The Exchanges

Q So Freshworks is now, I don't know, it's about a ten billion dollar market cap company. It's one of the big SaaS wins in India. What does Freshworks do? And was that what they were doing when they bought you?

A So Freshworks was called Freshdesk when they bought us. It was, uh, they had two products, but the flagship product was Freshdesk. Uh, it was a help desk solution, not like business software. Um, today it's broadly business software because there's a CRM, help desk, ITSM, different kinds of tools. That's part of it. Um, but yeah, when they bought us, it was Main focus was the help desk product, and we were looked at as, like, the third product within Freshworks. There was ITSM help desk, and then the chat product, right? So we launched that in, um, relaunched inside Freshworks in 2017. Um, when we got in end of 20 15, the company was, I think, eighteen million ARR. So, Much smaller than today's, I don't know, it's six hundred million plus, I guess. Uh, and, uh, yeah, we were there for four and a half years, um, seeing it all the way through to mid two hundred millions. So it was a very, I would say, educative journey for us. It felt like going to a SAS school. Um, lot of learning every day, and, uh, I think when we did the startup on our own, we had, um, we were learning, but, you know, we didn't really know how to run a SaaS business. We were doing our best, but inside Freshworks, we got a ringside view to how a world-class company would do it.

AI assessment note: “today it's broadly business software because there's a CRM, help desk, ITSM”

Q from, from, you know, parts of the U S and our parts of the world. And I, I feel like that was probably where a lot of the money was originally spent there. And we've gone through a few different waves of software development in India now, Can you give us a bit of historical context on how the ecosystem got started and how it started shifting to building companies?

A Yeah, I think the first piece of context, I think India has always been very big on education and a lot of people taking that engineering track from academic perspective and then going on to become software developers in IT services companies, right? Uh, those who move from India to US typically, um, to do their, um, post-grad, like MS or, um, you know, PhD would end up joining the product companies in the US, but in India, it was largely still IT services, which was happening. Uh, of course, um, I think that was the first wave where the likes of Infosys and Wipro and TCS, all of these large, you know, technology consulting and, um, tech services companies essentially brought together so much of, um, software development talent. I think the wave around products started maybe In the early 2000, you had some B to C, uh, product companies emerge in India. A lot of them would be, um, I would say, if there's a successful, um, dot com in the US, maybe there was gonna be a parallel in India. Yeah. Yeah. Um, but I think it's, it's in the 2010 to 2020 that you could see a lot of different kinds of product startups emerge in India. Um, Zoho, um, which, you know, the Freshworks founder used to work there for 10 years, was one of the very early B to B product companies from India though. So I think they, even as early as early 2000 had their cloud-based SaaS products coming to market, and …

AI assessment note: “I think that was the first wave where the likes of Infosys and Wipro”

Q you guys have a pretty good track record in terms of like helping run Silicon Valley. It's, it's, it's, it's extraordinary. And, uh, you know, it makes sense that India itself should be able to do this too, if people can come from India and do this here. Uh, you know, how do you, how do you see India's role evolving in the global software and the global tech ecosystem?

A Yeah, I think we're probably in generation three or four of, like, this, this set of product companies emerging out of India now. Uh, I'm sure a lot of people don't know that companies like Postman, or Chargebee, or Atlan, et cetera, were started in India, and, and then came to the US. So, now I think there's learnings that are getting passed on from, you know, companies that saw a journey before, uh, we have a Whole network, um, of, of founders, like this paid forward community called SaaS Boomi, which essentially is built by founders to help other founders who are up and coming today in the ecosystem. So I think that's really helping create, move India from being an IT services nation to being a product nation, right? So I think that, that movement is real. And, uh, it's not just SaaS. Even on the product side, I would say, while in the past, The Google of India is Google. The Facebook of India is Facebook, etc. But then the DoorDash of India is Swiggy. The, you know, Uber of India is Ola. So we have a different set of companies now which have scaled massively. Uh, and, and so I think there is this B to C and B to B tech tech ecosystem now in India that's fairly mature. Early on, it used to be only engineering talent that would be available in India, but now I think we have great product design, great product, Slowly product marketing. Every function is.

AI assessment note: “move India from being an IT services nation to being a product nation”

Q When did you know you had product market fit? Was there a time when it was clear, it was just really starting to work when you were there?

A I think, um, for us, for our product, for the chat product, uh, we relaunched inside Freshworks twice. And the first time we didn't really see that PMF happened. We had assumed that the Freshworks machinery would sort of help us grow faster. And, you know, the first time we relaunched, it was still, our product was still focused on mobile apps, and that didn't really take off. Um, mostly because I think the Western markets didn't see mobile as, um, You know, as important as India or Southeast Asia, where these were mobile first economies in a way. So once we realized that, and once we saw that, hey, there's companies like Drift and Intercom, which are growing so fast with just web chat, um, we sort of decided, hey, maybe we need to relaunch with web and mobile, and that took off in a big way, became the fastest product in Freshworks to hit various revenue milestones.

AI assessment note: “relaunch with web and mobile, and that took off in a big way”

Q Another big theme going on right now in the US, of course, is AI, artificial intelligence. What, what role does Rocket Lane play in the AI world? Like with the AI boom going on, what does Rocket Lane do with that?

A I think there's two sides to what AI does for Rocket Lane, not, you know, how we think about it, right? One is for our own product, we're going to have different areas where we can leverage AI. We already launched Like a resource AI module, which helps you staff the right team for the right project based on, do you want to optimize for margins? Do you want to optimize for like balancing the workload? So one piece is what we incorporate in our roadmap. But I think there's this larger theme of, if deploying AI in the enterprise is going to be like a big theme, and there's going to be probably even companies that are built just like new services companies that all they do is deploy AI in the enterprise. Then I think we have a role over there as well as the solution they would use to accelerate those deployments.

AI assessment note: “One is for our own product, we're going to have different areas where we can leverage AI.”

Q And, and tell me a little bit about the philosophy around the multi-product expansion. I think, you know, there's something called a compound, a SaaS company, which, you know, Rippling is a very famous example here. And Freshworks was sort of an early compound SaaS company. Like how do you, like how many different products were there? How do you think about how they related to each other?

A Right. I think the way to think of it is, is there value in bringing different kinds of experiences together? Um, Think of what the smartphone did, right? You have a camera, GPS, before that maybe you had the iPod and so on, and the phone as different devices, but by putting them together, it's not just about carrying one device, but it's also about the new use cases it enables, like sharing a picture with a friend because your contact is on the phone and the camera is on the phone. Um, so that's the equivalent we see here where from a Freshworks perspective, If the customer record can be common across the CRM, across help desk, across the marketing automation platform, et cetera, that enables automatically a lot more use cases for the business. And that's, that's sort of the, um, idea behind building this as a composite or compound product, um, create the iPhone moment for business software, right?

AI assessment note: “If the customer record can be common across the CRM, across help desk”