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zoho.com

144 pointssridharvembu72 comments

Why is it so difficult to find information about Zoho's management team? 1600 employees and I can't find the name of a single person on their website.

EDIT: why downvote this? I'm truly curious. I was a happy customer until not long ago, Zoho's products are great, I just never understood why they don't have a Team/Management page. Unless I'm missing it somehow?

Who cares? Would you purchase a different product based on their racial makeup? Are you looking for the gender balance? Are you concerned about the sex appeal of their CFO?

Theres quite a bit you can miss when initially deciding on a product. Perhaps knowing the developers on the team would make a long-term decision on the product easier. For example I'm sure it helps 37signals to employer the creator of Rails.

Every startup has faces behind it. A story behind it. Zoho feels like it's hiding something. People like to see the faces of the startups they sign up for. You can't just wear a mask over your face and reach out your hand and say give me money, sign up for my service. Who are you? Where are you? What's your story. That information is important for a business relationship.

What kind of leader hides? It's like a man who won't shake hands or tell you his last name. It's just strange.

Do they think people are going to avoid Zoho because it's Indian? Facebook, Google, Craigslist, & a bunch of others were started by Jewish founders and you know how people have and continue to feel about Jews. Their ethnicity didn't impact them negatively.

Hell, Americans are paranoid about the Chinese and yet still we buy Made in China products.

Zoho should be proud. It came from India, it's privately held, profitable, and hasn't taken venture capital or bank loans. I'd put my name all over that If I were the founder. That's an amazing feat.

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!

> The reason for the lack of a "management team" page is that we don't the org chart typical companies do.

Would you say Zoho abides by open allocation for its workers? [1] I'd love to hear more about the organizational structure of the company.

[1]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2012/11/26/what-is-open-al...

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".

Seeing the picture of the CEO or management team hardly tells you anything worthwhile. Specially on his company's website. That you couldn't find the CEO on the website hardly means they're hiding anything, a simple google search would've told you anything you wanted to know.

Yes, people will avoid you based on your race. People will marginalize you if you are not tall, or your voice is squeaky. This isn't just anecdote, it's been studied time and time again. [1]

Jewish people are well known for being shrewd in business, for example, and often claimed to be unfairly favoured. That you would use them for an example is ironic.

You should judge on merit, not the "story" behind it nor because the founders don't exhibit your idea of social "normal." Exploiting people with your attitude is a huge part of what is wrong with society today.

[1] http://money.cnn.com/2009/07/17/news/companies/tall_book_ari...;

http://www.amsciepub.com/doi/abs/10.2466/pr0.1987.60.3.843

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/10052978/Deep-voiced-chie...

Good point. So you know how there are Ghost Writers? Would be a good idea to use a Ghost CEO? Someone tall and masculine with a deep voice that just sort of pretends to be CEO while the real one pretends to be his assistant but really runs the show? In all seriousness I think such a strategy would work out quite well.

Zoho was founded by Sridhar Vembu. Wiki entry here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sridhar_Vembu . He completed his Phd from Princeton and according to his various interviews was really frustrated by it and decided to start his company. He has a very unique approach in grooming future employees.

(CEO here) There is no particular reason. Perhaps part of the reason is that we don't have an org chart the conventional way many companies do. If you look through our posts and our press releases, the people who run our products are mentioned. LinkedIn has a lot of our people too.

This public presentation I made 3 years ago on our history: https://docs.zoho.com/show/published.do?rid=s0uyx6d6a7e9c859...

Sridhar, thanks for taking the gloves off and writing this. You just don't read stuff like this every day. I don't know why, maybe it's the ultra-PC feel-good environment we're in (esp. in San Francisco), or everyone is worried about each others' feelings, I don't know, but such direct, crisp writing seems so rare today.

High-level business tradeoffs like this are fascinating and worthy of discussion. Even though you name names, it's clearly about the ideas, and not the people. I wish more people had the courage to write so openly and frankly about how they feel.

I'm glad Zoho is getting some love on HN. The article makes a lot of great points.

Unfortunately I'm going to be a wet blanket: I've signed up on Zoho a bunch of times over the years but never stayed because of the Zoho design, or lack thereof. The text is too small, the fonts and icons are ugly or amateurish looking, and its not mobile friendly.

Look, I want you guys to win. I can't stand Salesforce. I'd rather use Zoho products than Google products, but please give some attention to your UX/UI.

Thanks for listening!

