An Unusual Entrepreneur!

India has had several entrepreneurs and businessmen who have become household names. Locally as well as globally. From Tatas and Birlas to Ambanis, Narayana Murthy and Shiv Nadar to the Murugappas, Kiran Majumdar Shah and the TVS family. These are individuals and families who have grown their businesses virtually from zero to whatever they are today.

More recently, we have had several young entrepreneurs who have set up and grown their ventures into what we call Unicorns. Oyo, Zomato, PayTM, Big Basket, Udaan, Swiggy etc. All of them have identified a set of customer needs and have found ways to serve these needs successfully. These are all successful start-ups.

I greatly admire and appreciate all of them for what they have accomplished. I recently read about an unusual entrepreneur from India who has been unusually successful. Not much is known about him outside of his stakeholder circles. He is not very visible in the media. He wasn’t on social media until recently. Not much of PR about him. He doesn’t make any outlandish statements either.

Some unusual facts about him and his company –

1. It may come as a surprise to many people as it did to me, that his stake in his company was worth about $1.8 billion in 2019.
2. The company employs 9000+ people across the world and not all of them are graduates from ivy league colleges.
3. He graduated from IIT Chennai and did his P.hD from Princeton University, USA but has decided to move to a village.
4. Even a security guard who showed learning agility is today working in his company.

As you read this post, he has already moved to a village that is approximately 650 kms from Chennai and set up his office. As the global CEO of his company, he runs his organization from this village.

I started noticing his tweets just a couple of months back and found that they were very refreshing in approach and philosophy. For instance today, he tweeted about why there is no need to track the visitors to his company’s website.

Interested to know who this unusual entrepreneur is ?

Say hello to Sridhar Vembu, Founder of Zoho Corporation. Read about his vision in this Forbes article – Sridhar Vembu’s Vision from a Village.

He brings a fascinating approach to business and amazing innovations through Zoho. Bindu and I hope to meet him sometime in his village. We have been there in 2016, but he hadn’t moved at that time and we didn’t know about him then !