S3 E01 | Building a $3.5B global giant, from Chennai to NASDAQ | Girish Mathrubootham

[00:00:00] Girish Mathrubootham: I had never built a company per se. I had not managed all the other aspects. So, I know how to build a product. So, we thought, okay, let’s jump in and try it one more time. I think my plan B was if I failed, I wanted to join a bigger company like say IBM or Google or Oracle because probably then I can travel in business class.

[00:00:36] Karthik Reddy: Today, we have with us a founder whose journey truly embodies the spirit of our theme for this year’s podcast series, ​“Winning Beyond Boundaries.” 

Girish Mathrubootham, or ​“G” as he’s fondly called by everyone who loves him, is the founder and executive chairman of Freshworks, a leading provider of modern SaaS solutions.

For SaaS entrepreneurs in India, he’s no less than a rock star. He’s like the thalaiva of startups. He’s an icon who’s put India’s name on the global SaaS map. He’s grown Freshworks from its humble beginnings in Chennai to a Nasdaq-listed company valued at over $4 billion. The operation spans across multiple countries. 

What sets Girish apart is his ability to transcend geographic and cultural boundaries, building a company that resonates with customers globally while staying true to its roots in good old Chennai, which also happens to be my hometown.

But Girish’s boundary-breaking spirit doesn’t stop there. He’s ventured into the world of sports by pumping considerable dollars into youth football club, FC Madras, further expanding his life beyond the realms of tech. He has also started the Together Fund with Shubham and Manav, and the fund actively invests in young SaaS startups.

With a unique blend of entrepreneurial grit, a global mindset, and a passion for innovation, Girish Mathrubootham has truly carved a path as a boundary-defying leader. His insights and experiences will inspire us to learn what it takes to win beyond boundaries from India.

[00:01:55] Karthik Reddy: Welcome to the podcast, Girish. Lovely to have you. 

I thought we would start with people understanding who you are from your history of growing up. And, of course, maybe the best way to introduce you is like your undying love for superstar Rajinikanth, right? And, there is a lot, I’m sure to growing up, but did he influence you right from the beginning? Was at a love that you found later when you became a college student. 

So, just wanted to get a flavor for someone who even made it into your IPO documentation. And, you had a tribute to him there as well. So what is it about him and what is the appeal out here? And I’m sure you’ve met him many times as well.

[00:02:38] Girish Mathrubootham: First of all, thanks for having me on the show, Karthik. So, I think talking about, thalaivar Superstar, I don’t think anyone can actually answer why they love him because there are millions of fans, but I would say my love and respect for him really, really changed in 2011, actually a year after starting Freshworks.

So, I’ve been his fan and watched a lot of his movies, like millions of others, and I have been to the first day, first shows. But what actually we all witnessed in 2011, when unfortunately he had a medical condition, he had to go to Singapore and it was a serious medical treatment, I was moved by the emotional outpour of the fans. So many fans were offering prayers at temples. And then, he came back and actually, thanked the fans that their prayers are what brought him back. 

So, the thought in my mind was how can one man be living in the hearts of so many millions of people? What an impact that he has. So the respect for that is what truly turned me into, I would say a devotee, his devotee. 

I’ll actually tell you my previous CMO of Freshworks, David Thompson, when he came to India, he asked me. He does not know who Superstar is at that time. So he asked me, who’s a bigger star? Shah Rukh Khan or Rajinikanth. So, when I told him Shah Rukh Khan is a star. Rajinikanth is an emotion. I think…

[00:04:26] Karthik Reddy: I remember this line. Yeah, I remember this line. Is it a very similar emotion when you look at what Dhoni has done? Partly because he is a hometown boy here in Chennai, but do you relate it to him?

[00:04:39] Girish Mathrubootham: I think, both of them as leaders, carry a lot of common traits, which all of us as leaders can learn from, not letting success get into your head, the way you treat people, staying humble after all the accomplishment that you have made. Homegrown talent, but global successes. 

Look at Japan, where Superstar has such a huge… massive fan following. 

[00:05:09] Karthik Reddy: No, in fact, I was going to reference that little tidbit as well that he has this massive following in Japan. And that also fits into like our theme for today, which is like Winning Beyond Boundaries. And some of our stars have done that — built global brands much before Bollywood and some parts of it made them popular. 

Take us through maybe your college days and your formative days, and we’ve done a bunch of research and little tidbits here and there. You had your college friends first backed you, Ravi and Rajesh. I think Rajesh is still at Freshworks perhaps. 

What makes someone, and it’s not uncommon, but what makes someone believe in you, and what drove these friendships?

[00:05:55] Girish Mathrubootham: I think the college friendships that happened in India are probably the best things about the college itself. And I actually say all my education started after college. So, I think friendships are what I treasure for life. And the backstory, specifically Raj and Ravi, is that they backed my first venture too, and I lost money. This was in 2001 when I was moving back from the US to start a training company in India.

They had each invested a few lakhs, and I had to shut down that business because IT training in 2001 after the dot com bust never really picked up. So, I joined regular employment. And, so it was like I had it in my mind that someday I have to repay the debt or it was equity though, but in my mind, it was always the moral responsibility.

[00:06:45] Karthik Reddy: I understand the emotions.

[00:06:46] Girish Mathrubootham: Yeah. When I started Freshdesk, Freshworks was started as Freshdesk, I actually approached them saying, do it again and this time, we will make it worth the while. 

[00:06:59] Karthik Reddy: Awesome. You talked about your startup failure, is that what led you to thinking about that you should go and figure out a job where you can learn more? What is the beginning of that? I think when you joined Zoho, it was still AdventNet. And you’re known in the ecosystem for being this amazing product person. Where did those skills get honed? And I know you did sales as well. So, trying to understand that journey of what made Girish confident of… I know there’s a backstory to Freshworks, but what is the training for that?

[00:07:31] Girish Mathrubootham: See, I think, there are two important, I would say, lessons from life or one is a lesson and one is experiential learning. So, during my training days, before my 2001 venture failed, I actually had a successful training business in 1998 – 99. I was teaching Java. 

You’d remember those days during the dot com boom, like if you could spell Java on your resume, you are hired. So, I think the business was booming and successful. And when I say booming at a much smaller scale, I was just doing it as a self… think of it as earning some money. 

[00:08:13] Karthik Reddy: Good lifestyle business.

[00:08:16] Girish Mathrubootham: Yeah, so it’s a lifestyle business. But what I realized was when everybody wanted something, it is easier to grow a business. In 2001, when the macro turned, again when I say macro after the dot com bust when jobs were not there at the end of the training course, that lesson of riding a wave is what I learned. So, I was riding the Java wave in 1998 – 99. That wave had vanished. And even though I probably was better in Java, better equipped with training, etc. But it didn’t matter. So, riding a wave was an important lesson that I picked up there. 

So specifically, I think coming to my experience at Zoho, I think, there is one pivotal experiential learning. I joined Zoho, when they were AdventNet, as a pre-sales engineer. And because of my training background, I spoke to the team and said I will also take up training. So, I traveled in the initial years to do customer trainings. 

After one such trip, I came and spoke to my boss at that time, Kumar Vembu, who is also my mentor. So I told him, Hey, I got this feedback from a reseller in Korea. Why are we not building enterprise products in network management? Because we were selling OEM developer products. We had a platform. So, Kumar actually turned the table on me and said, Okay, sure. Good idea. Why don’t you build it? I did not know at that time that the company had already tried twice and failed. He didn’t tell me that. But they also had the idea. So, the interests aligned. So, they thought, okay, why don’t we give him a choice? 

