sridharvembu

(Disclosure: Zoho CEO here) Have you looked at Zoho Sprints? https://www.zoho.com/sprints/

Zoho CEO here. Please take a look at our Workplace suite (Mail, Cliq, Connect, Docs & Office suite - collaboration and productivity) and judge it for yourself. Our Writer (word processor) and Show (presentation) have had major upgrades recently, and Sheet is getting upgraded too.

(Zoho CEO here) Thanks for the mention, but we are not yet at a billion dollars - we wish we were, though we are gaining on that goal :)

We are bootstrapped like MailChimp, have never taken any venture capital, and we won't. We have focused on building what we call "the Operating System for Business", because we envision that all the business applications will come together. That's why we have so many engineers to build that vision. By the size of the engineering workforce, we are probably already bigger than Salesforce.

(Zoho CEO here) We apologize for letting you down last year. We had a string of DDOS attacks that coincided with a flooding event, that made it difficult to restore services quickly. We have made substantial investments in the past year, in terms of infrastructure as well as operations.

Our own 4000-employee organization relies on Zoho services to run our entire business. We hope to earn your trust some day!

(Zoho CEO here) I am sorry to hear this. If you can email me your issue I will have it taken care of. svembu at Zoho dot com.

Are you working on compilers and runtimes? If you are interested in doing this, please shoot me an email svembu at zoho

(Zoho CEO here) My analysis of financial bubbles informs how we operate in Zoho. I believe the Greenspan-Bernanke-Yellen era will go down in history as one of the biggest bubbles the world has ever seen.

The economy is now fully addicted to bubbles, and the start-up ecosystem is particularly affected. Withdrawal from this bubble-drug is going to be painful.

A couple of anecdotes about the last big tech bubble of 2000. At that time, there were 300+ optical networking companies in silicon valley. We had sold our network management software to about 150 of them. By 2003, only 2 were left standing. We survived because we had saved up some money for that eventuality, and we reinvented ourselves using those savings.

One painful bubble memory I have is the real estate lease that we had no option but to sign in 2000. We moved from San Jose to Pleasanton to escape the worst of the bubble-rents but even in Pleasanton, while the rent wasn't ruinous (about $20 per square foot per year), the landlord forced a 7 year lease on us. Still, the rents fell to about $10 per square foot per year by 2002, but we were stuck with the higher rent for 5 more years. Fortunately, the company was financially strong enough to withstand it but the episode taught us a lesson in bubble-planning and bubble-survival.

I am shocked that people are signing $50-100 a square foot per year leases for 10 year terms these days.

Our goal right now is to survive the present bubble, bigger in some ways than even the one in 2000. I tell our people that there is going to be a serious bust and we should aim to survive it first.

To be clear, there are extremely few Indians who hold any kind of grudge about the British. On the contrary, the English language is more popular than ever, 60 years after the British left.

History is full of injustices. I don't see why the present generation of Indians should hold onto what happened to their grandparents generation. We don't need to suffer history now, we get to live in the present - that is the attitude I see in most people in India. That is why India is as peaceful as it is (we have to normalize whatever good or bad is happening to the population - "India" is not an aggregate in the same sense that, say, "Sweden" is an aggregate - so whatever happens in Sweden once a year would happen almost once a day in India, simply based on the relative population sizes).

(Zoho CEO here) Don't worry, we will continue the free!

I had a short debate with pg a while ago on HN, where I said something to the effect "Finance has created far more wealth in recent years than technology or entrepreneurship". I don't think that trend is good for the economy but that is the inevitable consequence of the monetary policy the Fed has been running. The economy is well and truly financialized, and finance rules.

LinkedIn seems to be changing, and I am not sure for the better.

Recently they stopped access to a whole bunch of CRM players to LinkedIn API. Only Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics are allowed now.

http://www.zdnet.com/linkedout-crm-companies-squawk-over-lin...

(Disclosure: Zoho CRM was one of the affected products - we offered to pay for their API access but no dice)

I have to disagree with the "can easily tell within ten minutes if someone cannot pass muster" part. Interviewing is hard. We tend to make such snap judgments but those judgments reflect our own biases.

