Out with Silicon Valley, in with Indian paddy country.
Sridhar Vembu, maverick co-founder and CEO of Zoho Corporation, is the exception to every rule of tech stardom. The tycoon built his business empire in Tenkasi, Tamil Nadu. A hinterland temple town that once barely registered on the map.
Flouting all conventions of modern start-up success, he’s built an enterprise
free of venture capital and IPOs. A fully self-funded software unicorn. In 1996, he was a PhD from Princeton with a comfortable job in San Diego. After 25 years in San Francisco, Vembu quit, returned to India, where AdventCorp – a networking software company co-founded by him – morphed into Zoho. Early in the pandemic, he moved Zoho’s operations from Chennai to Tenkasi, his ancestral village.
Vembu’s corporate style could qualify as Indian counterculture. His thesis: the Western start-up model of boom-and-bust cycles is not suited for India’s needs. Why can’t we create our own philosophy? Corporations that bloom from rural backyards instead of clogging up urban business districts. Private ventures with public vision.
“I always thought that people migrating from villages to cities is not a good idea. I want to go to the smaller villages and set up what I call satellite connected office centres where 10 to 20 people will work.”
By 2022, Zoho had crossed $1 billion in revenue. 100 million users worldwide. And elevated Tenkasi’s status as a talent hub. A talent hub that’s being built from the local pool. His company has established a number of vocational institutes in Chennai and Tenkasi, where non-skilled candidates receive subsidised technical education. Today, Zoho boasts of 500 local employees in its global workforce of 12,000.
There is now a project in the pipeline to set up a 75,000 square feet primary and high school campus in the village. Making Tenkasi a Zoho company town in the next few years. Vembu believes other villages could emulate Tenkasi’s model. In fact, Kerala wants Zoho to set up their next R&D centre in one of its small districts.
Vembu eventually plans to move most of his employees to rural satellite offices like the one in Tamil Nadu. In Kerala, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh. Or even in Texas and parts of Europe. “I want my employees to live in these villages because it brings a lot of cross-fertilisation of ideas.”
The man in a mundu, who would rather drink tea with villagers than clink glasses in a boardroom, is a cheerleader of all things Swadeshi. He argues that India “should not be the factory of the world.” That data should remain in the hands of the individual. That independence from big capital will empower individual agency. And sees rural revival as the path to social transformation. No buyouts by megacorps loom in Zoho’s future. Traditionalism or parochialism?
A Padma Shri awardee, Vembu is not an apolitical CEO. His presence at an RSS event in 2020 drew some backlash from the Twitter chatterati. He regularly rebuts PM Modi’s detractors on social platforms. Diatribes against “liberal left secularism” are not uncommon. In 2023, Vembu became embroiled in a difficult divorce battle, his wife accusing him of transferring company shares to his family without her knowledge. In a series of tweets, he outlined the causes for their separation and the mental toll caregiving for his autistic son had taken on him: “Our family was destroyed by the tragedy of autism. It left me suicidally depressed,” he wrote. Serving the rural poor in India, he said, restored his will to live.
While this intensely personal tweet was unusual, no matter the controversy, Vembu usually responds in long threads on X. Suggesting an appetite for the public sphere. A natural extension to his public vision and, possibly, a political life in the future. “People with ideas should enter politics,” he says. “If we don’t have politics then we will have war.”
Vembu brings his brand of Swaraj capitalism to SYNAPSE. The bootstrap billionaire will debate the merits of tradition in a technocentric world. Urban expansion versus rural revival. Building businesses with a cultural pulse. Resisting Big Tech trappings. Communities over corporations. India’s answer to Silicon Valley dogma. And the country’s response to AI.