View allAll Photos Tagged INSPIRE
Inspiring Indian Entrepreneurs series.
Meet Sridhar Vembu, the CEO of Zoho Corp. (formerly AdventNet Inc.), the company behind the Zoho suite of online applications. He co-founded AdventNet in 1996, and has been CEO since 2000. AdventNet has transformed itself from a modest beginning as a software company serving network equipment vendors to a be an innovative online applications provider.
It has maintained growth and profitability, without needing outside capital. Prior to AdventNet, Sridhar worked as a wireless systems engineer at Qualcomm, Inc. where he was fortunate to work with some of the leading minds in wireless communications. Sridhar Vembu’s Zoho competes successfully around the world with some core products of Microsoft, Google and Salesforce.com. Vembu shuns outside capital, but if Zoho were to be valued, it might be well over $1 billion.
He grew up in a very modest middle class family in Chennai. His father was a stenographer in the High Court. Neither his father nor his mother went to college. He went to a Tamil-medium, government-aided school till Std 10, and then he did 11th and 12th in an English-medium government school. He did well at school and he obtained his Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and PhD in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University.