RAJU VEGESNA: It was in the late 1990s, when right after finishing with my Bachelor’s of Engineering from Bapuji Institute of Engineering and Technology, Davanagere, Karnataka, I had just began working. My job was to handle website promotions which led to my interest in network management. That is when I came across Zoho. I thought they were doing interesting things in the field of network management. Since I, too, had an interest I started communicating with them. Moreover they were a product-based company, which I always found exciting. So, after a few initial interactions with them I proposed a few product ideas which they liked and in a couple of months I joined the company. Today the company is almost 16 years old and my association with it has been for 13 years now. Zoho is one of the very few productbased companies from India. A significant point about Zoho is that we run it from the US, while others are based from India. When Zoho started out, India had a lot of companies providing services, but not many were into making products. Striving hard for bringing in projects and making the clients implement those was an idea which never fascinated us. What we at Zoho wanted to do was to create products and sell them in the global markets directly. Once the decision was made, we got in touch with a few Indian companies who were dealing in the same space and launched a few products and finally marked our arrival in the network management zone. Even though Zoho is being run and managed from the US most of Zoho’s employees, consciously or not, are Indians. We hire engineers and management people, mostly freshers because young people are more creative, innovative and enjoy challenges. We have around 1,600 employees in India, in America we have around 30 and in Japan around 30 more. People often talk about the challenges of running an Indian company in the US. But honestly speaking, it is not that big a deal these days. In fact, there are more advantages than disadvantages. Having said that, there are some challenges that we do face and have been facing over the years. For instance we have an office in India and in the US. In both the countries we have support teams. It is when these teams interact, that the problem arises. Most of all, language is a big barrier. Understanding each other’s accents is a troublesome area. But that is something that cannot be helped much. English, as we know is not our first language, and Americans do not understand any other language. The other problem that we deal with on a daily basis is the cultural difference between the two countries. This creates enormous amount of problems for us. The thing is that both the countries follow different work cultures, people have different ideologies and these are issues which will only get sorted over time. While these are some of the internal challenges that we face, the biggest and the foremost issue that we face is of reach. In a global market companies like Yahoo! and Google have a wider reach, which is something we lag. We would like to reach to more and more people but that is yet to happen. Perhaps we need to work on better marketing strategies. I would be stating the obvious in saying that the US has a more mature market, which actually changes a lot of things. For instance people in the US have been used to buying things online. They are comfortable with the concept of e-commerce. As compared to India, they are more comfortable buying something that has been put online. While in India that culture is yet to come. In the US we often see that the customers come online and browse for products. If they like the products they buy them, they don’t really talk to other people or take another opinion into consideration. It is tough to get that scenario in India. Moreover, dealing with the clients in the US is completely different from dealing with the clients in India. I agree that every country has their own culture and their own issues. And it is understandable that the Indian clients will have different sets of expectations while US clients will have different ones. Japanese clients, for instance, want every minute detail to be fixed. They look into the smallest matter, as they are very detail-oriented. Our clients in the US, on the other hand, are okay with smaller nuances, but they want the core structure to be impeccable. However, in India, perhaps because of the lack of infrastructure and tech support, clients always seek support to fix problems. They demand onsite support all the time. India needs an attitudinal change when it comes to these things. Similarly in the case of venture capital (VC) investment, it is widespread in US, especially in the software market, there are many VC firms with different models. It is a highly competitive market in US and some of the VC firms from US are making their way to the Indian market for expansion. In India though, it is starting to evolve, I would say Indian investors are more conservative compared to US investors. But to be fair to the Indian market, the scene is changing. Each day, we notice changes which point towards growth and maturity. When we started off in India, it was tough to get talent on board. One big issue that India faces is that it doesn’t have a culture of innovation and there is lack of exposure too. When the students come out of engineering colleges, they do not know that there is something like a product-based company, they are completely unaware. This lack of exposure becomes a road block. But I wouldn’t blame just the students or the colleges for this lack of exposure. The truth is that when we started out, there weren’t many product-based companies in India. And the market wasn’t all that open. However things have changed now, in the past few years I have seen some good product companies popping-up and the employees of these companies are the local talents, which is fantastic news. Especially for Zoho which always has had a policy of building talent and not targets. Speaking about the achievements of Zoho, I think it is becoming India’s largest product-based company, and its ability to capture the local Indian market. I think we have done a great job in bringing India to a strut in the international market. We have really worked hard on it. We have built products, taken them to the market, have taken the responsibility of ensuring that they are quality stuff and we have strived hard to promote them. The journey—as smooth as it sounds—has not been easy. It has been exciting, but not without hurdles. For an Indian company it is a big challenge understanding the US market. As open as this market is, it follows a certain work culture and expects every company to follow that culture too. Indian companies, which belong to a different school of thought, find it difficult to navigate through this market. Now that we have been in the US for some 16 years we understand how it works and therefore are able to strive through and navigate through the US market. Therefore, I think that execution is a biggest issue here. It is not about how great an idea you have. If you can not execute it properly, it would not work. Things that worked in favour of Zoho was that we always believed in taking one step at a time. When we entered the product market what we initially did was that we would take a software and embed it in our product and sell. Our targeted space was not all that big, probably half a billion dollar market, but it was getting us easy money, if not a brand image. We were always focussed on our next step—entering the network management market, which was a 50 billion dollar space. There we built some 30 to 40 products and it helped us bring in money and invest in our future applications. With our third phase of the company, zoho.com, we have left behind the $50-billion market and entered the multi-billion dollar market and I am happy to say that we are doing well. After all this effort that we have put in, we really hope that we have managed to inspire people back home to start more product-based firms. India has a great future, the market is booming, we have the talent and the enthusiasm. All we really need today is to pull our act together and make things work. I hope that Zoho’s success model is replicated and bettered by other Indian companies in the near future.