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

@Re EDIT: If I had downvote right I would automatically anyone that brags about downvotes. It just doesn't add anything to the discussion.

Perhaps they care too much about their employees' privacy to disclose information about them?

> and for that, let’s give credit where it is due: it is not Benioff, it is Bernanke.

[applause]

The only caveat I'd add: Japan has shown that monetary policy can stay bad for a looong time. While I personally think Zoho's chosen path is certainly more solid, monetary stupidity can last a lot longer than anyone believes it should.

The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent, as the saying goes.

The Zoho blog wants Bernanke to do the same thing Japan has done for the last two decades: kill the economy with tight monetary policy. They're blaming Bernanke for high stock prices. Because the whole economy should depend on what one blog poster thinks of a handful of stock prices.

Right, because clearly the economy is doing great right now. Robust growth across the board, especially in the middle class. I actually don't think we're printing fast enough, rates are still positive afterall. Bernanke could afford to be a bit looser.

Well, you're right, tight monetary policy would kill the economy, very briefly. It would force liquidation of debt. Companies that need to go bankrupt would go bankrupt. And we could finally begin to rebuild on solid footing. As it is we're headed for decades of slowly declining standard of living because we're delaying the necessary reallocation of capital by just flooding the market with money. It's not going to solve anything, it's just prolonging the pain.

> Well, you're right, tight monetary policy would kill the economy, very briefly. It would force liquidation of debt.

Indeed! Now think that the USD and its debts is not just America's home currency, but the world's "reserves", even "savings" for a rainy day.

So I'd strongly doubt the "briefly" part when the whole world is forced into a "liquidation" (you mean settling?) of debt.

Who can untangle the planetary debt webs? No flavour of monetary policy can do that, whether it's coming from US soil or global institutions. Can it ever be repaid in "real terms"? If it is clear that it cannot, the best they can do is to allow for nominal "debt-service performance". The banks demand it, simply because the depositors, pension funds, insurances, billions of people implicitly expect "at the very least that".

So you print. Doesn't matter whether the figure-head is Bernanke or Greenspan or Volcker or Yoda. Doesn't matter what Zoho's CEO thinks of this or ZeroHedge. Knowing the "hard place" that needs to be avoided, we cling to the "rock" for as long as possible. That is, as long as the entire planet happily soaks up all the fresh shiny USD coming out of the presses.

I've never read such a bitter blog post from a company blog.

Agreed -- the post had a very bitter/almost jealous tone.

I'm not sure this writing would accomplish more than simply putting your head down and continuing to build the products you claimed are already much better.

I loved that politically incorrect blog post. It summarizes what a private company can say in contrast with a public company where each word is precisely crafted to handle the expectations.

Totally. I felt like this post made the Zoho executive team seem very immature.

Zoho has so-so products, but at least their founder has the right philosophy to invest in R&D, to focus on organic growth and to take care of their products, employees & customers vs. Benioff's failed M&A strategy, which is done to sustain more and more expensive growth and their sky high valuation multiples.

Have you ever used Salesforce as a product?

I tried it and cancelled within a week; it's super-clunky & complicated. He's got great marketing, but the product is crap.

Dismissing Zoho's points based on the author's tone is a bit shortsighted don't you think?

Benioff's headcount is ludicrous when you compare the # of staff he has to 37signals on any reasonable metric ($ of sales per employee across any business function).

Excellent points. He isn't building a profitable, sustainable business. The fundamentals are completely off.

However, based on not-very-reliable data, Zoho's revenue per employee is less than Salesforce

I read it as an attempt to get press on the coattails of his competitors and the stance as intending to seem "scrappy". Color me an optimist but I don't think the intent was to spew bile.

I believe you're right. I just think it's a piss-poor way to drive business.

I feel that when you have 1600 employees, you're not that scrappy or nimble. It's not like David or Goliath anymore.

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.

Seems kinda relative right? Compared to 10,000 it isn't a lot.

Isn't that something that the 37 Signals dudes recommend in their book and have been doing for years? you know ... "pick a fight" http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch02_Have_an_Enemy.php.

Sridhar isn't doing anything different, he's forcing people to pick a side, and guess what ... it usually works.

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.

I agree you Sridhar, that you guys have taken a pretty solid approach. I've been fan of zoho for a long time but unfortunately dont really use any of your products right now. I used to use them few years back but somehow lost interest in zoho offerings, dont remember why. I do also think that the blog post is quite bitter. It reflects frustration more than it shows your strength... any case, wish you best of luck and I hope you guys concentrate on each vertical product with more focus, may be with a separate marketing tactic and domain.