I was also running product marketing for a year, and I was getting frustrated with marketing. When I pitched this idea to Kumar, he actually introduced the concept of a product manager to me. I did not know what the term product manager meant. So he took me out for a chai and actually said, Girish, you know what the problem is? You’re an authoritative person. Marketing is a consultative job. So that is why you’re facing all this frustration. So why don’t you actually become a product manager, and build the product? So, I didn’t even think about it. I said, okay, because I wanted to try something new. And then I went and Googled the job responsibilities of a product manager. That’s how I am an accidental product manager.

But, I think, when I started exploring more, I fell in love. The most important thing that happened was what we today celebrate as India SaaS, global from India, I think the foundational work for that happened then. At that time, even at Zoho, product management was in the U.S., and product marketing was in the U.S. India was predominantly an R&D, tech, engineering, and QA center. Even design was split between India and the U.S. 

So, I said, okay, let’s do everything from India. Again, most of it was trial and error. I stumbled upon a Google AdWords account that somebody had created and put $50 in. So, I thought, okay, why don’t we try bidding on the keywords? And every day we would get so many more leads and it is all on-prem software. So downloadable software, but we’ll get so many leads. And it was like, you pump in more money, you’ll just get even more leads. And we put an online trial. So we actually did everything from product management to marketing, to software development, support, sales, everything from Chennai.

The genesis of or the origins of building global products from India and actually figuring out that inbound engine, what we call inbound engine and, desk-based selling, SaaSBoomi calls it desk selling. All of this was hand-built by trial and error in those days.

[00:11:57] Girish Mathrubootham: If you read the book, The World Is Flat. It starts off by saying how India made all these investments in leased lines. So, we had a leased line connection. The phone was available. So we thought we would start selling and supporting. So, it was just a discovery of available resources and trying to figure out a model which today is a… 

[00:12:20] Karthik Reddy: … approved in the playbook. And I think while you get a lot of credit for that, what gave you the courage to finish that piece of your history on how Freshworks got started?

I know that there are a couple of stories. There’s one around you seeing some news item on Hacker News about Zendesk. There’s another about how your TV experience in the U.S. I think I’ve heard it from you. It’s always a combination of things. 

But what gives, back then, the courage for someone to say, I think I can stake out on my own. I can build a product company. I know you made SaaS popular, but for a very long time, investors didn’t have anybody even covering SaaS. Maybe there were 3 – 4 of us in India up until 2015. Now, it’s of course hot and SaaSBoomi has become a revolution, but back then, was it just the Zoho experience which gave you enough air cover to say that I can do this and a set of problems that you saw? 

[00:13:20] Girish Mathrubootham: So I think it’s a combination of factors. First of all, let’s talk about the two stories. One is about how did I get the idea for what product I wanted to build. So that’s the moving from U.S., a shipping company broke my TV. I contacted them online and tried calling and emailing them. They wouldn’t actually process the insurance claim. So that story has been told a thousand times, so I don’t want to bore our audience with that. 

But the long story short is when I shared my experiences online in a forum, the community started engaging, the president of the company came and apologized, and the next day money was in the bank.

So, I realized the power of customer support moving online. So, it was like a paradigm shift because when you call a call center. 

[00:14:07] Karthik Reddy: It is most frustrating.

[00:14:08] Girish Mathrubootham: The user does not have any power over the company. But when the same problem goes online, brand reputation takes a hit. This was 2009 and 2010. 2010 February exactly when I shared my experience. So, Twitter wasn’t big. Facebook wasn’t big for customer service or anything. So, I think, I could sense that, Hey, something is changing in the world of customer service where the power dynamic is shifting back to the customer. 

So that’s where the idea of, Hey, is there something we could build to leverage that. That’s the idea for the product. But the actual impetus to start the company or the slap on the face came when I read that Hacker News article on Zendesk increasing their prices by 300% and users revolting. So this was a casual Hacker News article that I was reading after lunch and I was thinking somebody had commented that, Hey, it just shows how somebody can come and build the right product and take all the market away.

I went and spoke to my friend and said, Hey, we should work on this idea and customer service because there seems to be an opening. So that was the push to actually jump into action. But the idea was formed a few months ago when I was thinking about my experience. 

[00:15:20] Karthik Reddy: Now coming into the early Freshworks days, just coincidentally when I read this about your company being incorporated on October 13^th. There was a strange memory that… I think we also incorporated it around then. So, actually, I had someone check this last night. We were incorporated on October 12^th, 2010. So Blume was born around the same week.

I think the experiences are similar, but Blume’s story has also been told a lot of times. But I’d love for people to understand that the talent pool just wasn’t there. And this was the biggest challenge going 15 years back. And we have the privilege of working with 2 – 3 of the 1^st 10 people that you put together now, in Atomicwork or other startups that we have funded.

And so we hear great stories, but how did you think that sitting in Chennai, you can build this marketing, sales-oriented, engineering-oriented company that can build a global product from here? 

[00:16:23] Girish Mathrubootham: Before I actually answer that, I will also add on to the last question because I said it’s a combination of factors. So, I wasn’t dreaming big of building a billion-dollar company or a unicorn from Chennai. So I think there was also another factor contributing to that. So I had moved to the U.S. for one-and-a-half years and then moved back to Chennai. So by the time, there were new product managers, I was more like overseeing multiple products. And I was getting bored. You know that I’m a product manager at heart. So I like rolling up my sleeves and actually working on product.

When I moved to the U.S., I missed the people working with teams on a daily basis, but when I came back, the environment for me to jump back and build products was not there. And I was looking at the rise of SaaS, SaaS adoption growing. I was running on-premise software. 

So that was also a reason why, like okay, what am I doing being the head of an on-premise software division, when there is so much happening in the world of SaaS? So maybe it’s time to think about doing something. So that itch was also there, but I think things came together. 

So when I decided to start, and I say this to other founders there was a lot of overloaded meaning in what Steve Jobs said ​“Stay hungry stay foolish,” We all enjoy it as a nice copy, and nice marketing lines, but after 14 years of Freshworks, I can tell you how much depth is there in the meaning of that and ​“Stay foolish” means and ​“stay hungry” means. 

Because if I knew everything that I know today I probably wouldn’t even have started Freshworks. So I think it was just done on impulse that hey, we have built so many products and taken many of these products to millions of dollars of revenue. So why don’t we not just try doing it one more time? 

I had never built a company per se. I had not managed all the other aspects. So, I know how to build the product. So, we thought okay, let’s jump in and try it one more time. I think my plan B was, okay, if I fail, maybe I’ll go and I wanted to join a bigger company like say IBM or Google or Oracle because probably then I can travel in business class.

[00:18:47] Karthik Reddy: That is awesome, the most honest answers that you get from Girish. No, I think, the other element of this is, when you want to build an international business, how do you… and this is what I want to drive home a lot this season in the podcast as well. Inherently, there seems to be some sort of a complex. I won’t give it a tag, but can we compete with the best of the best in the US? They’re local. They understand the market. We don’t have those cultural nuances that an American would have naturally. Again, sitting out of… determined to build a company out of Chennai, how do you ensure that all of that falls in place on day one? 

So there are two sets of attributes. One is, there’s a story about you saying it doesn’t matter what the first office looked like, what the chairs looked like, but everyone had to have the best machines because you can’t compete globally without that.

