The Economist profiles Sridhar Vembu who, they feel, can take a shot a shot at becoming software’s Michael Dell.
In the mid-1990s, though, venture capitalists gave Mr Vembu the cold shoulder when he shopped around a business plan for software that helped to manage telecoms networks.
This rejection, says Mr Vembu, led him to do the right thing: be frugal and stay independent. When they set up the firm in 1996 he and his five co-founders had to use their own money. Having no cash to waste—unlike so many others in those giddy times—they based AdventNet in Pleasanton, an hour’s drive east of Silicon Valley and much cheaper. Even today it has only a dozen employees there; the rest are in Chennai. Such penny-pinching allowed the company to survive when the telecoms bubble burst in 2001.
With no outside investors, AdventNet could switch to a different business. Venture capitalists would probably have killed off a few of the 18 web-based applications that AdventNet has since come up with under the Zoho name. Several are essentially interchangeable with services that are already offered by Google, the online giant, and will be by Microsoft, its main competitor.
Yet Zoho is no mere clone of Google’s applications. It is the most comprehensive suite of web-based programmes for small businesses, including even services to keep track of a firm’s employees and its customers.
