Sridhar Vembu

Who is Sridhar Vembu?

Sridhar Vembu is the founder and CEO of ZOHO Corporation. Zoho Corporation are the makers of the online Zoho Office Suite as well as several business applications.

Vembu holds a PhD. in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University. He has been in the news not only for creating one of the first online office suites as a company, but also for the unique staffing practices of Zoho which hires economically disadvantaged high school graduates and puts them through two years of education with a strong focus on engineering / software. Such "Zoho University" graduates now make up 10% of their workforce. Despite increasing growth and market presence, Vembu has stated that he wants Zoho to stay independent.

A commentary featured by Forbes in 2008 on Vembu focuses on the boot-strapped model which he stuck to while building AdventNet. Reportedly, the adherence to this model had no ill effects on its performance and profitability. Also high-lighted is his decision to remain independent in spite of aggressive bidding by Marc Benioff, CEO of enterprise cloud computing company, Salesforce.com.