Second is, how does that set of people attune to the fact that they’re an American company, for all practical purposes, sitting out of here? Because it’s important. I think we’ve had not so many great success stories of founders being or continuing to stay in the Indian mindset. And that actually curbs the ability to become a great global company. 

But again, you were one of the first out of the gate. So curious what lessons there are for entrepreneurs on that. 

[00:20:19] Girish Mathrubootham: See, there are two important aspects that you touched upon. 

One is around not spending on furniture, but spending on Macs. Let’s talk about that first. And then I’ll come to winning globally. 

I think this is also a lesson, from my mentor and boss Kumar Vembu. Meaning, what happened at Zoho? We were living through that journey. So how do you be frugal in aspects that don’t actually directly add value? Like where do you put your office? So real estate. What’s the point in being in a swanky building and paying rent through the roof when you’re a startup who’s trying to earn money? So, we wanted to, but if it’s impacting the quality of the final product, then those are the areas where you want to spend.

So, these are things that we have always followed. Even at FC Madras, if you can look at this, so everything that you see, the pitch, the hybrid pitch is world-class. The hostels are functional. It’ll be good. So I think that is a mindset that every founder should know where you spend and where you have a value mindset or a frugality mindset.

[00:21:34] Karthik Reddy: Very important.

[00:21:35] Girish Mathrubootham: Yeah, do not compromise on… because the product has to be world-class. So the office in the early days can be a garage. We all know that. Every startup in the valley also uses that. So I think that’s important. 

Now coming to the other aspect of the question, how do you compete globally? See, this is where I think we have to truly understand… go one level deeper and understand the business model. So the true disruption that we had with Freshworks is we have a very disruptive business model to the traditional enterprise software companies. 

So what is the typical enterprise software business model? You start in a country, most probably the U.S. You are building for larger companies. So you go, you hire a sales team and you go and meet and sell to customers. And when you meet and sell to customers face to face, there are these cultural nuances. You have to talk about baseball. You have to talk about the weather and it’s very hard to do that.

But what if the customer is not talking to you, but is experiencing the product? So our business model disruption at Freshworks was all about going with an inbound acquisition model long before the term PLG, became popular. So, we actually were doing that. In fact, when we had 100 customers for Freshworks, I had never met any of the first 100 customers in person.

The first customer or prospect who I met was actually Deep Kalra. Because I wanted to meet Deep, so I said I’ll come and meet. The important lesson here is, our model was not a sales-heavy model. But in an enterprise model, if you start in India, you first will have to go and sell to India customers. If you start in Australia, you’ll have to start and win in Australia. That’s a traditional model. 

So what we had right from the early days, when we had seven customers, they came from four different continents and people come online. We drive traffic to the website. We make the experience super easy. They actually experienced the product before speaking to a person. And today in the Valley, even if you, speak to any Valley company, you’re probably speaking to an Indian or an Indian accent. So that’s not a problem today. But I think, if the product is world-class, the customers know that’s what matters for them.

We used an affordable price, intuitive, easy-to-use product and a full-featured product, as a combination to get the wow from the customer before even they speak to somebody. 

[00:24:16] Karthik Reddy: Now in this journey, after you’ve gone through 14 years, has that formula held tight as you’ve developed multiple products, or alternatively, given that you’ve seen enough founders who’ve come for advice, I understand the SaaS playbook very well now from how you described it, but when it comes to enterprise software, is there any tips that you’ve picked up which can help founders?

Because a lot of companies try doing enterprise software. It’s not easy. So one, maybe they should move their backsides to whichever market they’re selling in. But beyond that, what else can work for them? 

[00:24:54] Girish Mathrubootham: So, I think at Fresworks, we added a mid- market enterprise sales motion over the years. I think somewhere after 2016was when we hired our first VP of sales in the U.S. 

So I think today we have a good mix of enterprise and SMB customers. But it’s an important… and also what has changed in the last decade I would say compared to if you take 2000 to 2010 or 15, the number of SMBs adopting technology or buying software, I think now in the last 10 years, I would say, thanks to SaaS and thanks to even COVID acceleration, I think everybody is now adopting technology. The SMB market has actually expanded and exploded. 

So enterprise has always been big. We know that if you take the enterprise share of the software market, that’s always traditionally been big. But what we are witnessing now, and you can see companies, who are selling to SMBs, whether it’s a Monday or a HubSpot, you can see a lot more companies actually winning there. So we have gone from our SMB, we have that. That is still a dominant portion of our business, but we also have added on this. 

So I think it’s important for founders to early on pick one motion because I’ll also add that having these two motions is quite challenging. And we have multi products also, we can talk about that later. But, early in our journey, that question, can we build a billion-dollar company by focusing only on inbound and SMB? The answer, at that point of time, seemed to be, oh it’s hard because churn is higher in SMBs. 

But I would actually say now that because so much adoption has started to happen that it is possible and it has been demonstrated by other companies that you can build, like a billion-dollar revenue company.

[00:26:55] Karthik Reddy: Just to touch a little bit about, all this requires somebody to take a chance on you, Capital, Capital, Capital. And I know this story of Shekhar getting started from Accel, giving you that small first check at seed. But outside of that, again, Shekhar was relatively new.

I remember meeting him before he formally took on the role at Accel. We were a part of one small Saturday thinking group and he was early as well. I know he was tentatively taking these bets. And it was very weak as an ecosystem beyond that. Maybe Nexus did a little bit. 

Then suddenly Lee Fixel comes and takes a SaaS bet in India, from Tiger and while the model was well established in the U.S., I’m sure it wasn’t simply them taking a courageous bet out here. It had to be something to do with Girish Mathrubootham. So, what is that again, magic sauce or the ability to sell a vision or a story that got you to those initial funding rounds, because that was important to build this dream out?

[00:27:59] Girish Mathrubootham: So, I think this story probably played out in less than a year, from the Accel funding to the Tiger funding, probably 6 months, 8 months. And, there are a lot of cascading effects of different things that happen, like the butterfly effect. And it’s an interesting story. So I’ll tell this. 

So, first, how did we get into Accel? So we were building a product. We were probably a few months away from even a beta release. I was the CEO who was sitting and doing all the other things, and I was building the product, but I also was trying to generate… I will do some marketing. I was writing a blog post.

So one of the blog posts that I wrote was… we were participating in an AppSumo contest, where there was a $50,000 AWS credits or something was the prize. So we thought, okay, and, you had to write a post on how your startup is a lean startup. So I thought, okay, let me, try and compete in that contest.

So I wrote a blog post, which is very famous even today. How a simple comment on Hacker News made me quit my comfortable job and start a startup? And I posted this on Hacker News. It went viral. This was on March 18^th, 2011. 

Now, in that blog post, I had thanked Venture Hacks for helping me create a pitch deck and things like that. So this is, and Naval Ravikant came and thanked me and said, Hey, by the way, we have AngelList and we don’t have Indian companies. So, can you list on the platform? And I will send intros to investors who are in India. So, actually, Freshworks is the first Indian startup to be listed on AngelList. We were not funded through AngelList._____ [00:29:50]. 

So Naval sent a bunch of introductions. A few others are also sent a bunch of introductions. Anand Daniel from Accel had seen that post, and he gets an intro from Naval. So he reached out to me, and then I sent him the pitch deck. And it was World Cup season, Anand was busy with, probably cricket. There was, like, 2 – 3 weeks of silence.

