Nasscom Tech & Leadership Forum 2022 puts the spotlight on startups and founders that setting out to redefine the techade. Rajan Anandan, Managing Director, Sequoia Capital speaks to Girish Mathrubootham of Freshworks about the startup journey and the role of India in redefining itself as a product nation in the next techade.
Here is an excerpt of the conversation-:
Girish Mathrubhootam:: I think what excites me is the long term story for India SAAS, is a very durable one. We have been, let's say optimists or early believers in 2014- 15, hoping that we will have a lot of Indian companies that are going to go public and build long lasting companies and so on.
But but I think it's time that our dream is actually starting to shape up and I can't be more excited about that. And I think the McKinsey report that was probably published maybe a year ago, I think was a fantastic one on showcasing how many Indian startups we can expect to make the identification of 450 different categories in which we can expect such companies to come in. And I think it's all playing out now over the next few years.
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So what we are seeing is new categories emerge like revenue, exhibition place, new verticals focused on big companies like CRM for product LED growth companies and so on and so forth. We are also seeing very interesting place in developer tools like India seeing an explosion of notable tools coming from Indian startups.
So I think it's fair to say that this is going to be
our decade for India as a product nation that there are challenges like in any other industry. I would say in 2010, my challenge when I was starting Freshworks in Chennai
was, we didn't have a good office space for India. I think we have come a long way.
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Today, the challenges are more along, I would say the number one challenge for us is, for all startups and for us as an ecosystem is, Hey, do we have enough experienced talent that all of our startups can quickly ramp up and scale? Right? So we we all know that India has a lot of youngsters and qualified engineers, but are they ready and will we have enough on time? I think that is the biggest challenge, but that's a growth problem.
Like we always used to say, a growth problem is always a good problem to have, and I'm an optimist. There will be two or so super excited for this long term story that's playing out for
India SAAS.
Rajan Anandan: No, can't agree with you more that SAS is really broad based. I want to now move to the journey
of Freshworks. You know, you led the company through this meteoric growth phase from founding to IPO. In many ways, you and your team. Girish have had textbook execution in so many areas, right? I wanted to, you know, get your thoughts on two specific questions.
The first one is, look you big red oceans to compete in, right? You know you went after to let's see helpdesk to start with with fresh desk. That was a very competitive space. Then you went after all the other spaces you won after it had been red oceans, you know, as opposed to blue oceans where you have many competitors, which is counter intuitive, right? And still, you were, you know, you guys have been wildly successful. You don't tell us how you thought about this particular strategy of going after sort of red ocean segments.
Girish Mathrubhootam: Yeah. Before I talk about decided you, I think let me comment on the textbook execution front because I'm sure there are many founders watching. So from the outside, it may look like textbook execution, but all founders does need to know that from the inside, the kitchen is always messy. So. So it's fine. It's OK, so you don't.
Nobody has textbook execution from the inside, so we make our share of mistakes and you just have to have enough calls made to be able to live to tell the story on the right.So that's something I wanted to tell all the founders that don't get fooled by the execution outside.
So but on the strategy, on the red ocean strategy, you are right. See our red ocean strategy was a conscious one. And before your current role, you were head of Google India, so you know what we did exactly well. So when we are targeting global markets, we picked...and we're sitting in India, right? And we are not hiding sales teams around the world in early days. So we needed to compete in established mature markets as a conscious strategy because of the search volumes.
So we were completely relying on online acquisition of customers, making sure the products were super easy to try and buy with credit card monthly payments like we because we were going on, we saw an opening in the market. So and what we used to say is most companies enterprise software companies build for the Fortune 500, we build for the Fortune 5 million, right?
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So that is the opening that we saw that is it long tail of the global SMB and we saw a fresh approach like how can we have product line growth, low cost, low touch sales model and building on Google and other online acquisition channels to bring customers to the website and then letting them try and making sure the products are simple, easy to understand and use.
