
Founder of ZOHO Gives Bootstrapping Tips on Mixergy - jasonlbaptiste
http://mixergy.com/sridhar-vembu/
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sridharvembu
As I said in the interview, I am a regular on Hacker News, and would be happy
to answer any follow up questions (well, at least the ones I can answer ;-))

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netcan
What's your presence in India? Do you develop locally?, sell locally?

Is it still an exciting place to be for a software person?

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sridharvembu
Our office is in Chennai, where we have over 1000 employees. All our software
development is in Chennai.

Is India an exciting place to be for a software person? Yes, absolutely!

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yarapavan
Great work SridharVembu and zoho team. I'm interested to know the technical
composition of the Zoho project teams? How does it work?

Without engineering graduates and constantly evolving programming languages,
frameworks, paradigms, and tools, how do you keep to speed and scale ?

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johnrob
Fascinating comment thread on the first TC write up of Zoho:

[http://techcrunch.com/2005/10/02/zoho-writers-ajax-word-
proc...](http://techcrunch.com/2005/10/02/zoho-writers-ajax-word-processor/)

The first comment (from Jason Fried): That’s a total rip of Backpack. I’d
think twice about covering such blatant rips like this — it hurts your
credibility to support these sorts of businesses and ventures.

Zoho is yet another example of why competition is not something to avoid!

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sushi
How do you hire engineers? I have heard that you hire kids from schools in
Chennai/Madras itself and teach them programming and basically equip them to
create practical solutions.

Also, how come we hardly get to hear about some Zoho engineers leaving the
company to create their own startup. What's the secret that engineers are so
happy working with you?

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ordinaryman
// Sridhar, allow me to answer the 2nd part.

I guess you don't imply that Zoho engineers who leave the company to create
their own startups were not happy working there.

I was happy.

That was the reason that I ended up working for over 8 years instead of _just
2 years in some software company to gain experience and then start out on my
own_ , which was my goal when I joined there from college.

Regarding the secret, I believe it boils down to the work culture. He
encourages and respects feedback from every employee.

Anyone can provide feedback/opinion - including about CEO's actions, directly
on a company wide forum and have the CEO respond to it. He agrees if he may be
wrong and does not mock at you if you were silly. That attitude encourages
open culture. So you do not have "Yes Sir, OK Sir" coding-monkeys, but much
better engineers who are satisfied with their work.

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chaosprophet
Hey sridhar, question for you: I have heard the reasoning behind zoho hiring
out of schools rather than colleges, but considering that most of the most
pleasant as well as least pleasant experiences of my life occurred inside
college, don't you think you're depriving people of an experience that they
can get nowhere else?

I know that it's upto the kids to decide whether they want to take the job or
not, but if I had been given a study for 4 more years or start earning now
offer, before I entered college, I would have taken the job. I would hardly do
the same now that I know more about life in college.

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yuvipanda
Most of the 'engineering' colleges in chennai are geared towards churning out
Outsourcing/BPO fodder. Technically minded folks would have a hard time there.

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DilipJ
interesting interview. I never would have guessed Zoho was doing 40M in
revenues, 12M+ in profits. They have a lot of great tools for small
businesses. I have yet to find a better (and free!) CRM alternative than what
they offer.Never again will Benioff or Ellison get a penny from me!

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randv
$40 mil revenue is largely from their products and services on the network
management and element management side (called AdventNet). They are not
exactly a typical startup.

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mwerty
Not sure what you mean. Which successful (non-acquired) startup do you
consider typical?

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andrewtj
I got a good feel for the origins of Zoho from the interview but I am a bit
disappointed with the drop outs. It's normally not an issue but this time it
sounded like Andrew let a few points slide without clarification or followup.

EDIT: Andrew - have you thought about having another band available for
running your audio through when Skype's playing up?

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ryanhuff
I have to give Andrew and his guests credit for continuing through the skype
issues. It must be tough after the nth disruption.

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SingAlong
Is there anyway to download that video from mixergy? I would like to save a
local copy.

(Heard mixergy is a paid services for older articles)

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vibhavs
I may be downvoted for this, but...

    
    
      -If you're on a Mac, navigate to the page using Safari.
      -Start playing the video
      -Open the Activity window (shortcut: command + option + a)
      -You should see a large file being downloaded into your cache. 
       (In this case, it'll be from Wistia CDN).
      -Hold the option key down and double click on the file.
      -The file will now download to your downloads folder 
        as a .flv which can be opened by VLC.
    

This will work for most video sites on the web: Youtube, etc.

