An Indian CEO wants BMW for all his employees

A simple comment on Hacker News motivated an employee of Zoho Corp. to leave his cushy job and build a b2b company that recently got $31 million in funding at $250 valuation from Tiger Global.  Company in case is Freshdesk and the person behind this hugely successful venture is Girish Mathrubootham.

Girish Mathrubootham, CEO of Fresdesk founded this cloud-based customer support platform in 2010. Girsih was VP of Product Management at the ManageEngine division of Zoho Corp when he read on Hacker News that Zendesk (now a competitor of Freshdesk) is increasing prices by 60% to 300%. In this comment of an unhappy customer of Zendesk, Girsih saw a potential business opportunity.

There was another personal experience where Girish never got a response to his 20+ emails from insurance company for his damaged TV. But when he posted his plight on a public forum he got immediate attention of the company.  He realized that he had  all that it takes to create a platform like Zendesk. He decided to hit the $37 billion customer relationship market with a SaaS based customer support platform along with his colleague Shan Krishnasamy.

They worked day & night with dedication for eight months to get the product out in market. In 2011, Freshdesk signed up its first client, Australia’s Atwell College. Freshdesk also emerged as winner at Microsoft BizSpark Startup Challenge winning $40,000. Girish and his co-founder maintained from the beginning that if within a year Freshdesk doesn’t get enough traction, they will shutdown and go back to job. However, that situation never arrived and soon they signed up 100 customer and became Zendesk’s biggest rival.

Smart Moves
Since inception Girish and his team planned everything from marketing to operations within budget. When they couldn’t integrate a US payment gateway to handle recurring payments which is essential part of any SaaS business and since their target customers were in US, Girish went ahead and registered a US company while sitting in India for just $1278. This paved the way to get a US bank account and integration of recurring payment gateway.

Girish always loved the work culture at Zoho Corp and felt the  strong sense of ownership and pride of being part of the Zoho group. He brought the same culture to his company. Unlike other big startups, Freshdesk don’t prefer to hire people from IIT or IIMs. On the lines of Zoho, Freshdesk also prefer to hire top talent of tier II, tier III  educational institutes. Girish is a kind of  CEO whose happiness lies within the happiness of his employees. In an interview to ET, on being asked about wealth creation, he answered

“Wealth creation to me means creating wealth not only for founders and shareholders, but also for all the employees who are passionately building the company along with us.I think it is a great opportunity that I have as the founder to be able to create and share wealth. When I started the company I told my wife that I am not starting a company for me to buy a BMW, I am starting a company so that all my employees can buy BMWs.”

Once on a trip to San Francisco, Girish was proud to know from a taxi driver that he uses Freshdesk on his day job as support engineer. In 2012 Freshdesk launched a mobile SDK, Mobihelp, which lets its clients to engage their customers within their mobile app. In 2015, Freshdesk acquired a social recommendation platform Frilp and a live video chat company 1CLICK to strengthen its customer support platform. Today, Freshdesk is used worldwide and has a huge customer base with a plush office in Chennai along with branches in cities like London, Sydney and San Francisco.

Image Credit: Freshdesk