Sridhar Vembu is betting on people like you and me!

Had an opportunity to listen to the amazing Sridhar Vembu of the Zoho Corp. yesterday.

For context, Zoho is a big ass bootstrapped unicorn made by people who were from a tiny village of rural Tamil Nadu.

We Tamilians wear Zoho as a badge of honor!

And Sridhar Vembu is one of its co-founders, who bets on people like you are me.

I’m not kidding. Listening to him speak yesterday was really insightful.

He really does believe that Tire 2 & 3 cities are the bloodline of India and people are going to do some remarkable things.

He also added that even though Zoho has 16,000 plus employees, the actual product is engineered by less than 50 people. Rest all work in support & sales.

For instance, Zoho Sign, which is one of Zoho’s biggest cash cow, has 15 employees in its development team.

When speaking about how commoners can upscale their technology, this one line popped out, “Purchasing software isn't true technology investment. Real innovation requires dedication to R&D.”

Sridhar also added that he directly works with the R&D team, and it’s one of the main reasons why Zoho is successful now.

He wants every business to invest in true R&D, however small it may be.

To top this all off, I tracked him down to get the long-overdue photo with him.

I want to emphasize one final thing before I sign off, “Indians leaving the country and becoming giant CEOs is not pride, Indians staying here and battling problems here are the actual superheroes.”

Thank you, Sridhar, for coming back to us!