Suddenly, out of the blue, I get an email back, after the World Cup, saying, sorry I dropped the ball on this Girish, can we talk? And then I pitched to Anand, and then he took me to Shekhar, and then I pitched to Shekhar. 

So how did the Accel funding happen? I actually asked Shekhar later because when Shekhar gave me a term sheet. He visited our garage office. He was the one who made the comment that, hey, your furniture is all cheap, but your, developers have Macs. That caught his eye. 

But the more interesting thing he said was, because I asked him later on, I was sending him startups with half a million dollar revenue. He invested in us when we had $2,000 of monthly recurring revenue. I asked him how did you bet on Freshworks when we had $2,000 in revenue while you were passing companies with half a million dollars.

So he said, Girish your $2,000 revenue comes from 70 different customers, all SMB customers globally. So product market fit is established. There’s no product market fit risk. There’s only the execution risk and that I am comfortable taking.

The other company that you sent with half a million dollars, 60% or 80% of the revenue is coming from one customer where the founders used to work before. So that revenue goes away. So I don’t know if the product market fit is there. So, that was an interesting thing. And then what happened? Two more things. The ripoff or not event happened, like basically there’s another famous story. So we were announcing our Accel funding and we got attacked by a competitor and we are responding on the blog. It goes viral.

[00:31:48] Karthik Reddy: Yeah, it’s a legendary story. 

[00:31:50] Girish Mathrubootham: So multiple investors reach out to me, and then see, I have just got the Accel money in the bank. I didn’t want to pitch, but one investor actually said, Hey, why don’t you fly to Mumbai? We will pay for the flight ticket. I called Shekhar and said, Hey, they’re saying they’ll pay for the flight ticket. Should I go? Just to establish a relationship is what they said. Shekhar said to go and meet, but don’t take the flight ticket from them. 

So, I went and pitched and they were very…like they wanted to do the deal. So when I was pitching, they said, Girish, we know that you are right now at 200 customers. We know you can get to 2000 customers and 20,000 customers. That’s not a problem. Valuation is what you want and so on. But when they actually made an offer, they said, can you do a 30% markup since you, actually raised only in October? And so I said, see, I look at Freshworks as a Valley company. I know how Zendesk and Desk​.com raised their rounds. I don’t want money now, but if I’m doing my next round, I need a 3x multiple, not a 30% markup.

[00:32:51] Karthik Reddy: Yeah, it has to be at the price that you want. 

[00:32:53] Girish Mathrubootham: Yeah and then they kept making me a slightly better offer, but I wasn’t comfortable. So then, again, Venture Hacks had good advice saying, always fundraise in parallel.

So I decided, okay, if there is interest, let me find out how much interest is there. So I reached out to all the investors who had passed in the previous round because now we had, by that time, January 2012, I think we had around $10,000 of monthly recurring revenue and 200 plus customers.

And so, I met 8 VCs in one week on Sund TV VC Varam Maari (VC Show on Sun TV). And five of them were engaged. One of them was Lee Fixel. And that’s why I call it a butterfly effect. So, Lee Fixel, who usually never comes to Chennai, was in Chennai that week. He was making the investment in CaratLane, who was on your podcast.

[00:33:48] Karthik Reddy: Oh, what a coincidence. 

[00:33:51] Girish Mathrubootham: I didn’t know CaratLane or Mithun at that point of time. We became friends after because of the Tiger investment, but he was there. And usually, I make sure every investor comes to our office. But Lee said, I’m busy, can you come and meet me at the hotel? And, so I went to Crowne Plaza Hotel with my iPad. And pitched him the story. And the pitch went very well. My story went well. 

But, I was meeting VCs every day. The next day, evening, Lee called, and he told me one thing, Girish, the numbers don’t make any sense. You are very early for us as a fund. But I am making a bet on you. You have seen the scale.

And if you are okay, here are the terms. We can skip the term sheet and start due diligence. That’s the speed at which he moved. While the others were still negotiating offers, they sent a few analysts and asked me for a five-year projection with Excel sheets. I’m just three months old as a company, how will I have a five-year projection and cash flow projections and so on, right?

So, I think I could see an investor who’s aggressive and who believes in me, and that’s how I decided to take on Lee. 

[00:35:00] Karthik Reddy: No, I think I had the pleasure of working with Lee on a few investments in that first five-year stint. And then, we still keep in touch. I say hello when I’m in New York. Amazing guy. And I keep saying this to his discomfort that actually in one of my investor letters, I literally wrote a tribute to him on how he’s single-handedly accelerated the ecosystem a bit.

I think if he was missing in the ecosystem from 2011 to 2015, it would have been a couple of years slower. I get that sense. Because he forced everybody to be on their toes. And people would say, what is Lee up to? And he’s repeatedly told me, I think even perhaps about you, that it comes down to people bet sometimes. And that gives him the courage to play a little earlier. And great story. 

[00:35:46] Girish Mathrubootham: What most people don’t know is that Freshworks was his first SaaS investment. Tiger’s first SaaS investment. And, at that time, we were the smallest cheque that he’d ever invested. The whole round was 5 million. And, so they put in 3.5 million at that time.

[00:36:11] Karthik Reddy: Amazing. Moving to scaling now. How is the whole idea of whether this can be a NASDAQ listed company, I’m sure that 10 – 12-year journey basically had a lot of decisions. You must have made thousands of decisions. And that’s what CEO founders get paid for to make those decisions. Any sort of favorite pivotal moments where you said this is what made the Freshworks ​‘22 IPO happen? What would those be, if anything? 

Also maybe a little bit about your framework around how do you help yourself make those decisions. Do you have an advisory group that you bounce these off or do you go with your gut intuition, just trying to understand the mind of a solid entrepreneur?

[00:36:58] Girish Mathrubootham: See, I think, if I look back at the Freshworks’ journey, there are actually three pivotal decisions. The first one was picking the inbound business model and going global without trying to go and sell in India or sell in one market. So, that really opened up a huge market for us. And that is something that I’ve experience in and have built in the past.

The nuance that is not easily visible to the casual observer on the outside is, it looks like we are always competing in red ocean markets, but how do you spot pockets of blue ocean inside a red ocean? That’s something we can probably talk about later, but that’s important in the decision-making framework of where we want to play. But we pick this broad, competitive markets, but the market is global. So going inbound and having a global market from day one is the first pivotal decision. 

Going multi-product was the second. And we went multi-product when things were pretty early and going good. And that’s my advice to founders. So if you want to build a second and third product, you have to do it when things are going good because when things are tough, you’re going to be asked to cut costs. There won’t be any bandwidth or resources left to actually start building. So when one of your products is taking off and doing well, you have to make some bets, experimental bets on your second and third. 

So the product manager has to be worrying about revenue that’s going to come three years down the line. The salesperson should be worrying about the revenue that’s coming in the next quarter. So both are important. So, that was the second important decision. 

And then the third was the decision to actually overlay a field enterprise motion on top of an inbound motion that was working, again, in the context of the time. At that time, when those decisions were being made, I think it helped us because all these three shaped the IPO story at Nasdaq, where, hey, it is not a one-product company. TAM is huge. They’re already at scale at two different markets, and they’re working on other products. They have enterprise customers. The Wall Street also likes…. Till very recently, they love enterprise software companies more than SMB companies. So, they have success in enterprise. 

So the foundational elements for a successful IPO were actually shaped by these three decisions that were taken at different points of time. 

