Sridhar Vembu on curiosity, daring to execute, being an outlier, building a long lasting culture [#2]

Best in Class with Harish Narayanan

In this episode, I am privileged to deep dive into the mind of Sridhar Vembu (@svembu), one of the best entrepreneurial leaders in the country today. He needs no introduction in the startup circles; he is the founder and CEO of Zoho, one of India's largest tech product companies and a pioneer of the SAAS ecosystem in India. During the IT services boom, his vision of building a bootstrapped product company was non intuitive and extremely bold, to say the least. His work has given wings to other entrepreneurs in the country and he continues to inspire many more. His is a story of unusual perspectives being put into action fearlessly and with an almost child like curiosity, and we will seek to unravel some of the 'whys' behind the 'whats' in this wide ranging conversation.

Timestamps:

• 00:00 Intro
• 03:00 Moving from ideas to execution, running experiments, taking risks
• 08:29 Worst case scenario planning
• 09:51 Resilience
• 14:48 Choosing the right friends
• 18:33 Living in a village
• 21:37 Building Zoho culture
• 26:12 Bootstrapping
• 30:55 Passion
• 37:02 Productivity
• 43:18 Books and resources
• 47:16 Sridhar’s billboard message: “Prestige is a trap”
• 49:28 What makes him think the way he thinks

Disclaimer: The views, information, or opinions expressed during the series are solely personal and do not necessarily represent those of my company / employers.