Sridhar Vembu

Sridhar Vembu is the founder of Zoho, an office suite which is competing with the likes of Microsoft’s Suite and Google Docs. The good thing about Sridhar is that he is one of the very few Indians who can claim to have built his company around a “Product” rather than a service. Wipro, Infosys, Satyam etc merely codes existing applications for clients without any innovation, while the team of Engineers behind Zoho come up with new softwares every week. Competing with the aforementioned giants like Microsoft and Google does make this Chennai based company an underdog.

 First, a bit about Sridhar’s background. Sridhar finished his undergraduate studies in the prestigious IIT Madras in 1989. Then, he went abroad and finished his PhD in the world renowned Princeton University in 1994. Both, his undergraduate and PhD majors were in the Electrical Subjects.

He worked in Qualcomm as a wireless systems engineer for two years (1994-96), but moved to software due to his passion to do something for India.

Initially though, the company was focused on the telecom sector. However, when the telecom bubble was burst, Sridhar found himself left with highly talented team of engineers. The next logical step for them was to foray into the web applications sector and that was how Zoho was born.

 The most remarkable thing about the whole company is that, the team of programmers behind do not come from prestigious universities with an extra-ordinary resume.  On the contrary, Vembu recruits high school students coming from low economic back ground, who do not have the means to continue their education due to family pressures. Then Sridhar trains these kids and moulds them into the kind of programmers that they today are. Because of this, these kids are able to live a comfortable life. Sridhar says that the skills that these young people have acquired are comparable or even better than the graduates coming out of the universities.

Sridhar thus, does not have to pay astronomical amounts to his software team and this reflects in the low cost of the suite. The company which is in deep trouble financially because of Zoho is SalesForce.com which offers the software at around 65$ per user whereas Sridhar offers the same at a very low price of around 12$ per user. Having a team of 600 engineers in India, and just 8 people in Silicon Valley positions Sridhar leagues ahead of his nearest competitor.

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