[00:39:30] Karthik Reddy: Just one counter caveat on that, that when you thought about, I’m guessing the multi-product strategy meant you wanted to shed the old name of Freshdesk and move to Freshworks. So, I don’t know whether the naming thing had something to do with multi-product. 

And then when you think about multi-product, do you feel like in a lot of businesses, even the biggest guys who were listed, the Oracles and the Salesforce of the world, eventually, if you want to build a legendary long-term company, isn’t it inevitable that the market sizing opportunities of each segment that you play in or each product that you play in force you to start thinking about adjacencies, either through acquisition or building your own products. 

How do you know it’s time? As you said, one is when you have the resources, start thinking in that direction, but were there any natural triggers? Is it always listening to the customer or the market first? I’m sure you didn’t start building products randomly, right? 

[00:40:26] Girish Mathrubootham: Yeah. See, again, this is a multi-layered question. There are many flavors, right? 

Okay, let’s start with the first aspect. Should a startup do only one product or multiple products? And when is the right time to do it? Every large company has multiple products, but in the U.S., they probably get 100 – 200 million before they even think of the second product.

Now, what is the driving function, then? I think it’s the scarcity of development resources. So, the cost of an experiment for a startup in India is actually much, much lower. Experiment, and that’s important. See, I’m not saying you’re blitzscaling and throwing the entire business and burning millions. For us, the cost of an experiment was, okay, 5 or 6 developers, 9 to 12 months, less than 300K-500K. So that was the cost of an experiment to see whether something flies or not. In fact, before we launched our second product, we actually built one and shut it down, in 2012 also, because that didn’t make sense at the time. So that’s one aspect of it again because it’s a very contextual question. 

The second thing is we went multi-product because ours is a business model disruption story and it is SMB. So I am in the business of… see I’m not going whale hunting. I’m actually catching a lot of fish. I looked at my role at Freshworks in the early years as like a VC. So, I have these two or three bets. I am replicating a model and I can create another team, which is… So there’s a shared services team in HR and IT and finance, but the product team and this sales team and the engineering team are different, but they are exactly replicating the model, which is our unique differentiator like going inbound.

So the keyword-based online search, how do you capture the search? So I know that we have the opportunity. Because for me to get to those high growth numbers, I could not use an SMB business, with churn characteristics. I cannot get a 200% or 300% percent growth. Freshworks went from 1 million to 5 million to 15 to 34 to 56. So that journey was not possible with only one product. Because we knew that existed, our business model differentiation or disruption, I can replicate that. So that’s one of the reasons.

The third aspect is how will I choose to build. I’m a big fan of a book that I read during my college days, from Ramcharan where he says every business is a growth business. The fundamental takeaway for me from that book was there are two ways to grow your business. One, you can take your existing feature set and try and go to a different market segment to a different customer set or you can go to your existing customers and give them more features of what you don’t already have. They showed how companies like GE actually did both. And I think that lesson stuck. 

So if you look at what we have done. Freshdesk started with ticketing, email ticketing, self-service portal knowledge base. So we took that to fresh service for the internal help desk for IT, and then later on, built more for what IT needed. But this was the first flip. 

And then if you look at the same customer, freshchat, freshcaller, for a customer support customer, we look at what are the other tools that are paying. You are already my customer and we are the works… like the system of record platform for you. So why should I give the opportunity for somebody else to build a small standalone tool? So we start building more features for the same customer. So, this has been the… 

[00:44:21] Karthik Reddy: I think, shifting gears a little, I feel like the other challenge I’m seeing in some of our younger startups is how do you; the two levels of challenges. One is when you’re building a strong long-term culture, which you need to become a public company and beyond. I know you’ve used a cricket analogy once, talking about how you would pick younger talent and then groom them there. So two parts to that question. We’ve seen a lot of companies actually in our portfolio when they’re building for a new segment, new type of talent, I think it’s inevitable playbook, they accidentally go and try and figure out a lot more fresher talent. Because you can influence it, you can groom it in a certain way. There’s no easy hiring ground. 

Now that you’re a very large company, and then you have to start thinking about the US, now you’re picking up lateral talent and you’re trying to bring them into the context of how Freshworks is built over this decade. A very contrasting set of hiring and cultural challenges. 

How does a founder deal with these? It goes back to the theme here being, how do you build global businesses as, this young man from Chennai or from Bombay or from Noida. 

[00:45:33] Girish Mathrubootham: So I think, the context of the early years is talent simply did not exist. I was trying to hire my first marketing person for Freshworks in 2011. So, it was incredibly hard to find somebody who had done software marketing globally from India. But if I go to the Valley, I could actually hire 9 different disciplines of SaaS marketing. Like inbound marketing, customer advocacy marketing, digital marketing, and field marketing. So nine disciplines of SaaS marketing in the U.S. So that’s the level of talent, 

[00:46:14] Karthik Reddy: Sophistication.

[00:46:15] Girish Mathrubootham: Sophistication in the U. S. versus finding somebody who had done. So what do you do in that context? So the secret sauce for our hiring, again, my big life lesson, comes from a book called ​“First, Break All The Rules” by Marcus Buckingham. So this is a book about people. So, the core takeaways, two or three takeaways from the book. 

One is you have to learn to differentiate between skills, knowledge, and talent. So skills are easily teachable and learnable. Knowledge, there is factual knowledge and there is experiential knowledge. Factual knowledge, again, is easily teachable. Like skills, programming in Java is a skill, right? Or using Adobe Photoshop is a skill. Factual knowledge, sunrises in the east or it’s hot in Chennai. These are all facts. Experiential knowledge is a retailer knowing how can I place my merchandise at a particular spot so that people will add it on to their basket. So it comes from experience, but over time, some of the experiential knowledge can become best practices. 

Talent is not teachable. It’s something you’re born with. And how do you identify talent? When you talk about certain topics, your mind opens up like an eight-lane highway and ideas flow. When you talk about certain other topics. Like to me, if you talk about databases or version control systems, my mind will close. So people are naturally interested in certain things and talent, when I say talent, I boil it down to really core traits. Are you an unorganized creative person or are you a very organized regimental person? Are you very articulate, and enjoy talking to people or are you introverted and you would rather not speak? Do you have empathy? Can you think on your feet? 

So I boil it down to these basic characteristics. So the ​“First, Break, All The Rules” basically the biggest takeaway is you cannot put in what God intentionally left out.

And now you overlay the context of India. Now we have a country where if you go to campus hiring, everybody’s doing BE computer science. This year I’m seeing there are 10 different computer science and AI, B.Techs in every university. So, everybody wants to do BE computer science, but they’re all different people.

They’re not built for programming jobs at Freshworks or TCS. But they are doing it because their parents are telling them to do it. 

[00:48:40]Karthik Reddy: Job orientation.

[00:48:41] Girish Mathrubootham: Yeah. So now what we did was we actually went for campus hiring. And really used this learning that I don’t care about your degree. I want to find what your talent is. So if I’m hiring for customer support, I need to find a person with empathy and patience. And if I’m hiring for pre-sales, I need to find the person who can teach me new things, who can think on their feet when I adjust the audience level, if I’m hiring for sales, I will talk to you about multiple topics. You have to make the conversation interesting. You have to be shameless. I’ll ask you to sing or dance. You have to do that. So these are natural traits. I don’t care whether you’re a biotech engineer or a B.Tech computer science engineer. So if I know this is who you are, then I can put you in that role and then groom you into that… 

[00:49:29] Karthik Reddy: All this is now baked into your sort of interview process 

[00:49:32] Girish Mathrubootham: For fresher hiring, yes.

