Sridhar Vembu Success Story
A person who has got a job in America. One who can do PhD along with his job can make a career in it and can earn a salary worth crores. Such a person suddenly decides to leave his job and do something on his own and start his own company.
Meaning everything has to start from zero. Imagine how much courage it would take to reject a salary worth crores and start everything from zero. How much opposition would have to be faced in making this decision? Yes, the same thing happened with Sridhar Vambu also.
The decision to leave America’s job became a milestone.
Sridhar Vembu Success Story: Sridhar Vambu belongs to a middle-class family in Tamil Nadu. After graduating from IIT Madras with a degree in Electrical Engineering, he completed his postgraduate studies in the US and got a job as an IT Engineer there.
After getting a job as an IT engineer in America, Sridhar was earning a good salary. But there was still some feeling of dissatisfaction inside him, which brought him back to India. And after coming to India, he decided to start his own company.
Sridhar Vembu Launched own company in software field in 1996
When Sridhar Vembu left his high-paying job in the US, he decided to start his own business. In such a situation, the biggest twist in his story comes when he decides to establish his business not in any metro city but in a small town in Tamil Nadu. Anyone who knows about software inventions today will definitely recognize ZOHO Corporation. And Zoho Corporation is Sridhar Vambu’s own company.
However, when Sridhar started his own business, he established it with the name AdventNet, but later, its name was changed to Zoho Corporation. In 1996, Sridhar Vambu and his brother Thomas together founded AdventNet. AdventNet started from a small office in Chennai.
When this company came into existence, Sridhar Vembu’s brother Tony took over as CEO. Sridhar Bambu had worked as a Qualcomm wireless engineer in California, so he took over the founding position of this company.
The company provided network management protocols and a package of equipment monitoring and management of local area networks or wide area networks to companies across India.
Shridhar himself became the salesperson of his own company.
Sridhar Vembu and Tony first created software together. This software was an application layer protocol. Both tried to sell this software at the Las Vegas trade show. He also added Sridhar Vambu with him. Both of them tried their best to sell the product in this show, but they needed to learn about marketing strategy. In such a situation, Shridhar Bambu first started selling his products by becoming a salesperson.
First profit 350 thousand dollars
This company, which started with the name Advent Network Management Link, initially recruited engineers who had dropped out of premium colleges. And to such amateur employees, Sridhar Vembu himself started learning coding and made them proficient in programming. Due to Sridhar Vembu’s marketing skills and training skills, by the end of 1997, the sales of his company’s products had crossed 350 thousand dollars.
Sridhar Vembu Net profit reached 1 million dollars in 1 year.
Sridhar Vembu’s company made the first profit of 350 thousand dollars. Instead of dividing the first profit of the first year among themselves, they decided to invest the money in new products of Advent Network Management Company. And they launched a product like WebNMS.
Due to these products, the sales of his products increased to more than one million dollars in the next year. When the sales of his products started exceeding one million dollars, he started taking a share in this profit.
Despite participating, by the year 2000, his entire business fund reached 10 million dollars. That was the year Thomas handed over the CEO post to Sridhar Vembu.
Now, Shridhar has become the CEO of Advent Network Management In Company, and many applicants have started coming to invest in his company. In such a situation, by June 2001, Sridhar had made a new decision after getting the help of investors and seeing the increasing trend of work.
ZOHO’s entry into the Product Orient Company
2001 was the year when the dot com bubble burst all over the world, and many companies suffered considerable losses. But Advent, under the leadership of Sridhar Vembu, managed to survive this massive storm. Sridhar Vembu knew that
The value of the WebNMS product has now been lost in the market. And now, it’s time to move on from this. In such a situation, he started the work of creating a product management engine. Stepping into a product-oriented company was a significant risk, but Sridhar took this risk and launched Manage Engine in 2003. Due to this, he had such incredible success that he registered the name of his company in the Fortune 500.
A new beginning of ZOHO CORP
In 2005, Sridhar Vembu decided to change the name of his company to ZOHO after the success of Manage Engine. And meanwhile, ZOHO was created. Various products like ZOHO Rights, ZOHO Sheets, and Hasiya ZOHO DOCS were launched in the market. Although Sridhar knew that competing with Google was not so easy, ZOHO still took the risk, and ZOHO Schools were also launched in 2005.
In ZOHO School, people were given training for work. Instead of taking money for this training, they were paid, and more than 1400 applicants graduated from ZOHO School, and these graduates started working for the people.
By 2015, ZOHO Corporation had launched more than 25 products in its company. They grew to 80 million plus users, and over time, 25 productions turned into 55 productions. Gradually, the number of employees started increasing, and their service area started expanding ever after. By 2015, ZOHO Corporation had begun operating in more than 150 countries.
If we talk about today, ZOHO launches products from every sector in its company, such as sales, finance, marketing, communication, and HR. More than 55 products from different sectors are manufactured in Zoho Court. Under the leadership of Shridhar, Zoho company is launching various products in sales, marketing, social, finance, HR, etc., which are enhancing their reputation in the market.
Shridhar’s company is the image of Shridhar’s personality.
Talking about Sridhar’s journey so far, Sridhar Vambu never compromised his moral values. Their vision and continuous efforts to improve themselves, along with keeping customer satisfaction in mind in every product, make ZOHO different from other companies. Under the leadership of Shridhar, ZOHO has grown by almost 40% since 2012.
Today, ZOHO has more than ten crore customers in the market. More than 55 apps, more than 15000 employees, and companies like Netflix, L’Oreal, and Pal have been included among ZOHO’s top customers, which is working to increase Zoho’s profits by crores.
Sridhar Vembu Awards And Achievements
Because of this passion, Sridhar Vambu has also won many awards, including the Young Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2019. In 2021, he was awarded the Padma Shri, the highest honour of the Government of India. Along with this, in 2022, Sridhar was appointed to the National Security Advisory Board by CNN News 18.
Even after success, Sridhar is a person who likes simplicity.
Despite achieving so much success, Sridhar believes in leading a straightforward life. The basic mantra of success of Shridhar, who always considered the formula of living life with self-reliance and simplicity as the best formula, is that you never let success go to your head. He always believes in working with vision, hard work, and giving priority to customer satisfaction and employee welfare.
At the same time, Shridhar also believes that in return for the progress we are getting from society, it is essential for us to do something for society. It is because of this that Sridhar continuously achieves success in his life.
Sridhar Vembu responsibility towards society
Through ZOHO, Shridhar continuously runs various school programs, projects, and technology schemes to uplift backward people. Along with this, he has now opened many schools for rural children in Southern Tamil Nadu. Where children up to 12th class are provided special training in mathematics and technical studies. And Shridhar’s organization pays the fees of all these children.
Overall, Sridhar Vembu prioritizes social welfare. Along with success, they also prepare themselves for failure, which is why Sridhar Vambu is handling such a big company like ZOHO with 15,000 employees today.
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