Freshworks

“There is something called a cowboy or a cowgirl sales style. Where, you know, I considered myself a good salesperson. I could win the trust. I could really tell people my value prop, but Pankaj can do only that much. So there is a new world of sales, which tel…”

“We didn't raise any money up until the second or third year of operations, where we did a small angel round for one and a half crores, where we had people like Ritesh, we had Girish Matraputam from Freshworks, and a couple of other angels, Rohit and Nana in We…”

“Someone, someone came and said that, you know, do you know someone is coming out of Zoho and starting a company, you know, and he's raising funds. Would you like to speak to them? And I said, you know, I have done a lot of investments and I think I am out of t…”

“Because otherwise, like in Freshworks, more than 90% of the ownership is with investors.”

“India right now is in an amazing place in terms of very, very high quality entrepreneurs in the SaaS space, and people are coming off very strong organizations, whether it's Freshworks, whether it's Chargebee, whether it is Zoho, etc.”

“I think of this as an exponential curve, Siddharth, not as a linear curve. You build one today, you build three tomorrow, you build nine the year after, and then 27 the year after. So, I think of it as an exponential journey and not a linear journey.”

“I think soon, three years down the line, they might be touching the one billion dollar ARR mark.”

“In fact, a lot of, I would say, Chennai-based SaaS startups have Founders who may be ex-Zoho, ex-Freshworks, etc.”

“I think we were still in a phase where an ex Freshworks team had a premium.”

“We had like a zero to twelve million journey in two years and three months”

“Today, Freshworks is more than five hundred million in annual recurring revenues.”

“Because I think when you launch prematurely, you're not living up to the vision. The customer can't decipher that vision when the product isn't there yet.”

“India, I would say it would be Wattfix, since I get to know Khadem very closely, and I think Khadem is building the next Freshworks, or Wattfix might become bigger than Freshworks in the next 10 years.”

“Freshworks has demonstrated that, right? It's the scale of a large public listing because a lot of people got financial independence created huge, like it's a number that almost a hundred people got into dollar million, million years, right? Which is eight cro…”

“Fresh works created Hundreds of people with ten million dollars of wealth. And now they're pumping money back, right? They're all my limited partners in the fund.”

“Which is the reason why these companies are say at a anywhere between a 10 to 30% premium when it comes to their revenue multiples as compared to say a Freshworks, which is again, you know, a fantastic company with a seven hundred million dollar kind of scale,…”

“That's one of the companies you know, I'm seeing that they'll, they can become the next Freshworks or even bigger than Freshworks from India.”

“So we'll write checks, 25 K, 50 K US dollars, and almost every weekend will help in helping one founder or the other. So that saw both our portfolio grew to a hundred. Grisha bought 60 investments. Fashion really scaled like hockey stick, right? Acre still wen…”

“The art of selling is still to be figured out. I think for, I think SaaS from India has still not seen that type. There are a few success stories, obviously Freshworks, some of the Postman, some of these have been good stories for the ecosystem, but SAS India …”

“I strongly believe at this point of time, my engineering team even won't be hundred people. So that will be very strong. I mean, view I have it in the size of the team who can able to deliver high value companies will be way, way smaller, right? So like you wi…”

“This is my third help desk in building, right? One, I did it in Zoho, which is an installable era where people install software to get things done. And I built Freshworks in a cloud era. Where the technology is actually booming, but still it took time, but I d…”

“To give a comparison at Freshworks, when we released the product, we released in three months because we actually ditched Java. We put Ruby on Rails because it is easy to bake in and actually release that entire product in three months, right?”

“The error is gone, right? So now you can't do like, okay, I will actually bet on digital sales. I can able to sell as nine dollar per agent subscription. Those days are gone, right? So those should be rethought about how you wanted to build digital sales. The …”

“Yeah, I think we have Zoho, which is already, and then I'm sure like Freshworks will be the next, and there'll be a lot more that will follow.”

“Freshworks created like thousand millionaires sitting out of Chennai. And it completely changed in ecosystem how founders give back.”