[00:49:33] Karthik Reddy: Yes. And then when the other end of the spectrum. 

[00:49:39] Girish Mathrubootham: The other end of the spectrum. Now, see all of this can work as a startup. And we are learning by doing, right? There is a cost to learning by doing. You will make mistakes. So people have to understand learning by doing, it basically means you will make mistakes and you have to learn. Otherwise, how will you learn? 

[00:49:55] Karthik Reddy: Minimize the cost of the mistakes. 

[00:49:55] Girish Mathrubootham: So when you are a startup going from 0 to 1 or 1 to 50 or 50 to 100 or 100 to 200 and when you are VC funded, VC money is very forgiving. You can make these mistakes and go.

Now let’s talk about the journey that we are on. Like when we went public, we were at 300 million in revenue. So from 300 million, I want to go to 3 billion or 5 billion revenue. Now, how do I do that? Now that brings two different sets of questions. So we are a public company. So public company comes with its own set of requirements. So for SEC compliance, I cannot hire somebody in Bangalore and say, we learn by doing stuff.

One mistake and kill you. A global tax, we have a global tax expert. There is a whole organization that is needed to support a public company. You need to know there are certain roles where learning by doing is simply not worth it or acceptable. So that’s when you definitely want to hire people who have been there and done that. 

Second, when you want to scale access to the talent pool. Now, we were doing a lot of this because we didn’t have access to it. Now with Freshworks being in the US and in Europe and we have access to the talent pool, would I be better off hiring somebody who has seen that scale, who has taken companies from 200 million to 2 billion multiple times? Like the playbooks that they have seen, if we have access to the talent, then that’s the right strategy at this point of time, because, again, learning by doing may not be the best strategy when you have access to that.

[00:51:29] Karthik Reddy: And coming to, I know you, you jokingly, I don’t know whether you put on Twitter or I heard from you, but you had this analogy about everyone’s clamoring for my IPO, but It’s like a big fat Indian wedding where everyone comes for the party and then I’m the one who’s married to the company for another 10 – 15 years.

How does it feel after the Nasdaq IPO, and I know you’re going through your own journey but personally, what was the most transformative aspect of becoming a post-public company, because I think it’s becoming important both in the context of Indian companies trying to go public here and while people might aspire, not enough have gone public on Nasdaq and you only know that emotion but what has changed in you per se as a founder? How do you have to think about this transition from being venture-funded to a public company? 

[00:52:20] Girish Mathrubootham: See I use this analogy of IPO being the wedding and being a public company. I think that analogy fits perfectly and I’ll explain how.

See a VC-funded company is like a bachelor who can party and have fun and then you can do a lot of things, right? A public company is like, at some point, we realized that, okay, I’ve had a great life as a bachelor. Now it’s time to settle down, become responsible, start a family, and then you go into marriage.

So now jokes apart, being a public company and being in a marriage, responsibility is an important thing. There can be great things accomplished in a family or in a public company when you understand the responsibility. Day to day, you may have good times, you may have bad times. All of us go through that, right?

I don’t think anybody who’s been in marriage can say I’ve had every day of my life was bliss. So I think public company is like that. So the narrative, a lot of people tend to focus on only the hardship part of it. The true rewards of being a public company come from the learnings.

And every quarter we learn so much by actually listening to investors on how they are looking at the company outside in. And what does that mean? It actually helps us prioritize really what is important for the company over the long term also. 

[00:53:56] Karthik Reddy: Yeah.

[00:53:56] Girish Mathrubootham: This is again like when you look at it from the surface, you only focus on the general narrative or general narrative, yes, being a public company requires a lot more governance, a lot more transparency and compliance. So there is a lot of work to be done, but, that is the world standard. So if you really look at truly the companies that have created massive wealth creation for so many people, you take the Microsoft and the Amazons and the Googles of the world, if that is the gold standard, why are people doing it? 

See, if the general narrative is a public company is hard, why do you want to do that? Then there should be no public company. 

[00:54:35] Karthik Reddy: That’s right.

[00:54:36] Girish Mathrubootham: Then you have to ask the question, why are smart people doing it again and again? 

Number one, that’s the only way to create a massive wealth-creating machine for decades. If you’re a private company with…

[00:54:50] Karthik Reddy: The journey stops.

[00:54:51] Girish Mathrubootham: Yeah, it stops. So that is number one. 

Number two is, as the company scales, right? And I have an analogy with fitness also. See, when you’re eating, you have unhealthy eating habits, and you’re not paying attention to what you’re eating, you end up becoming unhealthy, and that analogy can happen to many VC-funded startups because you’re loading a lot of money and you’re spending a lot of money without knowing what you’re getting for it. So you actually end up being very unhealthy.

The number one responsibility for a public company CEO is capital allocation. So every quarter and every year, you have to review, Hey, how is the capital being used? Where am I deploying it and what am I getting for it? What are the best places where I can actually invest more and grow faster? What are some of the places that I should probably get out of? 

There may be examples of, maybe sometimes we have to take we may take bad calls because we didn’t understand the true long-term perspective, but mostly this is good. Like in fitness, right? If you cut your carbs, you can become fit, if you exercise daily.

So I think that is very, true, and my transformation in the last two and a half years as a public company CEO was when I started looking at it as a learning opportunity because I fundamentally believe when smart people are doing something, I want to understand why are they doing it.

So if I just focus on the difficulties, I will not learn that. So I want to focus on what is the goodness of being a public company. And then I understand that, okay, with so many investors, when they’re looking at from the outside, what are they looking at? What moves the needed for the company? Now we know when we listen carefully and talk to enough investors, now we know how to do this. It’s still hard, but if you focus on the learning, that’s what I did. I think it’s fantastic.

[00:56:39] Karthik Reddy: No, lovely, answer. And, I know when we planned the interview, the news was not out. Now the news is out. You’ve decided to move away from the CEO title per se and be executive chairman.

And I remember reading, somebody must have asked you and we picked that press quote up. You say that when Freshworks started you sensed something magical beginning to happen in the SaaS-enabled world. And now you feel that moment in AI is there. And you’re a product guy, you love that. I get that sense sometimes after 13 – 14 years. That love for investing is somehow consumed by organization building after spending 14 years. 

Is that the trigger, is that the motivation to go back to, saying, I want Freshworks to look like a very different company on the back of AI-first world, 5 – 10 years from now? And I want to chart out that path and have somebody who’s been there done that, build out the public company on a steady path while I look at the future. Is that a guestimate, right?

[00:57:48] Girish Mathrubootham: Yes, I’ve said this publicly. See. Okay. Today, there is nobody who’s going to argue that AI is going to be super disruptive. Five years ago, six years ago, we asked this question, in 2016, we asked this question, what can kill Freshworks? The answer was AI. We started investing in Freddy AI. But after the ChatGPT demo, we are all blown away by the potential of AI.

Now, I’ve told this at Freshworks. I’ve told this at SaaSBoomi. And I’ve told this at Together Fund, AI is the future. And the world is going to go through a massive transformation phase. Now, if I look at my role at Freshworks, I again ask, I can hold on to the CEO title if I had wanted to, but the point is, where can I add value? True long-term values. And I told you about listening to investors.

So, what is the market perception of investors towards Freshworks? So they want to know is Freshworks going to be impacted by AI, customer service being disrupted by AI is the talk of the town. Is Freshworks going to be neutral or is Freshworks going to be like a beneficiary of AI? 

