Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu has called on Indians to shake off “defeatist” mindsets and believe in the country’s ability to build world-class technology, pointing to Zoho’s decades-long track record of quietly competing with Google in core productivity tools.
Responding to a post on X highlighting how Zoho launched several office products before Google, Vembu wrote: “Most important of all, all of this has been built by people who had never seen anything like these ever built, and in fact, most of our people had never worked anywhere else.”
He added, “Our first challenge is to make ourselves believe ‘we can do this’.”
Vembu framed Zoho’s journey as part of a broader national awakening. “Due to our tortured history, a lot of Indians, even highly educated Indians, have had the defeatist attitude ‘it cannot be done, definitely not in India’,” he said. “Escaping that mental trap is the most important part of it.”
Drawing a parallel with China’s rise, he wrote: “This is why I admire the Chinese people. After ‘100 years of national humiliation’ as they see their history, they have now risen. Bharat must rise and will rise. Tech is the most critical part of it.”
The original post praised Zoho for being “underrated heavily,” noting that it had quietly built core office products — including Zoho Writer (2005), Sheet (2006), and Show (2006) — years before similar Google offerings like Docs (2006), Sheets (2006), and Slides (2007).
It also highlighted the Indian firm’s resilience and independence in building a suite of tools ranging from email and spreadsheets to file storage and messaging, often with earlier launch dates than Google’s counterparts.
Zoho, founded in 1996, has become one of India’s most prominent bootstrapped tech companies, with a global user base and an R&D footprint largely rooted in rural Tamil Nadu.
