Dear Sridhar,
Don't waste your 5AM IST peace time on my EST satire.
Based on public data, Zoho spent Rs 2,722 crore in FY23 to employee expenses but recorded profits of Rs 2,800+ crores. That’s Zoho’s business strategy and no one labeled you as a ‘greedy’ founder for choosing profit over hiring another 5,000 employees or giving proper hikes to under paid Zoho employees.
Let’s extend some grace to India’s first public SaaS company, Freshworks. It has ignited aspiration and ambition among VC-backed founders, just as Zoho did for bootstrapped entrepreneurs.
Lastly, Freshworks' cap table is far more complex than a founder-family ownership like Zoho’s. Both Wall Street and Tenkasi can thrive in their own ways, each with unique successes and struggles.
There is more than one philosophy in life or business, that is what our Dharma also says 🙏
You decide: am I a socialist to focus on the most important asset of any company - their own people and their well being?
Take Nvidia and AMD. Ultimately they triumphed due to their engineers and crucially the engineers that stayed long term to work on deep tech. Their CEOs are from Taiwan.
Now Taiwan itself has built incredible deep tech companies like TSMC, following a similar approach to talent - and Taiwan has about the same population as Sri Lanka.
That is how real capital building works: take care of your employees, your most valuable asset and build long term successful companies.
Intel took care of Wall Street instead, and they have lost comprehensively to TSMC, AMD and Nvidia. And now they have lost Wall Street as well.
It is a perversion of the English language that we think of the late stage hedge fund and PE driven financialism as "capitalism".
Capitalism needs capitalists - people who own and risk their own capital. What we have today in America is "we bet other people's money and if we win we keep a lot of the gains and if we lose we run to the Fed to bail us out and we cheer on the Fed to keep asset valuations high so we can cash out our financial instruments - never ever let the stock market down and whatever happens CEOs should be paid 500x average employee wages!"
Does that sound like capitalism to you? That is the system the US has practised for decades now. Even more of it is going to drive the country to a civil war.
Take the bailout of Silicon Valley bank last year. A lot of tech entrepreneurs cheered that on. They suddenly forgot "capitalism".
Should India import this system? Refusing to do that is "socialism"?
So please don't lecture me on "socialism". Practise some real capitalism first - take care of your people well.
That is also our Dharma 🙏