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 ;-))
Sridhar- I think that was a great comment by you when you mentioned that you do not have an ego at Zoho. It was in response to Andrew's mentioning of Zoho members being able to use Google to login to Zoho.
I would also imagine that allowing members to use Google login on Zoho would somewhat beat the competitive advantage that Google has in this regard- in allowing their members to share one login across all of their apps. Good move.
I wonder how Zoho is able to manage so many apps. Do you have many different development divisions? You mentioned that you have over 1,000 employees. How many does it take to maintain just one of the apps? I'm sure it will be dependent on that app itself, but if you would allow us an estimation merely for the insight.
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!
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?
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.
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.
Most of the 'engineering' colleges in chennai are geared towards churning out Outsourcing/BPO fodder. Technically minded folks would have a hard time there.
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!
$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.
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?
-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.
