If you haven’t, I wouldn’t be surprised. Quite frankly, neither had I until very recently (but, then, I am no techie). And that is because Sridhar Vembu, the founder and CEO of Zoho Corporation, likes to keep an extremely low profile. So while Infosys, TCS and Wipro are the Indian companies that we Indians sing paeans to, very few of us realise what an amazing company Zoho is.

Zoho Corporation started as AdventNet in 1996 in Chennai. The company changed its name to Zoho Corporation due to the popularity of its online office suite – Zoho Office Suite. While the company is now headquartered in California, almost 90% of its 2,500 employees operate out of the company’s Chennai’s office.

Zoho started small as a network management framework provider for telecommunications and network equipment vendors but an industry crash around 2000 threatened prospects for the telecom products. That led to the formation of Zoho Corporation as ‘a “born-on-the-cloud” company that offers software as a service (SaaS) – much like Google Apps or Microsoft’s Office 365 suite. Its range includes everything from word processing, spreadsheets, accounting and email to project management, recruitment, customer relations management (CRM) and a host of other applications used by individuals and small businesses.’ (N. Madhavan, Hindustan Times).

There are a few quite amazing facts about Zoho that all companies, especially start-ups, can learn from:

• Vembu is a great believer in the boot-strapped model (starting and building a company with little capital, generally from personal finances) of building a business. That is how he founded AdventNet. What he found was that the model he followed had no ill effects on his company’s performance and profitability.
• Zoho has remained independent to date. Vembu has not allowed any venture capital into his company despite major overtures and an aggressive bidding by Marc Benioff, CEO of enterprise cloud computing company, Salesforce.com, a company that is obviously shaken by the competition from Zoho.
• Zoho’s hiring policy is quite unique – it shuns engineers from the prestigious IITs and hires people who it sees as smart and creative. In an interview to Forbes in 2008, this is what Vembu had to say: “We hire young professionals whom others disregard. We don’t look at colleges, degrees or grades. Not everyone in India comes from a socio-economic background to get the opportunity to go to a top-ranking engineering school, but many are really smart regardless.

We even go to poor high schools, and hire those kids who are bright but are not going to college due to pressure to start making money right away. They need to support their families. We train them, and in nine months, they produce at the level of college grads. Their resumes are not as marketable, but I tell you, these kids can code just as well as the rest. Often, better.” Zoho is not a believer in student loans says he does not like student loans and has started the Zoho University which trains the company’s employees.

• Vembu is a fan of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and feels that it is companies like Zoho that will make the ‘Make in India’ concept come true.
• As far as revenues and productivity are concerned, N. Madhavan writes in HT: “Zoho does not disclose revenues… [But it is] growing 70% year on year. On a conservative estimate of $400 million, [the] 2,500-employee-strong Zoho is earning a revenue per employee of around $160,000 – which is more than three times that of Indian IT leader Infosys. Giants like Microsoft earn as much as $700,000 per employee.”

Vembu and Zoho have shown that you can start an extremely profitable company while staying under the radar; you just need to approach your business creatively and without a huge start-up budget. I am sure we will be hearing more of Zoho in the coming months and years.

(In the photograph, Sridhar Vembu is on the right).

Sources: Wikipedia; N. Madhavan, Hindustan Times; Sramana Mitra, Forbes.

Visual courtesy : https://www.flickr.com/photos/hotfromsiliconvalley/