Now, we have to demonstrate that if customer service is going to get automated by AI, somebody has to build the AI technology and we have been working on that for five years and we know what needs to be done and we have to build it, sell it and show the numbers. So if I look at what will I enjoy doing and we talked about riding a wave, riding the Java wave and riding the SaaS wave.

So the AI wave is a monster wave. I said that at SaaSBoomi. I definitely think this is the right moment personally, for me to enjoy riding the AI wave. I should try meaning whether we riding a wave is whether you’re successful or not, you know after riding it, but the thrill is in riding the wave. 

[00:59:28] Karthik Reddy: To pick up the surfboard and go.

[00:59:29] Girish Mathrubootham: Yeah. And go. So that’s what I’m doing. It also is the best use of my time for the long-term value creation, of Freshworks. So that’s the reason. 

[00:59:39] Karthik Reddy: So, the Freshworks story, I think is now folklore. It’s the foundation and we’re building beyond that and we will come to SaaSBoomi, but the SaaS ecosystem as a whole is just erupted. And it’s a Cambrian explosion of sorts. So it keeps growing with every 3, 4, 5 years. It’s inevitable, but people wouldn’t have guessed the pace or the scale. Like when I came to SaaSBoomi, I was just blown away by the scale. 

But from your lens and you’ve said, it’s the right time for founders to build tech products in India, if you double click on that, what makes you confident that it is, A, easier to build that? And if you had to put like a goal out there, what would you want to dream for Indian SaaS in the global market 10 years down the line? What would that dream be?

I’m glad you used the word dream, this explosion of SaaS that you are seeing started as a dream in 2015 – 16. We were looking to plug into an ecosystem and there was no ecosystem. I was talking to Avinash who was at iSpirt at that time. We decided to call a bunch of founders and decided to do an UnConference in Chennai. We called it SaaSX. There were 40 companies and these were companies who were building global SaaS from India and Freshworks was the biggest company. We had just crossed $5 million in revenue and everybody else was smaller than that. We said, okay, there is no ecosystem and why don’t we create one. That’s the genesis of SaaSBoomi. The dream was India as a product nation. Many people have this dream like Nasscom created a product council and iSpirt was started with that thing. I think it is inevitable and it is the natural next step for India’s soft power evolution because we all know the success we’ve had with IT Services. With IT Services, we had not just Indian companies like Wipro, Infosys, TCS, but also global majors like IBM, Accenture, CapGemini. They employ more people in India than some of the others. That is the first step, because of the talent available here, you also have global product majors, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, ServiceNow. Everybody has an India office. We have people working in those companies who have built global products, that talent pool is there. Then we have companies like Freshworks, Flipkart, Ola, where we have built B2C and B2B products. Our talent has grown, people who joined as freshers are now leaders in many SaaS companies. I think availability of talent pool is the number one factor. The aspirational middle class, the demographic advantage that India has, capital is not a constraint any more, the government is super favourable and steady for policy. Most importantly, SaaS was the wave and now AI being another wave. India is the second largest contributor to AI/ML repositories on GitHub in the world after China. US is third in terms of quantity of AI talent available. SaaS and AI are providing this opportunity for transforming India as a product nation. It is going to happen. It is inevitable. This started as a dream. Our original event in iSpirt was called product nation. That’s how I got connected into that ecosystem and that’s how we did SaaSBoomi. At our IPO when I introduced Avinash we spoke about India as a product nation and this is an important milestone event. I think today that is the moment that all of us in the community should actually engage together on. where how do we play our role in being a catalyst towards this transformation that’s already happening. This is going to be the decade of India as a product nation. I think where do we see ourselves by 2030, I think we will be creating like there are many numbers out there like it could 500 billion or trillion dollars worth of value. And maybe 50 billion dollars of revenue. So, we will have to figure out the exact numbers, but the numbers can be off a little bit, but the tsunami of startups is happening. Not just the metros, you’ll be be amazed when we do the SaaSBoomi in tier 2, 3 towns, the number of founders we are seeing, the excitement, even if we do a social, people coming there wanting to learn. I think we are living the dream. 

Karthik Reddy: Awesome! I know as a public company, you cannot put numbers to your own market cap, but i think broadly the direction i heard from you is that if that IT Services could do it, it is a great yardstick. We should create that kind of revenue and a mulitple on that. We create 50 billion dollars of revenue so we get $500bn-1tn of value. That is a great starting point to the continuation of the dream. Apart from SaaSBoomi, which, you have grounded in Chennai. Clearly there are other dreams of Girish that are playing out today. One is this wondrful setting that you have facilitated this morning, FC Madras. People would love to know the backstory of why football/​soccer, how did it come to life and I’m sure it is an episode by itself. Very quickly if the audience can know the passion that drives FC Madras

Girish: I’m not a soccer player myself. I have casually played it in school, so, I’m also a fan of soccer, but not a player. My sons used to play very briefly so they aren’t into soccer anymore. I think there was one incident when I was taking my son for a recreational soccer weekend program. So, I saw like almost 80 kids playing in a footbal field in Adyar in Chennai. It was a mud field. It was like sub divided into smaller areas, the kids were having fun obviously. It was dust all around, the parents were sitting and waiting in the bench. Their talent was visible, the lack of infrastructure was also clearly visible. When i used to travel for work, the same scenario plays out in a very different manner in the US, where the weather is cold and soccer fields are empty. I’ve many times seen a dad and a kid just practice scoring goals. They have the fields but many days they don’t have 22 players to fill the field. This disparity was striking in my mind, when i saw that and thanks to Freshworks i was able to make some money. I always felt that purpose of money is to serve the society. A part of the inspiration also came where one of the weekend matches we took the kids to a ground in SSN Engineering college which is not far from here. They had a nice natural grass ground and a gallery. All the aprents had come and kids are playing. I could see the joy on the face of children and on the parents, when you hace an infrastructure like that. So, I was like someone has to do something about it. So, let us be the first one to do. I hope and I want to make a call in this podcast, I use every opportunity. 

I encourage successful founders who have made money to do something, get inspired by things like this and build something. I am not asking money to support my charity. I’m saying do something on your own, if it is for sports, India needs to be a sporting nation also and not just a product nation. When you think about our children, I’ve used this in FC Madras video. I show picture of Sundar Pichai and Sachin Tendulkar and I show their fourth standard time tables. There is only one PT period. Academic kids like Sundar end up really successful because of the system and they end up in Google/​Micorsoft, Satya and so on, but sporting champions are successful in India inspite of the system because there is no infrastructure, no opportunity. Some of them will be academically brilliant, some will be sporting champions, we have create an environment for them to succeed in both. I hope and I welcome everyone to come and see this.

Karthik Reddy: I was so keen to come and see it and thanks for making it happen this morning. Seeing it live, trials are going on. I did not envisage the scale until you see, I would encourage viewers to see it. I’m sure we can work it out with his office and have startup tours to get inspired by this. It is residential, it focusses on different timetable, it trains kids differently, setting them up for a chance of success. The end state, can we be a sporting nation and win beyond boundaries? Sport at a scale where we are truly up to our potential to the youth we have. 

[01:10:52] Karthik Reddy: And then, I know you’ve started playing an active role in Together Fund. Clearly, it seems like an extension, but usually, you’ll find founders being an angel investors or sometimes just being LP in a fund. You’ve been all of that as well. We are beneficiaries of having you as an investor in one of our funds. What prompted you to think about, hey, that’s a track I want to be a little bit more involved in? Because that’s another hat you wear. 

