Thread by @stockifi_Invest

Coming from an Indian middle-class family to Establishing a multi-billion-dollar enterprise

Mega-Thread on the story of Zoho and Sridhar Vembu
@svembu @Zoho

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1) Sridhar belonged to a middle-class family in Chennai. His father was a stenographer in the High Court.

2) After his schooling from a Tamil medium government school, Sridhar went on to do his graduation from IIT Madras, followed by a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering.

3) Earlier Sridhar aspired to become a professor and he had already published a mathematical paper, but then he realized that he wanted to do something more innovative.

4) When Sridhar observed that India does not have many software programs he decided to use this opportunity.

5) He partnered with his brothers and one of his seniors, Tony Thomas, and decided to build software applications.

6) They commenced their first venture, “AdventNet” from a small apartment located in Chennai in 1996.

7) Right from the beginning, the venture was outright bootstrapped and did not depend on any external funding.

8) At the initial phase, Tony Thomas acted as CEO and Chairman of the company.

9) Sridhar was the Chief Evangelist, mainly taking care of marketing and promoting the software packages.

10) Within a short span of time AdventNet acquired many clients, including some big ones like Cisco.

11) By 2000, the team grew to around 120 engineers along with a handful number of people in the USA. The company attained a total revenue of $10 million.

12)However in 2001, when Sridhar just took over the company as CEO, the markets crashed and the venture hit a major setback.

13) The majority of networking businesses saw a major downfall.

14) Sridhar spotted a new opportunity during that phase and decided to diversify the company’s offerings in order to grow back its customer base.

15) The network model, “Order Equipment Manufacturer” was converted to “Enterprise Model”.

16) It further led to the advent of “ManageEngine“. The Enterprise Model enabled organizations to streamline their operations with artificial intelligence and powerful analytical tools.

17) That’s how Zoho came into the picture. It offered companies a wide range of products including Sales & Marketing, HR & Finance, e-mail & collaboration, and IT & helpdesk.

18) After two years, Tony Thomas exited the company to start another venture.

19) Thereafter, Sridhar revolutionized the entire functioning of the firm from bringing customers on board to starting out Zoho University.

20)The intent of starting the university was to hire disregarded young professionals having a lack of degrees.

21) The university trained the students for a period of nine months to make them well equipped for practical work. Later on, they offered them employment in the company itself.

22)By 2009, the company changed its name from AdventNet to Zoho Corporation.

23)Many businesses gained by renting software programs from Zoho instead of buying licenses for expensive software packages. That was the initial phase of Sridhar Vembu’s success.

24)Over a period of time, Zoho Corporation diversified its services and evolved into three divisions. They were Zoho .com, WebNMS, and Manage Engine.

25) Zoho provides customized SAAS products including tools like: CRM, sales, campaigns, mail, chat, docs, connect, creator, app creator, reports, books, inventory, invoice, support, service desk plus, recruit, etc.

26)ManageEngine provides simplified IT management services with economical and user-friendly software programs. Some of their products include analytics, help desk cloud, application, active directory, etc.

27) With its cutting-edge technology, the company is serving millions of customers worldwide. It has branches all over the world, including Singapore, Japan, the USA, and China besides India.

28)Zoho ensures the utmost security of the data of its clients. Every single user's information is stored online and can be accessed anytime.

29)Seeing the rapid pace at which Zoho is growing, Salesforce CEO, Marc Benioff had shown a keen interest in buying the company.

30)He was amazed at the fact that Zoho could manage to offer the same product at $10-15 which Salesforce offers at $60-70.

31) Being a person with strong business ethics, Sridhar had politely turned down the offer.

32)Besides Marc, many other venture capitalists approached Sridhar to invest in his company.

33)However, he has been very determined to run the company on bootstrapping itself.

34) Zoho has made it possible to bring a wide range of online services, all in one place. At the same time, it aims at keeping its application cost-effective.

35)Zoho continuously strives to innovate and capitalize on ways to create software that can solve all business problems

36)Zoho has recently launched TrainerCentral to offer a collaborative e-learning platform to tap into the booming e-learning market.

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