Simple living high thinking…
The worlds, 59th richest Indian man, has a vision to bring Silicon Valley to our rural India. Being from a farming family he loves his village and loves to be attached with the soil of his birth place, Tenkasi in Tamil Nadu.
He is a very simple man, whose favourite attire is a cotton shirt and dhoti with a pair of sandals. This 53 years old man, was awarded forth highest, civilian award Padma Shri in 2021, by the Indian Government. He wakes up at 4 am daily, busy making calls to US offices. By 6 am, he goes for a walk in his beautiful, lush green village, which is situated at the southern tip of western ghats.
After having breakfast he reviews the codes of his engineering projects and attend the calls of his customers.
Meet Mr.Sridhar Vembu the founder of ZOHO Corps. Born in a simple farmer Family in a village of Tanjore Tamil Nadu. Mr. Vembu graduated from Indian Institute of Madras, in 1989 as an Electrical Engineer, later he went to Princeton University, New Jersey and completed his MS and PhD.
He started his career, working as a wireless engineer in Qualcomm located in San Diego, California. He moved to San Francisco bay area later; when he got the vision of developing his own village.
He founded Advent Net in the year 1996 when he was in his late 20's.This was found to build software products. In the year 2009 he renamed the company as Zoho Corp aiming at developing cloud based business software.
Zoho Corps has its global presence in many countries, which was managed by Mr.Vembu, staying in San Francisco.
Due to Covid-19 the world came up with a new mantra, of work from home, when Mr.Vembu thought of relocating to his village Tenkashi and manage his business from there.
According to him, there is nothing as sweet as, staying near your soil and working from there. Being a founder and C.E.O of Zoho he also likes farming and grows paddy, coconut, brinjal, okra, tomato, watermelon, mango etc. In this way, he feels more connected to his roots and enjoy his life. He loves being simple and upholds simplicity.
He says when he found Advent Net in the year 2009, along with his two brothers and three friends, he noted, that India has perfect talent but zero products. So here he noted an opportunity as well as complexity. But you don’t get any fruits without complexity and hard work.
In 2019 Zoho, earned the distinction of being, first software product unicorn. Reporting a profit of ₹ 516 crores, Zoho has 50 million users worldwide.
Mr. Vembu has a blueprint in his mind, where folks get educated in village and even gets the opportunity to work there. In 2004 they started Zoho University, now known as Zoho school, where the students are trained with certain skillset and abilities. Students are not charged anything here, but gets stipend of ₹ 10,000 during this two years course. The only thing, required to get into this school is, the student must have the fire to learn and do something in their belly. Today more than 800 students have graduated from Zoho school and most of them are employed in Zoho Corps.
Abdul Alim, the security guard of Zoho Corps, was found working on the reception desktop one day, by an employee of Zoho. Later they found he has some passion of programming and so, was trained accordingly. Now he works with Zoho Corps as a programmer. 10 to 20 percent of Zoho engineers don’t have any engineering degree, they develop their skills in Zoho school and thus starts working in Zoho Corps.
Headquartered in Chennai, Zoho has two rural offices, one in Tenkashi and the other in Renigunta Andhra Pradesh. Globally it has its presence in countries like, U.S.A, NETHERLANDS, CHINA, U.A.E, JAPAN, MEXICO, AUSTRALIA and SINGAPORE.
As of now, there are 9,300 people employed in Zoho, out of which 500 are located in its global offices. Mr Vembu’s dream is to place all his employees in villages as it brings more refined ideas, and could be mentored and couched by people who comes from cities. These high earning city people can then be recruited by Zoho itself. So it would be a two way exchange idea.
As it is a new initiative for him, he wants to set himself, in the village too. In one of his interview with Forbes India he said, “About a year or two ago, I decided that I want to do something new. 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.” Mr. Vembu’s idea is to build capabilities in human being which in turn will create wealth.
At dusk Mr.Vembu goes for a walk again, and observes the farm animals like, cow, goat, chicken, sheep etc. who roams around all day, going back to there home, at a certain fixed time, they too know what is a home for them . He likes swimming and long walking as these are the things which gives him mental peace, and space to think. He goes to sleep by 8 pm to get up charged at 4 am again…
“The richest man is not he who has the most, but he who needs the least.”