[01:11:23] Girish Mathrubootham: So, we want to show the world that it is possible to build a world-class product company from India. India has got the talent and if the playbooks are right, if the right opportunity and resources are available, we can do this from India.

Now, If you look at SaaSBoomi, that’s exactly what we want to do. 

[01:11:44] Karthik Reddy: Yeah. 

[01:11:45] Girish Mathrubootham: The product nation dream. So my job at Freshworks gave me the pole position. So, I’ve used this in SaaSBoomi. I’ve said we are like the Roger Bannister moment. So, we broke the four-minute mile and then so many others will break it. And we are seeing that happen now. So many other companies are coming in. So the journey of Freshworks gave me the opportunity to show the world that Hey, there is a case study that this is possible. And you said, now hot on B2B. I’m glad we played a role. And we actually did conscious things also.

We publicly announced our 100 million and 200 million revenue numbers because we wanted the world… 

[01:12:24] Karthik Reddy: Highlight to the world.

[01:12:25] Girish Mathrubootham: … to notice that this is possible. With SaaSBoomi, we wanted to say, Hey, it’s not about Freshworks. People have advised me, why are you opening up and sharing your playbooks and numbers? You’re giving away your secret. I said it’s not about Freshworks. It’s about India’s need for employment. Like unemployability is still a problem for us. We need to create opportunity. We need to create IP. And so this is really, really important. 

I was also adamant in hiring and keeping them, all the jobs in Chennai because that’s how you create the talent pool. So what we did with SaaSBoomi was open up the playbooks. Make sure that people are making new mistakes. I share all the existing mistakes that we made so that they can learn faster. This happens beautifully in Silicon Valley. We wanted to create a community that engages an ecosystem of Pay-it-forward here.

So then we realized, Hey, we are doing all this to help and I was also doing angel investment. I’m an angel investor in more than, 60 or 70 companies now. And very, very grateful for the opportunity that the founders provided me. Today, I’m getting a 30X return on a 50K investment that I’ve made also. And you also provided some ride-along opportunities. So thank you for that.

So what we realized was even after providing all those playbooks at SaaSBoomi. For a good startup, finding the right investor is also an important and interesting challenge. And we have seen that be a hit and a miss. Some founders are, I would consider myself very fortunate to be working with the best of investors, but there are companies that we have seen that have been like not getting the right kind of operational advice and being forced to go in different directions and then shut down because co-founders didn’t agree.

So, the right, investment partner was still a hit or miss. So we felt like, Hey, we are operators. We know the playbooks and again at that time, there wasn’t any focus. Say every investor was B2C and consumer internet. 

[01:14:37] Karthik Reddy: generalist at that point.

[01:14:38] Girish Mathrubootham: So every investor was a generalist. So we felt we truly believed this was coming. We truly know how to do it. Then why don’t we actually use the opportunity that we can see to create a fund that is focused on global products from India? And that’s how Together Fund happened.

[01:14:54] Karthik Reddy: Who better than you? So that’s fantastic. And I think, that 2.0, not to embarrass you, but it feels like your, Thala moment as well, right? So, it’s essentially how I evolved to become a leader that everyone respects. And what can I do for society and be back to humility and not be the unchanged Girish that everybody saw even in 2010? 

You always get a sense of that when we meet. So thanks for being who you are. And I think it’s coming through. The last question very quickly. Is there a pride in seeing a Freshworks mafia brewing? Is it important? Is it a real thing? Or is it just a subset of this entire SaaSBoomi product nation? 

[01:15:43] Girish Mathrubootham: No, I think…So, in fact, yesterday, I was telling somebody, that I’m actually super proud of the culture that we have created. See, there is a WhatsApp group for Freshworks alumni, with 450 plus members. And these people have actually gone and worked in other startups. Some have changed 2 or 3 jobs, but the Freshworks connection is what is holding them. Why is that? Why aren’t they in some other startup mafia group?

So, I think that all boils down to the culture and the people, and the experience that they had at Freshworks. And, I feel super proud. In fact, one of the plans that I have, see our annual event is called Refresh. So, I want to actually do an event called Extrafresh and actually host all the alums and have fun. 

[01:16:30] Karthik Reddy: So down to the rapid-fire round. So favorite Thalaivar film.

[01:16:34] Girish Mathrubootham: Sivaji, the boss.

[01:16:53] Karthik Reddy: Oh, lovely. And tea or coffee.

[01:16:38] Girish Mathrubootham: Coffee. Filter coffee, South Indian. 

[01:16:39] Karthik Reddy: Any recommendations for the best places that you like in Chennai? 

[01:16:44] Girish Mathrubootham: Freshworks office. My home. 

[01:16:47.22] Karthik Reddy: Awesome. And what’s the best piece of advice you’ve received? I know you’d refer to Gopal’s 2.0, but anything beyond that? 

[01:16:57] Girish Mathrubootham: So there are many things. I actually learned from people. And I think 1 or 2 things I can quickly say. So you can be aggressive in your work, but you should not be abrasive in your relationships with people. So sometimes people need to know the difference between the two, right? So when you’re pushing hard to win more, how do you still respect? So relationships are very, very important and don’t break the fabric of trust with people because that’s hard to build back. 

So good successful founders should learn this nuance that you can actually be very aspirational and be aggressive in your go-to market in wanting to win. But still, be really soft and not be abrasive. 

[01:17:51] Karthik Reddy: No, I have a version of this and it’s important because I think a lot of people catch these catchphrases from some 80s Wall Street movie and say it’s nothing personal, it’s all business. There can’t be a more false statement than that, so eventually we’ve seen. I tell a lot of my colleagues, whether it’s a founder or whether it’s another VC or whatever, 10 years later, they come back in your life in another avatar and truly influence a decision that could impact value for you, just scary how these cycles come back.

[01:18:20] Girish Mathrubootham: I can do an entire episode on that. 

[01:18:23] Karthik Reddy: Your favorite Indian restaurant in Seattle, for those who are watching from there.

[01:18:24] Girish Mathrubootham: Farzi Café.

[01:18:27] Karthik Reddy: Oh, you like Farzi there. I know the founder. He would love to hear that. And, a non-Indian restaurant in Seattle. 

[01:18:34] Girish Mathrubootham: Phad Thai.

[01:18:37] Karthik Reddy: _____. Okay. Clearly a Thai fan as well. What’s harder being the founder, franchise owner or investor?

[01:18:46] Girish Mathrubootham: See founder is the hardest. Especially early days, you don’t have money. As a franchise owner or as an investor, you have money and you have to wait to make money for 10 years. All of these are 10-year journeys. Founder is the hardest. 

[01:19:01] Karthik Reddy: And what do you do outside of work to recharge? 

[01:19:03] Girish Mathrubootham: I play tennis.

[01:19:04] Karthik Reddy: Lovely. I know I took away your tennis lesson today. So once again, thanks a lot for all the…

[01:19:09] Girish Mathrubootham: No, it rained yesterday, so no tennis today. 

[01:19:11] Karthik Reddy: Okay, so I don’t feel as bad anymore. But once again, Girish, thanks for this wonderful opportunity. I think our viewers would love to replay parts of this episode time and again. Just a lot of nuggets of wisdom. And that’s what India needs to hear as well. So that’s what we’re trying to bring out. So thank you again. 

[01:19:28] Girish Mathrubootham: No, thank you for having me.