Zoho hasn't just built successful global biz but also created nurturing ecosystem for its employees

Arvind Parthiban always knew he wanted to be an entrepreneur. When he applied for a sales role in Zoho he was upfront about his entrepreneurial inclination. His passion and clarity reminded his interviewer Girish Mathrubootham of his own interview with Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu. Today, Mathrubootham, having worked in Zoho for over a decade, owns Freshdesk, a multi-million dollar startup. Parthiban decided to strike out on his own in 2015 and founded web-optimisation startup Zarget. Zoho is known for many things.

A pioneer of software product startups in India; a rare bootstrap success; an early adopter of cloud or remote computing; and as the first company to build world-class software products from Chennai and sell them globally. With a vision of building software products in India, Vembu cofounded Zoho as AdventNet Inc in 1996 along with his brothers Kumar and Sekar. Twenty years later, Vembu hasn’t just built a successful softwareas-a-service (SaaS) business but also created an ecosystem through Zoho that has nurtured and encouraged employees to start their own ventures—Freshdesk, Zarget, ChargeBee and Credibase, among them.

“My best learning ground was Zoho where I joined in 2001 as a presales engineer and left as VP of product in 2010,” says Mathrubootham, who founded Freshdesk in 2010 along with Shan Krishnaswamy, another former Zoho executive. Based on a SaaS model, Freshdesk, like Zoho, is also a multi-product company and sells globally in the customer relationship management market. Mathrubootham credits his experience at Zoho for him getting his product-building basics right. Like Vembu, Mathrubootham shares a vision of seeing India evolve as a ‘product nation’ and is passionate about creating a globally soughtafter talent pool in the country. The Zoho experience also helps entrepreneurs find validation for their ventures.





Parthiban recalls how within three months of incorporation, Zarget began sparking interest from multiple venture capital firms. “I think our investors bet more on the entrepreneurs running the startup than the product itself,” he says. “We had the experience of building a great product at Zoho and that created trust among our investors.” Parthiban started Zarget, also a SaaS startup, along with Naveen Venkat and Santhosh Kumar, former Zoho employees. The startup went on to raise venture capital funding from Matrix Partners, Accel Partners and Sequoia India. Parthiban says his decade-long stint at Zoho helped him transition into different roles and take on new opportunities.

“There was always a challenge to look forward to,” says Parthiban, recalling his time at Zoho. His stint at Zoho working in different product building and marketing roles gave him the confidence to pursue his entrepreneurial dream. Zarget has more than 1,000 customers in 10 countries within four months of its product launch. Of its 52-member team, more than 20 employees were previously with Zoho. “When people leave Zoho to start a new venture, they are leveraging the Zoho playbook,” says Sharad Sharma, cofounder of software product think-tank iSpirt. “They carry their learnings as tacit knowledge in their head. This tacit knowledge is so valuable that it’s often the difference between success and failure for the new venture.”




ChargeBee, a SaaS startup providing recurring billing services, was a result of Zoho minds coming together. Thiyagarajan T, Sarvanan (KPS) and Rajaraman Santhanam got together with Krish Subramanian, formerly with Cognizant Technology Solutions, to start ChargeBee. The firm counts Accel Partners and Tiger Global Management among investors. Zoho, and the startups that it gave rise to, share the same culture of openness, experimentation and support for the SaaS community. Vembu is a donor at iSpirt and mentors several startups. Mathrubootham and Parthiban, too, are active members of iSpirt.

A striking difference in the newage startups, however, is that they are well-funded by venture capitalists, unlike Zoho that has been bootstrapped. Vembu has been pretty vocal about his dislike for venture capital. “Venture capital firms are focused on exits. I didn’t build Zoho with an intent to exit in 10 years. You don’t build big companies that way,” says Vembu. Mathrubootham, however, says he chose the venture capital path because that was the sensible thing to do for a SaaS company competing in a mature market. Zoho started in a very different world with a different business model and was already profitable before starting the Saas division in 2006. Building SaaS products and selling them at a competent price in today’s market requires lot of capital, Mathrubootham says.

While a number of SaaS startups have emerged from Zoho, there is also an odd ball startup success in the Zoho cohort: Voonik, the fashion portal for women. The company is the brainchild of former Zoho executive Navaneetha Krishnan and ex-Amazon.com employee Sujayath Ali. They are both convinced that innovation isn’t restricted to enterprise products. Krishnan, currently the chief technology officer at Voonik, says he applied his learnings of product building at Zoho to build a democratised fashion platform for non-branded apparel. From SaaS to ecommerce, Zoho executives have leveraged their learnings to ventures in different domains. Vembu, who recently launched a new helpdesk product at Zoho, says he is happy with the ecosystem Zoho has been able to create for India. “It’s only natural for a firmly rooted tree to spread its seeds far and wide,” Vembu says. “That’s how an ecosystem arises.”

But when Zoho began operations 20 years ago, there wasn’t a conscious effort to encourage entrepreneurship. “Our original goal was to survive,” he says. “I did know that if we survive and thrive there will be many off-shoots as the natural part of our own success.” A multi-product company, Zoho operates in a thoroughly decentralised manner, giving each team substantial autonomy in the way they run. “In that sense, Zoho itself is a collection of smaller companies, and naturally that turns out to be great training for entrepreneurship,” Vembu says.

It is by virtue of Zoho that Chennai has turned into a SaaS hub, says Vinod Muthukrishnan, chief executive of customer analytics startup CloudCherry. It is like a cohesive SaaS community where everyone is connected to each either through Zoho or one of the startups that emerged from Zoho. Zoho’s success story of building in Chennai and selling to the world has also provided a sense of encouragement to other entrepreneurs to build software products locally.

Having shared a common ground at Zoho and now operating in a more or less similar market, the Zoho cohort seems to share a common vision: to grow together. “The Zoho mafia looks out for each other,” says Parthiban. Case in point, during the recent cyclone that hit Chennai and caused power outages in some areas, affecting businesses, Zarget’s team was camped at Freshdesk and ChargeBee.