Sri Ganesan, founder of Rocketlane and former Freshworks leader, explains why Indian SaaS companies had an arbitrage advantage serving SMBs compared to US competitors.
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Most Indian tech talent prefers cash compensation over startup equity.
“I think there's very few companies where people believe in equity. So if you are hiring someone who used to work at Freshworks, they're gonna ask you for more equity, less cash. If, you know, most other, if you're hiring talent from elsewhere, they don't under…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Job candidates reneging on accepted offers remains common in India.
“In general, that's true that, you know, people may not join after accepting an offer from you in India. I think it, it's been called out a fair number of times on LinkedIn and so on. So I think the behavior is changing a bit.”
Assertion Supported
Freshworks initially staffed all corporate functions with recent engineering graduates.
“He actually built the business off of initially really, you know, young fresh grads from different engineering colleges, and in specific, I think he went to, you know, one engineering school, kept going there every year to hire talent, and For every function, …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Half of projects on Asana, Smartsheet, and Monday.com are customer-facing.
“Fun fact is, I think, 50% of the projects that run on, like, Smartsheets or Asana or Monday.com are actually customer-facing projects, but none of these were built, ground up for that use case.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
New service firms will emerge exclusively to deploy enterprise AI.
“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.”
Insight
B2C startup founders require greater delusion than their B2B counterparts.
“I think the more delusional you are, the more you move towards B to C, because it takes even more to succeed.”