[HN Gopher] Sridhar Vembu built Zoho by questioning the conventi...
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Sridhar Vembu built Zoho by questioning the conventional wisdom
Author : sokradhar
Score : 104 points
Date : 2022-10-02 08:24 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (foundingfuel.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (foundingfuel.com)
| gsatic wrote:
| Given the very poor quality/growing cost of Engineering Colleges
| in India, his Zoho Schools(zohoschools.com) concept of
| paying/training high school students for IT jobs, is looking way
| ahead of the curve.
| TruthWillHurt wrote:
| After building a business with Zoho functions, blueprints and if-
| this-than-that flow -
|
| I can tell you conventional wisdom missing in Zoho like version-
| control and testing is very much needed.
| csomar wrote:
| I use Zoho and while it sucks, pretty much every other
| alternative sucks to the same degree (or more) than Zoho. (That
| is if you are looking for the full range of functionalities
| that Zoho offers).
|
| It seems to be an industry-wise thing and I wonder if it's time
| for disruption.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| But disruption in this space is not easy; these are massive
| and complex products; they look pretty trivial from the
| outside until you use them; there are 1000s of small features
| you need to have and support in all the workflows and api
| tools. I had to integrate the Freshworks/sales api a few
| weeks ago for instance, and that looks like a trivial thing
| to copy, until you start really looking into all it does
| under the hood.
|
| It is ready for disruption but to do so, I think it would
| need a holistic base that is consistent with respect to and
| between programming language/implementation, infrastructure,
| api and gui tooling. Now these are mostly manually adapted
| between each other when stuff gets added and the end result
| is a lot of leaky abstractions, instability, issues scaling,
| bugs and inflated infra costs.
| doix wrote:
| Feels like the disruption could be identifying a subset of
| the 1000s of features used that a cover a large enough part
| of the market and solely focusing on that.
|
| Instead of 1000s of features, have 40 good features. Limits
| how many customers you can get, but should lower
| development costs as well. There's probably a sweet spot
| that works.
| tomcam wrote:
| > identifying a subset of the 1000s of features used that
| a cover a large enough part of the market
|
| Deceptively hard. The only way to make this happen is
| using telemetry, and users don't like that,
| understandably. My belief is that Excel and Word are so
| successful because EVERYONE uses a different subset of
| those thousands of features. A one-lawyer office will
| differ from a dozen-person firm, a big general contractor
| will use different features from a small one, etc.
|
| You can't survey users about those features either. Users
| don't know what your surveys mean half the time. They
| will answer according to how they think you want them to
| answer instead of what they really do. Or they will be
| satisfied but name features they would never use because
| they heard about them at a conference once. They use
| different terminology from you, so signal gets lost
| either way. Ad nauseam.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| Well, rather than telemetry, I suppose excellent domain
| knowledge may help? Experience in a particular field
| might help you choose a particular workflow that could
| work for a lot of users.
| Markoff wrote:
| > When he returned to India from the Silicon Valley in 2019, he
| didn't settle down in Chennai, the headquarters of Zoho, but in a
| village called Mathalamparai, 650 kilometres away in Tenkasi
| district in Tamil Nadu.
|
| >The very idea of a billionaire moving to a village that's hardly
| known and hard to pronounce, and images of him pedalling a
| bicycle around paddy fields, driving an electric auto, or
| relaxing in a thinnai (shaded verandah) wearing a half-sleeved
| shirt and a white dhoti evoked curiosity.
|
| Must been written by American, as European I find the village
| name very easy to pronounce. Same with finding exotic riding a
| bicycle.
| sigstoat wrote:
| > Same with finding exotic riding a bicycle.
|
| how many european billionaires ride a bicycle as a form of
| transport rather than exercise?
| Kye wrote:
| >> _" Must been written by American, as European I find the
| village name very easy to pronounce. Same with finding exotic
| riding a bicycle."_
|
| I'm going to go out on a limb and say a guy named N S Ramnath
| who lives in Bangalore (Twitter bio) is probably not American.
|
| edit to add: As a European, you might be making faulty
| assumptions about the pronunciation, while he's aware of
| numerous pitfalls that vex people who don't know the language.
| As an American, I see this a lot from Europeans who try to
| pronounce place names from indigenous languages that we take
| for granted. I've heard some hilarious verbal renderings of
| Okefenokee, for example.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| You can go for a simpler case such as the city of Tucson.
|
| I pronounced it "takson", and my American friend had a laugh.
