Freshworks initially staffed all corporate functions with recent engineering graduates.
Sri Ganesan · Ep 84: Sri Ganesan on Freshworks' Big Win, Building Rocketlane & India's Tech Boom · Joe Lonsdale · Apr 11, 2024 · at 8:41
Sri Ganesan (founder and CEO of Rocketlane, former Freshworks director) explains how Freshworks scaled its early talent in India.
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“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, whether it's support, or marketing, or sales, or product development, it would be fresh engineers from this school.”
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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…”
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.”
US software companies cannot afford to provide high-touch support for SMBs.
“A company in the US typically cannot afford to serve the SMB well in terms of like the hours of support you can offer.”
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“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.”
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.”