sridharvembu

Zoho CEO here. Please take a look at our Workplace suite (Mail, Cliq, Connect, Docs & Office suite - collaboration and productivity) and judge it for yourself. Our Writer (word processor) and Show (presentation) have had major upgrades recently, and Sheet is getting upgraded too.

(Zoho CEO here) Thanks for the mention, but we are not yet at a billion dollars - we wish we were, though we are gaining on that goal :)

We are bootstrapped like MailChimp, have never taken any venture capital, and we won't. We have focused on building what we call "the Operating System for Business", because we envision that all the business applications will come together. That's why we have so many engineers to build that vision. By the size of the engineering workforce, we are probably already bigger than Salesforce.

(Zoho CEO here) We apologize for letting you down last year. We had a string of DDOS attacks that coincided with a flooding event, that made it difficult to restore services quickly. We have made substantial investments in the past year, in terms of infrastructure as well as operations.

Our own 4000-employee organization relies on Zoho services to run our entire business. We hope to earn your trust some day!

(Zoho CEO here) I am sorry to hear this. If you can email me your issue I will have it taken care of. svembu at Zoho dot com.

Are you working on compilers and runtimes? If you are interested in doing this, please shoot me an email svembu at zoho

(Zoho CEO here) My analysis of financial bubbles informs how we operate in Zoho. I believe the Greenspan-Bernanke-Yellen era will go down in history as one of the biggest bubbles the world has ever seen.

The economy is now fully addicted to bubbles, and the start-up ecosystem is particularly affected. Withdrawal from this bubble-drug is going to be painful.

A couple of anecdotes about the last big tech bubble of 2000. At that time, there were 300+ optical networking companies in silicon valley. We had sold our network management software to about 150 of them. By 2003, only 2 were left standing. We survived because we had saved up some money for that eventuality, and we reinvented ourselves using those savings.

One painful bubble memory I have is the real estate lease that we had no option but to sign in 2000. We moved from San Jose to Pleasanton to escape the worst of the bubble-rents but even in Pleasanton, while the rent wasn't ruinous (about $20 per square foot per year), the landlord forced a 7 year lease on us. Still, the rents fell to about $10 per square foot per year by 2002, but we were stuck with the higher rent for 5 more years. Fortunately, the company was financially strong enough to withstand it but the episode taught us a lesson in bubble-planning and bubble-survival.

I am shocked that people are signing $50-100 a square foot per year leases for 10 year terms these days.

Our goal right now is to survive the present bubble, bigger in some ways than even the one in 2000. I tell our people that there is going to be a serious bust and we should aim to survive it first.

To be clear, there are extremely few Indians who hold any kind of grudge about the British. On the contrary, the English language is more popular than ever, 60 years after the British left.

History is full of injustices. I don't see why the present generation of Indians should hold onto what happened to their grandparents generation. We don't need to suffer history now, we get to live in the present - that is the attitude I see in most people in India. That is why India is as peaceful as it is (we have to normalize whatever good or bad is happening to the population - "India" is not an aggregate in the same sense that, say, "Sweden" is an aggregate - so whatever happens in Sweden once a year would happen almost once a day in India, simply based on the relative population sizes).

(Zoho CEO here) Don't worry, we will continue the free!

I had a short debate with pg a while ago on HN, where I said something to the effect "Finance has created far more wealth in recent years than technology or entrepreneurship". I don't think that trend is good for the economy but that is the inevitable consequence of the monetary policy the Fed has been running. The economy is well and truly financialized, and finance rules.

I have to disagree with the "can easily tell within ten minutes if someone cannot pass muster" part. Interviewing is hard. We tend to make such snap judgments but those judgments reflect our own biases.

I have come to believe over the years that interviewing measures interviewing skills. Test scores measure test taking skills. Success on the job requires success-on-the-job (to coin a phrase) skills. All those things correlate, but the correlation coefficient is not super high. In fact, ignoring those correlations can be an effective strategy to find great people.