I have come to believe over the years that interviewing measures interviewing skills. Test scores measure test taking skills. Success on the job requires success-on-the-job (to coin a phrase) skills. All those things correlate, but the correlation coefficient is not super high. In fact, ignoring those correlations can be an effective strategy to find great people.

I think of most VCs as "money brokers" or "money salesmen" rather than as capitalists or investors. A company taking in $100 million in venture capital is basically enabling the VC partner(s) to earn $2 million a year annuity until an exit. That 2% annual commission (that's what I call it) on every invested dollar is a substantial incentive on the part of the VC to push more and more money on companies that a) may not need it b) would be unwise to spend it.

I don't see any justification for the 2% on ever-larger rounds of investment. The work VCs do on a $100 million investment is not 100x more than the work they do on a $1 million investment. I hope that model gets disrupted!

There is evolving tentative suggestion that autism may be an auto-immune disease:

http://sfari.org/news-and-opinion/news/2013/large-study-link...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15546805 --- abstract -- Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a spectrum of behavioral anomalies characterized by impaired social interaction and communication, often accompanied by repetitive and stereotyped behavior. The condition manifests within the first 3 years of life and persists into adulthood. There are numerous hypotheses regarding the etiology and pathology of ASD, including a suggested role for immune dysfunction. However, to date, the evidence for involvement of the immune system in autism has been inconclusive. While immune system abnormalities have been reported in children with autistic disorder, there is little consensus regarding the nature of these differences which include both enhanced autoimmunity and reduced immune function. In this review, we discuss current findings with respect to immune function and the spectrum of autoimmune phenomena described in children with ASD. -- end quote ---

The immune system in new-born babies and young children is immature and under-developed.

In purely economic terms, China has performed a fascinating ongoing experiment.

The Party looked at the "end state" of an industrialized, prosperous middle-class nation and then decided to will that end state into existence. In that end state, China needs to urbanize on a massive scale and these cities are simply the physical manifestation.

This is the grandest scale human experiment ever, collectivist decision making at its finest (those farmers who are forced to give up the land don't have much of a voice).

Will this work? I don't believe we can begin to calculate all the consequences of this experiment. In any case, it is not obvious the causality runs the way that is implicit in this experiment: build cities, move people, and forge a vast urban middle-class out of rural peasants.

This book is a somewhat sympathetic description of that grand experiment (mildly sympathetic to the Party):

http://www.amazon.com/Chinas-Urban-Billion-Migration-Argumen...

Your point on "slightly below" Turning machines caught my attention - exactly the same terminology I have used. I want as many proofs (assertions) as possible about code, and Rice's Theorem is a problem, so slightly below Turing is on the radar. If you are interested, we can discuss this. Shoot me an email at svembu at zoho ...

Your comment captures the ground reality well. Rapid urbanization combined with a weak, ineffectual state is bringing out the worst in young men moving into cities for work.

As an Indian, this makes me really really ashamed and sad and angry. I would apologize to her as an Indian.

To understand what is going on in Indian society, I recommend this book by Naipaul, written over 20 years ago, but still very relevant: "India, a million mutinies now" http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55676.India

Basically India is in an utterly chaotic transition from an old established hierarchy where your caste and gender fixed your place in society to something that looks very different.

One part of the societal transition is that there is a vast horde of (mostly male) migrants to major cities in India and these men are absolutely not rooted in anything. They are away from their villages, their families, their social networks. For most of these young men, the social system, particularly gender roles, they experienced in the villages is very different from what they see in a big city. You put a lot of young men in that situation, they think anything goes, particularly when they see a foreigner or an urbanized Indian woman. They think of her not as a person, but as an object - but it is a different kind of objectification, where they feel inferior to the object, it is unattainable to them, so they act with cruelty and savagery. That is what is different between this form of objectification and normal patriarchal behavior which would try to be patronizing and protective towards women.

Those very same men, in their own village, would not do the same thing to a foreigner, because normal social restraints would apply. In a vast urban space, they feel the protection of anonymity and feel they can get away with anything.

