6. Started originally with Tony Thomas, my brothers Kumar & Sekar, and friends Shailesh & Sreenivas

  7. We started with basically nothing, just a few of us and a few computers (no outside funding at all)

  8. Focused on a specialized small market, supplying software to network equipment vendors

  9. Our Web NMS suite became a leader in that niche (big companies generally ignore niche markets!)

  10. Such niche markets are easier to break-in without much capital, so ideal for starting out

  11. After gaining experience, skills and capital in the form of profits we saved up, we expanded our horizons

  12. First ManageEngine, and then Zoho came out, each targeting progressively broader markets

  13. ManageEngine provides Help Desk and Monitoring software for small & mid-sized business

  14. Zoho is our most popular division, but we started that division 10 years after the company started

  15. We took the slow road, we took our time Why?

  16. In India, we have had to build our skills from the ground-up, unlike in silicon valley where you can recruit from already established companies

  17. Yahoo recruited from Sun/IBM/Oracle, Google recruited from Yahoo, Twitter/Facebook recruited from Google ...

  18. In Chennai, there wasn't a comparable ecosystem so it took time to build up our skill-sets

  19. Culture is the most important asset of an organization, so focus on creating a great culture

  20. Culture in a start-up flows from the founders

  21. Culture determines how easily information flows within the organization, how fast you can respond to the market

  22. Culture determines how conflicts are handled, what kind of disagreements are OK ... (we need to disagree a lot!)

  23. Very informal, flexible org, networks instead of hierarchies, lots of small teams

  24. We like to learn from the best, acknowledge internal weaknesses openly (we always think we suck!)

  25. We are very self-critical at Zoho, try to have as little ego as possible

  26. Today about 1500 employees, one of the largest pure-play product companies out of India

  27. Are we successful?

  28. Only moderately so, we still have a long way to go, to match global competitors (we'll get there!)

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