Sridhar Vembu

Zoho corporation ( published on 6 Mar 2015 in Times of India, Bangalore)

Early life and family :
He grew up in a very modest middle class family in Chennai. His father was a stenographer in the high court. Neither his father or mother went to college.  He went to a Tamil medium school till 10th standard and did his 11th and 12th in a English medium school. He got well in school and got into IIT Madras for electronics engineering.

What influenced him to become entrepreneur?

At IIT he says he did not pay much attention to the courses. He was more interested in political science, economics. He read Bertrand Russell, Ayn Rand and was very influenced by zen and art of motorcycle maintenance. He realised socialism is our problem. He had read about how Japan' Singapore and Taiwan developed. All of these thoughts band beliefs from his student days came together when his brother Kumar who was in the US then suggested that they should return to India and dona software venture.

The big challenges:

They had started in the networking space and had about 150 customers. But when the 2000 dotcom bubble burst, only 3 customers survived. He realised that they cannot just depend on this one space. That's when Zoho was born.