The only short term solution, being tried in states like Tamil Nadu, is a massive increase in female police presence, both uniformed and plain-clothes police officers in public places in big cities. This does improve security for women where it has been tried (Chennai is an example of such a city). I hope her post serves us a wake-up call for the governments in India to think of measures like this.

We believe in fair degree of autonomy and tight-knit teams. I won't call it "open allocation" because we encourage people to stick to a particular work for a reasonable period to really excel at it (experience being the best teacher), but people do have the ability to transfer to other teams, or even across functional boundaries (engineering to marketing etc). The goal is to maximize mutual chemistry and cohesion, maximize autonomy. Our attrition rate tends to be very low, in spite of (or perhaps because of) there being no "golden handcuff".

No I didn't think you accused us of that. I merely responded what we would do as a rent seeker :)

As for the original accusations, "develop a thick skin" is my attitude, so you saw I never bothered to respond.

If your thesis is correct, the optimal strategy for us would be to sell when the prices are very high (like they are now) i.e collect the next 50 years of "rent" right now, because it is so readily available. Instead, we continually and steadily improve the product (while clearly acknowledging that we have much work to do). Don't you think that is an awful rent seeking strategy?

We are listening. We take all the criticism to heart. We are focused on UX and quality. You will see a transformation.

I would apologize to your team, and I would circulate this thread internally first. Second, I would review why we got this wrong. We went through a major redesign in CRM after that forum post, and the user experience got much better (our CRM sales jumped as a result). I acknowledge we still have work to do, and we will take your criticism to heart.

Your point is fair - there is no point in building if we don't build well. We are focused on it - and it does take a while for software to mature and become world-class, particularly complex applications with huge data models (lots of tables). As Joel Spolsky said (paraphrasing) it takes 10 years to get software truly right. We will take your criticsm to heart.

We simply enjoy writing software, and as long as customers keep feeding us, we hope to continue doing it. As for design, have you checked out any of our recent offerings? Would you want to offer a point-by-point critique of our design? I can be reached at svembu at zoho ...

Generally the math of the acquisition is that there is "synergy" (i.e 1+1 much greater than 2 kind of logic). Generally when a big price is paid in an acquisition, the intent is that the acquirer would be able to recoup their investment through such synergies, leveraging the acquired company's technology, leveraging the acquirer's own reach and distribution channels to sell more of the acquired product and so on.

We respectfully disagree. Our Zoho Leads iPhone app was launched in under 3 months from concept to shipment, and it was done by 2 people and it is selling! We have a substantial degree of autonomy in the company (possible because we are private) which keeps us nimble.

On David vs Goliath, Microsoft, Google & Salesforce are just 3 of the companies we compete with.

Your point is fair. Anytime we criticize a competitor, we risk being perceived as bitter, which is why I rarely post about Salesforce at all. However, I made an exception here because I felt customers should be educated that they aren't just making product choices, they are also making business model and organizational philosophy choices. My conviction is that our approach would result in a better outcome for customers in the long term. Of course, I can be wrong, and the only real proof is execution. Yes, we are focused squarely on execution - which is why I only post once in 6 months or so.

Bitter? We are doing just fine and we have intentionally chosen to remain private (17 years and running now). We could sell the whole thing or go public tomorrow if we choose to. So why would we be bitter? My post is to draw a clear contrast between us and one of our principal competitors. We believe our model would work better for customers long term. The post reflects that conviction.

Our people are prominently mentioned in our press releases. We respond on our forums, on twitter, on forums like this. The reason for the lack of a "management team" page is that we don't the org chart typical companies do. First, there are geographic divisions - India/US/China/Japan where we have offices which run fairly autonomously, and second there are product divisions, which also run fairly autonomously. A private company can operate this way (with a fair degree of autonomy in teams) that a public company cannot.

I have made presentations on the history of the company before. Here is a public document on this:

https://docs.zoho.com/show/published.do?rid=s0uyx6d6a7e9c859...

It isn't like we are famous or anything ;) which was why we don't go around touting it!