This is Kamla Bhatt we bring you part 2 of our conversation with Zoho’s Sridhar Vembu.
Kamla: You described Zoho as an Indian company with a skeletal staff here in the US. What were some of the early pitfalls and problems that you encountered working on Zoho because we know about the success but what about the pitfalls?
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Sridhar: Sometimes in anything new you do, you simply have to figure out a lot of things like how to write software efficiently to run as a web service on the internet. All of these we have to figure out and those are the engineering challenges, then the market challenges so figure out what for example in CRM market is. But I didn’t come from a CRM background, we came from a different background so figuring that out. So those are the challenges but we have smart people that we have developed internally a cadre of managers and engineers who are come up in the system and they are really smart and they observe a lot of companies. Basically we are also a business school and so they learn and they put their lessons to work, the next generation. So that is how we are. It’s very much an organic process its not like day one when we think of doing something and we get that right. Its like we launched something and then we learned a lesson, sometimes it’s a failure and then we analyse why we failed, go back do it again. We have done that with even our CRM for example; our first ten ships were in 2004 as a product we didn’t ship it as a web service. The whole CRM was a product. And then we decided no that is not the right way to talk in this market so we actually reloaded as a web service. So that is the ability to learn from your mistakes and adapt. That is what I think is the key to success.
Kamla: Tell us about your hiring process. How many IITans do you have in your company?
Sridhar: May be 3, including myself. So IIT has not been the big source that is because there is so much of competition. Everybody from Google, to Yahoo, to Microsoft everybody is recruiting so we don’t stand a chance. So our way again is a unique hiring philosophy over the years. We struggled a lot you can say its not like we had a plan for this. So we hire from a variety of colleges and what we noticed in the beginning is the academic record and the performance did not have much of a common relation. Someone could have been really good on paper but...
Kamla: It is the exact opposite of the Google hiring process.
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