Sridhar got interviewed by Ashish of pluGGd.in. From the interview :
[Ashish] Building a competitive engineering workforce is a huge challenge in India - especially for product companies. Please share some of your experiences/insights on the same.
[Sridhar] We have been fortunate that we started out as a product company in 1996 and stayed the course. We built a culture of creating a product, selling it to customers, which is a lot tougher than building the product in the first place, supporting customers and so on. Creating that culture is what I regard as the most important first step.
It also helps that we don’t put that much weight on paper credentials - the kind of college a person attended, their academic performance and so on. We have found that most of that is not very useful in predicting job performance. By ignoring such conventional metrics, we truly broaden the pool of people we draw our team from.
Of course, the Indian IT market is hot, and anyone with experience has a multitude of opportunities to choose from. We are fortunate in that our people, by and large, choose to stay in AdventNet/Zoho, because they like the challenge here, and they like the culture of the company. Without that team and the culture, we couldn’t have come as far as we have come.
[Ashish] Your tips to entrepreneurs
[Sridhar] It helps to have passion. It helps to keep in mind that there is no template to succeed - there are so many paths leading to success, and so many paths that result in a dead-end too, and nobody can tell you which is which in advance. Each person has to find their path, tuned to their inner nature and self. Like a grandmaster, it helps to study past chess games, while keeping in mind that each game is likely to be unique, so often the only way to know the outcome is to actually play out the game.
Ashish had earlier interviewed Raju.
PC Magazine has released its Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites (hat tip - Mashable. Thanks, Pete!). The list consists of their "picks for the top new or under-the-radar sites of 2007. You may not know many of the sites on this list, but you should" and Zoho's part of it.
Blog Online University Lowdown in its post titled "Top 20 Facebook Apps for Entrepreneurs" lists Zoho prominently at number 2. And Pete Prestipino at Website Magazine writes in the post, "Zoho: Office Suite Game Changer",
I've been meaning to write about my experience with Zoho, the increasingly popular web office suite for quite some time, but each and every time I start, they seem to roll out either another application or feature which brings me back to phase one. As such, let's look at the office suite products provided by Zoho right now because more than anyone else they are a real game changer and if I wait any longer they will roll out another service and I'll have to start new all over again.
All Zoho applications are web-native, meaning no client-side software is required (no download). All you need is a browser and an Internet connection (perfect for those who are always on the road). It's also a real boon to those needing some level of collaboration on the documents or projects they are working on.
Thanks, all!
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