| He said it is obviously "tiuzon"
| Cockbrand wrote:
| Non-English native European here - now I'm curious, what's
| the correct pronunciation of Okefenokee? I found a video [1]
| which pretty much matches how I'd expect it to be pronounced
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/TMzoTPWBQ2Y
| jraines wrote:
| Haven't watched the video but i live near that swamp and we
| call it "OH-key-fen-OH-key"
|
| Not sure how the native way to say it was, but a lot of
| natural features in South Georgia were taken, nominatively
| & literally, from the Muskogee people ("Creek Indians")
| jogjayr wrote:
| > I find the village name very easy to pronounce
|
| I'm Indian, though not a Tamil-speaker, and I couldn't tell you
| with 100% certainty the correct pronunciation of that village
| name. At least not when written in the English/Latin alphabet.
| I can think of 2 different pronunciations for at least 4 of the
| syllables in it.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| On a tangent, my native language is not English and I very often
| find pieces written in 'Indian English' extremely hard to read.
| It gives the opposite feeling of reading a novel, NOT because it
| would be incorrect English, but because it seems to be stuffed
| with unnecessarily complicated constructs. Like double negations,
| long sentences interleaved with short ones, choice of nouns and
| verbs that are not the most common, while a common alternative
| exists, and so on. Does anybody share this feeling?
| kesava wrote:
| I am an Indian, and I share this feeling. We have some very
| good writers and lots of mediocre ones, not to comment about
| this particular post, which i have not read. Anyway, Indian
| schooling does not focus on writing as a skill, as much as they
| do on math and science.
| npinterview wrote:
| Being proficient in English was seen as being among the elite
| in the colonial era.
|
| This results in a premium being placed on complicated and
| convoluted phrases. Like in legal documents. This seems to be
| prevalent in the former British colonies in Africa too.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| This actually makes sense, grammatically/mathematically
| correct does not necessarily mean readable. If Indian
| schooling does not have it in focus, the result is as
| expected.
| keeptrying wrote:
| 50% net profit Margins - amazing.
|
| Can confidently say theres no business in the US at that scale
| ($600M+ revenue) with those margins. Ridiculous.
|
| There doesn't seem to be much literature in estimating gross
| profit margin.
| mlboss wrote:
| Receipe: hire in India sell in US/Europe
| sokradhar wrote:
| Sridhar Vembu built Zoho by questioning the conventional wisdom.
| For the longest time, no one took much notice. But now people are
| curious about what makes him--and Zoho--tick
| viraptor wrote:
| I really like the companies that don't take too much vc money and
| don't try to chase that exponential growth when there's just not
| enough market left unless you start doing questionable things.
| I'm a happy zoho mail/invoice/desk user (still bitter about docs
| going away though) and things have been mostly pleasantly boring.
| I think I started paying them before I reached any plan threshold
| just because I appreciated the service and being treated well.
| frereubu wrote:
| I've been curious about Zoho for a while, so I'm interested
| when you say "docs going away", because it looks like they have
| this: https://www.zoho.com/workdrive/ Is that not what you
| mean? I'd like something to entirely replace Google, including
| Docs - what was your experience?
| lewisjoe wrote:
| Workdrive comes with support for a Google Docs alternative
| (with full parity and even more features) -
| https://writer.zoho.com
|
| Note: I'm part of the team that makes Writer. Please feel
| free to reach out to support or write to me (my email is in
| the profile) in case you need help taking a test drive :)
| viraptor wrote:
| They had a service called Docs which was explicitly about
| document storage, tagging, revisions. It got folded into
| WorkDrive a few weeks ago. It's kind of the same features,
| but not the same idea. I did want the document management
| system, rather that a dropbox clone.
| srvmshr wrote:
| I had the fortune of meeting with Mr. Vembu on a social occasion.
| He was delightfully unassuming & very disciplined man. I wish
| other SV VCs & technocrats took a leaf out of his playbook &
| focused on being pioneers instead of trying every single day of
| creating a Steve-Jobsian aura
| tomcam wrote:
| I would love to hear how you determined on a single occasion
| that he is disciplined. Not trying to contradict you! I'm
| fascinated how that would become clear in such a short time.
| srvmshr wrote:
| Very punctual on time, polite in his preference that he
| expressed (food, servings etc), avoided business questions,
| kept his interactions to the point. He came across as someone
| very principled about how he went about his life.
| z9znz wrote:
| As a business email hosting customer, I have been very happy with
| Zoho for years. And on the rare occasion that I needed customer
| support, the experience has been very pleasant in comparison to
| almost every other tech company I depend on. Not only that, the
| pricing is very reasonable.
|
| It's funny that in the tech world, providing a reliable service
| at a reasonable price for two decades (and with actual human
| customer service) is contrarian. I realize that's not the point
| of the article, but it does apply.
| nxmnxm99 wrote:
| I have realized that you can take just about any SaaS company,
| no matter how saturated, and build a great product and
| overdeliver on customer service and succeed.
|
| Hard to do obviously but you don't need to strike gold on some
| new ideas or category.
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