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.

Why don't you just let your product speak for itself?

I don't think a bitter blog post like that accomplishes anything positive.

Not bitter, but it felt like it was written by an old-school rapper:

"You like bitches and stocks, we like builds and money" - Master V(embu)

It doesn't look bitter to me. Proud, yes, but not bitter. Seems like Zoho is playing a long game seeking to be profitable for years to come instead of sell-out for immediate cash.

That being said, I used Zoho before, but left for Google Apps. Recently I revisited Zoho, but decided to keep looking for Google alternatives. Zoho has great a checklist feature set, but somehow it feels too web 1.0. They offer a bunch of services, but the ones I care about mostly like basic PIM (mail, contacts, calendar, tasks) are nood integrated deeply enough and feel like they require an effort to use.

Anyways, good luck to Zoho.

Zoho's products are mediocre. But I suppose it makes sense in the context of going for the strip mall approach to cloud software. Offer a ton of services and hope to hook the user and upsell.

The main problem I find with their service is the design is atrocious.

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 ...

Neat article, but deeply undermined by zoho's mediocre execution in their crm product. The data model and search are solid, but the ui is wildly buggy (the back button doesn't work!) and the API is slow, missing features and poorly documented.

It's one thing to build, build, build. It's another to build well, build well, build well.

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.

That's an elegant response, I gotta say. But here's a post on your forums about the back button not working from _5 years_ ago: https://forums.zoho.com/topic/back-button

I chose Zoho for our team, and as we grow am fielding more and more complaints about these kinds of issues. What am I supposed to tell them?

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.

Small nitpick: You probably mean to say "I will apologize to your team" not "I would apologize to your team".

The word 'would' is used when expressing something in a conditional mood, often times in light of some possible future occurrence. E.g. "I would try harder if only I were getting graded for this assignment" or "I would lose my mind if anything happened to my children".

The more you know. :)

I guess we're in this together: At the least, there's gotta be a way to up the "getSearchRecords" API quota limit from a measly 250. We asked if we could _buy_ more and were told flat out "No."

I can understand APIs and UIs are complex, evolving features, but simple API quotas should be changeable. Would a limit of 1,000 / day be that stressful on your system?

Why is deep integration important? (serious question, I'm not sure). I like Heroku before, I still like Heroku. I'm glad that the website tells me nothing about Saleforce and doesn't require me to make a Salesforce login. As you say integration causes all sorts of headaches and integration does little to improve the business model beyond brand recognition (which is why I'm assuming they do the slight logos changes). Whats the benefit of fully integrating a already successful and recognized platform?

I guess the authors point was that it since there isn't a deep integration, it doesn't provide value to Salesforce.com users. The question is, why should it if they're not the target customer?

Specially recently, people have been acquisitions that get integrated (closed down) and are happy then the company is left alone (Tumblr).

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.

The truth is that the ZOHO founder is right (acquisition price is a joke, Salesforce product is clunky, Salesforce multiple is crazy). And yet, clear market leaders in high growth markets command premium prices (Amazon has a crazy PE multiple for example). But ask Netflix or Apple. When you screw up one or two quarters, market reacts fast.

Meh. Many well-established companies in a lick of trouble run negative P/E ratios for years...as in, the firm is losing money. There may be arguments for or against a given share price, but anything coming strictly from very high P/E values basically shifts the discussion to "what's the forward P/E?"

And of course small companies (and startups) lose money all the time, and that's expected while they're gaining momentum.

Firms that have very high P/Es (OpenTable and LinkedIn also come to mind) somehow have convinced investors that it's rational for them to spend every scrap of money on growth on a relatively massive scale, as so that the "P" part of the equation approaches zero. It seems then the discussion shifts to what the 'forward' P/E is, aka a prediction about the future where growth has stalled and the business is established and printing money without an obvious place to allocate it sensibly...like Google, or Apple. The theory then being it'd go to dividends, but that doesn't seem to be what has happened, because the business tries to justify holding onto the capital just in case it's needed to grow even more.

FWIW...I don't know anything about this stuff and plow just about everything into Vanguard. I have no interest in beating the market, I just want to track "the economy" so I can meet my needs when I can't work anymore. So, grains of salt and all that, but when I think about what a hyperbolic plot does it always mystifies me why people care so much about P/E when either term is close to zero.

