Zoho’s Sridhar Vembu has advice for engineers, scientists and doctors: ‘Do sales, get rejected, repeat’

Zoho’s Sridhar Vembu has a blunt piece of advice for engineers, scientists and doctors who want to build businesses. Go sell. Get rejected. Do it again. In a post, the Zoho chief scientist wrote that the first step for technical professionals turning to business should be sales calls. “Please go on a lot of sales calls, face rejection if necessary, but persist,” he said. The experience, he argued, forces better communication because explaining ideas turns out to be harder than expected. It also builds respect for people who sell for a living. And it might even make you decent at business.

There is no business without selling something, Vembu added. Sometimes the obvious needs saying. Vembu’s own path gives the advice weight. He built Zoho into a major software company without the usual venture-capital playbook, leaning heavily on product and direct customer relationships.

Why This Line Landed

For a generation of engineers and researchers who still treat sales as something other people do, the post felt like a reality check. India runs on technical talent that would rather build the product than pitch it. Engineers love the elegance of a clean solution. Scientists live for the data. Doctors are trained to diagnose, not to persuade. Selling, for a lot of these people, feels beneath the work, or worse, feels like something they were never taught and don't have time to learn now.

The Internet Reacts

Reactions poured in, and they broke into three fairly distinct camps. One reply cut straight to the point of lived experience: some of the most successful businesses were built by founders who picked up the phone themselves, rather than outsourcing the discomfort to a hired sales team. No shortcuts, no delegation. Just the founder, the rejection, and whatever they learned from it.

Another response pushed back, gently, but with a real point buried in it. Technically, sure, Vembu is right. Practically, though, sales teams often don't want the engineer anywhere near the call. Put a technical person in front of a customer and suddenly every conversation turns into a feature request. It slows the deal down. The commenter did admit there are workarounds, which is really the honest answer buried inside most disagreements on the internet.

A third reply went somewhere more interesting, almost academic. Rejection, this person argued, isn't just a bruise to the ego; it's data for the brain. It forces what they called "epistemic updates," a fancy way of saying you can't actually know if your product fits the market until the market tells you, usually by saying no. Stay inside the building, and your assumptions never get tested. Step outside, take the hit, and suddenly you know exactly which part of your pitch is broken, communication, positioning, or the product itself.

Sridhar Vembu's Latest Social Media Posts

Vembu has been on a fairly consistent public run lately, weighing in on AI eating into coding jobs, on whether tech valuations have detached from reality, and on why engineers need to become domain experts rather than just good programmers. There's a thread running through most of it: technical skill alone won't save you anymore. What will is understanding the actual problem a customer has, and being willing to sit across the table from them while they tell you why your solution isn't quite it yet.

Selling, in that sense, isn't a distraction from the real work. For Vembu, it sounds a lot like the real work. Whether every engineer-turned-founder reading his post will actually go make that first cold call is a different question entirely.