It is only an elite group of Indian software companies that have made it to Nasdaq, arguably the most glamorous stock exchange in the world. A company lists on Nasdaq when they have the audacity and the gumption to think big and achieve big. Infosys was the first Indian software company to do it in 1999, and since then, a handful of Indian companies have gotten there. When Girish Mathrubootham, the young and dynamic engineer, a hardcore Rajnikanth fan and an ardent movie buff, rang the proverbial opening bell at NASDAQ on the 22nd of September 2021, it was a red-letter moment for him personally, a proud moment for India, and for Indian product startups in general. Freshworks, a company Girish co-founded in 2010, was the first Indian SaaS company to reach a market valuation of one Billion dollars in 2019, and now with this public listing at Nasdaq last week, it has raised a whopping 1.3 Billion on a single business day and ended the trading with an unbelievable market capitalization of 13.2 billion, a quantum leap from 3.2 billion before the IPO. Nearly 28.5 million shares at $36 a share were traded at a 21% premium to the IPO price for the most part of the day Overnight nearly five hundred hundred employees out of the four thousand strong workforce became multi-millionaires, among which seventy are below the age of thirty. India is a not stranger to Unicorns (companies with a 1 billion valuation), but Decacorns (companies with over 10 billion valuations) is rare, and Freshworks has achieved just that. A resounding consummation of one man’s dream.
Freshdesk is a SaaS (Software as a service) company selling a portfolio of customer service products. The investor confidence in the company, in its vision, was so strong that at the end of the day on the 22nd, the stocks soared and valuation broke through the roof. Girish later told an interviewer he felt like a “man who had broken the four-minute mile barrier, like Roger Bannister”; what an apt and perceptive comparison to make at such a poignant moment? History remembers how, after Bannister broke the four-minute a mile record in 1954 (a deed considered physically impossible at that time) athletes, routinely started running the mile under four minutes. All it needed was one man to show what was possible, and the rest followed. Girish’s story is something on those lines as well. A man who, in a short span of ten years, has proved, that success need not be a long-drawn-out dream in the modern connected world. Where there is clarity of vision, self-confidence, the integrity of purpose, ethics, and an irrepressible entrepreneurial drive, anything is possible.
Girish belongs to the town Tiruchi, a reasonably big city in the state of Tamilnadu, India. His parents separated when he was young, quite an uncommon occurrence in the India of the 1980s. Girish acknowledges his parent’s divorce as a defining factor in his life and on his maturity, he had no choice to grow up fast. He was an average student, nothing really stood out in his academic performance in middle or high school. In fact, in the eyes of his family, he was considered a below-average kid, one among the thousands of puffing and panting students, who were destined to become engineers in one of those nameless engineering colleges that mysteriously sprang up with unceasing regularity, like mushrooms, in India. In an interview, Girish, half smilingly says there were family members who had then believed he was not even fit to be a rickshaw puller. Luckily, Girish, despite his average scores at school, managed to complete his engineering and business administration studies in decent colleges near Tiruchi and Chennai respectively, and joined the industry as a software engineer in a support role, as millions did, before the Dotcom bubble. Soon, he tried his hand at software education, sales, and finally landed at Zoho, a highly successful CRM company founded by Sridhar Vembu, one of the richest business families in India. His real education happened during his tenure at Zoho.
In 2010, Girish had learned enough. He had spent the last decade learning the nuances of the software product business, and the brief stint in America and back had given him a clear perspective on priorities. The Dotcom bust had sent him back to India. From a salary of 85K dollars each year in the US, he resumed work in India at around 20K, a steep decrease. It was during this time, he noticed that Zen desk, a popular customer service company, announced an increase in their service rates. It was a moment of epiphany for Girish. In a lecture to IIM Ahmedabad students in 2016, Girish projected a post on the screen from the website hackernews and pointed the audience to a comment by a disgruntled Zen desk customer. The comment presciently read: ” anyone who can build a helpdesk product at the right price point now can take control of the market”. That comment, Girish says, was like a slap on his face. The very same day he talked it over with his friend and colleague Shan, and they decided to start their own company. Girish was quick to realize that customer experience was now a premium service in the global marketplace, perhaps one of the key drivers to sustain a business or a product in the ever-changing marketplace; and, with most software services moving to the cloud, there was definitely an opportunity and a pressing need for a scalable, reliable, and comprehensive suite of solutions to manage the entire spectrum of customer experience. Girish sensed the opportunity and instinctively knew that the time had come to create his customer experience space. His vision was to develop an integrated platform blending social media, cloud service, proactive data analytics, and tools for quickly resolving the issues. Girish understood that companies will invest in quality customer service, even at slightly higher rates, if it could improve customer retention and increased demand. In the modern consumerist world, a product is only as good as the quality of the customer service it offers.