The reason is because high P/E stocks are speculations, not investments.

What I mean is that because Salesforce: 1/ hits their sales target 2/ grows reasonably fast 3/ is the leader in SaaS for many large investors (like vanguard) Salesforce has very high valuation, which allow them to acquire Company, raise money in very good conditions and keep growing. In Salesforce case, most of their products are very bad by Silicon Valley/standard standard, and yet, the Company is worth a lot of money.

As much as Salesforce is criticizing Oracle, Salesforce is behaving just like Oracle - with a cooler CEO (who is himself a former Oracle guy).

This is the only post on the front page today that's not about government spying.. Well done.

Are n't many famous products (Android, Maps, Docs etc) of google are acquired rather than built?. What you think might work for you, may not work for others. Every organization have to figure out what will work best for their customers, by themselves.

Look at how EMC does it. Almost no software companies they bought have really flourished. Smarts, Infra, Voyence, nLayers, Configuresoft and Fastscale are to name just a few. All are on the way out, or are so ridiculously unsuccesful compared to when they were nimble and smaller.

If you get acquired by a monolith, then don't expect the acquisition to succeed. It will most likely fail.

Could not post this story for couple of Days, mailed to PG, thanks for unblocking/banning :)

Is there a free webmail product at the start of the funnel? An online office suite?

I loved this blog ... no offense on his words, its true

Yay, something that's not about the NSA!

Zoho's strategy is this

1)Let others innovate, we will copy - Always copy the market leader. Anything that can be copied and built by using Java/MySQL and other free software, they will attempt and flood the market. Let others innovate - Zoho has no patent/discovery to be proud of. They always wait for someone to start first, then piggyback on them. The breadcrumbs that are left by the master is more than enough for the puppy

2) Hire Cheap, Be cheap - Zoho hires school students and give them the ludicrous jobs - Help desk ticket assignment, routine jobs like build management etc. Less than 20% of the total school students hired are working in developmental activities. If you see Zoho's linked-in and facebook pages, they are advertising for fresh Engineers to join them. So what about the school students, CEO?

3)Pay Meager - Zoho's salary is very less compared to other product companies around, but marginally better than the consulting/services company. That way their cash reserves are huge. I assume around $50 million goes into cash reserves every year.

4) Zoho is controlled by Sridhar's family. All other founders have either been chucked out or been demoted. Such a frustration lead to the creation of freshdesk.com

ah, ha.. I thought Zoho Creator, a drag and drop app/script builder (or Paas) was their unique idea. Am I misunderstood?

ps: Zoho may prune the garden at any time too.

"Zoho hires school students and give them the ludicrous jobs - Help desk ticket assignment, routine jobs like build management etc"

These jobs have to be done by someone.. I don't see why these jobs should be "below" school leavers. Hell, its a good place to start for them to gain some experience anyway.

You seem to have an axe to grind - almost all the points you mention (assuming they are true) can describe a well managed company, if you skip the negative spin.

well managed company? What he described is very nearly rent seeking. If a company is never innovating and always simply copying what everyone else does then that means that, 1) they will always be cheaper than their competitors and 2) if they ever completely win their market they will be stuck with the last iteration because they can't afford to innovate.

People like to say a race for the bottom is good for consumers but it isn't. A race for the bottom is only good for people playing arbitrage games who know to get out before the bottom is reached.

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?

It's amusing that you're defensive on this subject. Someone accused you of something, then another commenter said the described strategy was actually that of a well managed company. I explained the described strategy was very nearly rent seeking. So even though the thread started about your company, it became more general and that's when I stepped in.

I wasn't talking about your company specifically because I don't even know what you do. But the fact that you're defensive enough to take my comment as an attack makes me wonder if the OP was actually close to the mark. :)

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.

Fair enough.

I am the co-founder and CEO of freshdesk. I want to clarify here that I spent close to ten years at Zoho and I thoroughly enjoyed every bit of it. There was absolutely no frustration leading to the creation of freshdesk. Zoho has been a great place to experiment and learn and I owe a lot of what I learnt to Zoho. Regarding hiring school students, I think the media has hyped it beyond reality. I have seen first-hand on how it changes lives of kids who would otherwise have had no access to college education and would have been pushed into poverty. Having been a Senior manager at Zoho for several years I know that Zoho pays it's star performers reasonably well, but anyone who leaves Zoho always commands a premium in the market.(That speaks volumes about the quality of the experience that we pick up there)

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