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Comment by acchow | Hacker News Reader

> Sridhar Vembu of Zoho said that no other company has built a billion dollar product company in India.

India has no other billion dollar product companies? Doesn’t Tata sell cars?

Software products. IIT -> Princton PhD in Electrical engineering -> Qualcomm -> Services Company in that space -> CRM product. And then moves his dev center to the lowest income rural village he can find.. "In 2004, he set up Zoho Schools to provide vocational software development education to rural students as an alternative to formal university education. A statement from the company states that 15 to 20 percent of its engineers have no college degree, but have received vocational education from Zoho Schools".

Legend.

I think he means software product company. Anyhow, regardless of that his statement is inaccurate because Zoho IS NOT an Indian company. Majority of its employees are in India (and the founder is Indian) but that's true for a lot of other international companies as well, that doesn't make them Indian.

It has its HQ in India, the founder is indian as you state as well (the other founder is american), the market is global, and the main jurisdiction is possibly american (?)

These things get blurry with global markets and jurisdictions, but I would definitely call them an indian company.

What makes them more Indian is the lack of VC which usually forces Indian companies to HQ/incorporate in Singapore or USA.

It would be interesting to see which jurisdiction they pay highest taxes in though. It’s possible to find out for India, UK and EU, maybe I will.

As you say the majority of staff are in India, the founder is Indian but also crucially the major stakeholder[1] is also Indian and lives in India.

I'm not sure how they could be anything else but Indian.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radha_Vembu

I stand corrected, I did some digging and found out that Zoho has recently reorganised itself and is now an Indian company.

He means a tech product company.

Most other billion dollar Indian tech companies are in the IT outsourcing business.

Why about the likes of Paytm or Flipkart?

Different industries - PayTM is mainly into finance while Flipkart (now owned by Walmart) is into online retail. (Though both also dabble in each others field). Just because they use tech, doesn't make them a software company.

He is a bit cuckoo in terms of making statements. Follow him on twitter.

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