Girish grabbed this market opportunity to spin off his own company, Freshdesk. It was uncharted waters for him. All he had was an idea, a vision of how customer service should be like. To translate that into action, and with not enough money to invest, he plunged into activities that could get him the necessary attention. He participated in a competition held by Microsoft for startups and won the competition along with the prize money, the money he used to kick start the business. He also wrote blogs to attract funding. Though the blogs never won in any of the competitions, Girish’s passionate articulation of his vision caught the eyes of potential investors. Within a few years, Freshdesk was rechristened to Freshworks, and since then, the company and Girish haven’t looked back. The company’s size steadily grew and attracted young minds to his workplace. Girish’s overarching ambition was to create an egalitarian organization, where everyone profits from the company’s growth — a typical Silicon Valley start-up dream. In many interviews, Girish recalls how he sold the idea of creating a startup to his wife. he told her ” I am building this company not to buy a BMW for myself, but for every employee to buy one for themselves”. Who can object to such a vision? In a matter of ten years, from humble beginnings in a 700-foot office space in suburban Chennai to a plush office in Silicon Valley in California with hubs in several countries managing around 40,000 customers in 145 countries, and growing. Freshworks is a journey that is built on a simple vision: grab opportunities, learn as you go along, use criticism as fuel to your inner fire, confidently do what it takes towards your goals, and never forget to take your team along the road to success.
There is a moment in Girish’s journey that stands out for me as the essence of the man. The time is 2010, and Fresh desk had just started with one Customer service product. Girish was looking for investors. He didn’t know how VCs ( venture capitalists) function or what a term sheet ( a sheet that summarizes the terms and conditions for the proposed investment) even meant; he didn’t know any VC, let alone met anyone before. When Shekhar Kirani, a partner at Accel — a VC firm, expressed interest in the vision statement of Girish and chose to visit his Chennai office, Girish wasn’t sure what to expect. The office wasn’t well furnished or decorated. It had five, six tables, strewn across over the room. However, on the top of these tables were brand-new Macs. When Khirani observed the incongruity of the settings, he wasn’t disappointed, on the other hand, the feeling he got was that Girish had his priorities right. He had invested in top-class machines to get the job done, to focus on what mattered to the business, and less on external paraphernalia (A message that echoes from the lives of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and founders of Google working in makeshift places). Accel went on to invest one million in Fresh Desk, and today hold 26% in the company. So much for Girish’s attitude, and the perspicacity of Venture capitalists in choosing to invest in Girish’s vision. For the last few years, Girish has helped jump-start quite a few start-ups himself, and also runs a young football league in Chennai to promote all-round development. Forty-six years of age, with a personal estimated net worth of over 700 Million dollars, a supportive wife, and two teenage sons, Girish is not the average boy he was deemed to be at school,
That Rajnikanth is an iconic figure in South India, is a well-known fact. For millions of Rajni fans, whatever the actor does or does not do, is worthy of emulation. But what is not very common is for successful businessmen to quote Rajni dialogues to frame their success stories. Girish is an exception, and is pretty open in his admiration for the superstar, and does not even pretend to hide the fact that the source of his inspiration is songs and dialogues from Rajni movies. Girish grew up in the heartland of Tamilnadu, at a time when the wave of Rajni was at its peak. In the nineties, a string of Rajni movies starting from Thalapathi, Yejaman, Basha, Annamalai to Padiyappa were not merely massive commercial hits, but a cultural phenomenon in themselves. The songs and dialogues of Rajni from those times have become an integral part of the Tamil lexicon, along with the actor’s inimitable style and star presence on screen. It is impossible to sketch the madness and the passion of an opening day of a Rajni film during his heydays, like nirvana, It had to be experienced to be believed. Even today, when Rajni is well beyond those halcyon days, his movie release is a special occasion. World cup football celebrations can pale in comparison. In an interview with Economic Times, shortly after the IPO, Girish weighed his company’s success in the light of one of Rajni’s super hit songs in Padiyappa — the opening song when Rajni is introduced to the audience. A free English translation of the first couple of lines of the song penned by Poet Laureate Vairamuthu and set to tune by AR Rehman goes like this:
“Walk up the stairs of your ambition,
like a Lion King with majestic grace,
On touching the summit, don’t tarry!
tread onwards –
to meet the beckoning heavens,
shimmering with further possibilities”
My translation isn’t even close to the precision of Vairamuthu’s chiseled Tamil, but this verse from the song was Girish’s response to the interviewers’ query on – what next?
We wish the team at Freshworks and Girish all the very best. The team has shown that it is possible to dream big and achieve it too if there is a right synergy of talent, opportunity, and a great team.
(note: I request readers to pls watch the 2016 IIM lecture by Girish. Every minute of those 35 minutes is worth it. here is the link https://youtu.be/fAlTcjFXlic
God bless…
yours in mortality,
Bala