Namaste, I hope you're all keeping safe.
I am reaching to you from a small village
in deep southern India. This is near our office location in Tenkasi
which is where actually the Zoho Desk Software is produced. So I am based out
of a village and now I work out of this village and I wanted to share with you
some of the lessons we learnt as a company now 25 years in the running with
no outside capital, and we went through two previous busts the one .com telecom
bust in 2001 and then of course the global financial crisis in 2008 9 and I
want to share our lessons in terms of resilience how you build a resilient
company through this. And telecom bust in 2001 was particularly hard on us where
over 90% of our customers vanished which something you know when you think about
these times there are many many sectors where there is a reduction of 90% or
even hundred percent loss of income what unfortunately for a lot of sectors so
our lessons we learnt at that time apply and similarly in the GFC we suffered
less, we were not so frontally exposed but still we had to make adaptations and
the first step is we actually learnt over the years to be very nimble
and rapidly transform ourselves. So that is a critical thing in our resiliency as
a business and a company so there is a culture of experimentation, to find the
new solutions, new pathways, new ways to stay relevant as I call it. So I always
ask our people are we relevant to today's times? are we
offering products and solutions that are relevant to our customers needs today?
that's an important question to keep asking one self. And to create that
culture of experimentation you have to also have an organizational culture in
the same way. We are a company with very sort of fluid culture with titles are not
very relevant internally and I personally still write code and there is
a lot of engineering you know internal experimentation goes on and we also
actually are highly self-critical as a company internally that we constantly
critique our own products and of course we use our own products and we critique
them and we see how we can do better and better that's an important part of the
culture of the company and that also allows us to openly discuss and debate,
is this how the market is heading? or is this appropriate way to address the
customer need? All of the sudden when somebody opposed critical feedback of
our products we debate those internally, openly, the entire company sees those so
that's a very core part of the culture that keeps us honest and we also have a
third leg of this we have avoided debt throughout, which as you know which is
really unorthodox, nobody usually in today's world, but this is what allows us
to sleep well at night. We know that even if our revenue drops quite a bit since
we don't have debt we don't have to pay come up with the payments we could
simply shrink our own expenses and we could even take pay cuts though we have
not come to that in this episode but we always prepare our employees in tough
times we may have to take pay cuts I would actually say those things in good
times. For example even as of 2016 or 17 I would tell people these good times may
not last forever so if bad times arrive we may have to take pay cuts so
don't splurge now then you will regret later that is what I am always told
people, and that's been a key aspect of our resilience as a company not only
as a company at a group level but also our people. That's what allows us to keep
innovating even during the last three months we have come up with
new offerings, new innovations, and we are continually doing so even as all our
employees essentially all our employees worldwide now work from home, we still
retain that dynamic and vibrant spirit inside as an organization that all came
from the resilience we built and resilience to adversity. And that is
actually my notion of capital itself capital ultimately has to convey
resilience to adversity. Capital is not just wealth, capital is also resilience.
So with this I we hope to continue to serve all of you and we want to thank
our customers worldwide for standing
with us and we hope to also provide you
services for a long time to come by
keeping ourselves healthy and keeping
ourselves innovative. Thank you very much.
Namaste.