We are bootstrapped like MailChimp, have never taken any venture capital, and we won't. We have focused on building what we call "the Operating System for Business", because we envision that all the business applications will come together. That's why we have so many engineers to build that vision. By the size of the engineering workforce, we are probably already bigger than Salesforce.

Our own 4000-employee organization relies on Zoho services to run our entire business. We hope to earn your trust some day!

The economy is now fully addicted to bubbles, and the start-up ecosystem is particularly affected. Withdrawal from this bubble-drug is going to be painful.

A couple of anecdotes about the last big tech bubble of 2000. At that time, there were 300+ optical networking companies in silicon valley. We had sold our network management software to about 150 of them. By 2003, only 2 were left standing. We survived because we had saved up some money for that eventuality, and we reinvented ourselves using those savings.

One painful bubble memory I have is the real estate lease that we had no option but to sign in 2000. We moved from San Jose to Pleasanton to escape the worst of the bubble-rents but even in Pleasanton, while the rent wasn't ruinous (about $20 per square foot per year), the landlord forced a 7 year lease on us. Still, the rents fell to about $10 per square foot per year by 2002, but we were stuck with the higher rent for 5 more years. Fortunately, the company was financially strong enough to withstand it but the episode taught us a lesson in bubble-planning and bubble-survival.

I am shocked that people are signing $50-100 a square foot per year leases for 10 year terms these days.

Our goal right now is to survive the present bubble, bigger in some ways than even the one in 2000. I tell our people that there is going to be a serious bust and we should aim to survive it first.

History is full of injustices. I don't see why the present generation of Indians should hold onto what happened to their grandparents generation. We don't need to suffer history now, we get to live in the present - that is the attitude I see in most people in India. That is why India is as peaceful as it is (we have to normalize whatever good or bad is happening to the population - "India" is not an aggregate in the same sense that, say, "Sweden" is an aggregate - so whatever happens in Sweden once a year would happen almost once a day in India, simply based on the relative population sizes).

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7705779

Points: 2

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Recently they stopped access to a whole bunch of CRM players to LinkedIn API. Only Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics are allowed now.

http://www.zdnet.com/linkedout-crm-companies-squawk-over-lin...

(Disclosure: Zoho CRM was one of the affected products - we offered to pay for their API access but no dice)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7650544

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

I have come to believe over the years that interviewing measures interviewing skills. Test scores measure test taking skills. Success on the job requires success-on-the-job (to coin a phrase) skills. All those things correlate, but the correlation coefficient is not super high. In fact, ignoring those correlations can be an effective strategy to find great people.

I don't see any justification for the 2% on ever-larger rounds of investment. The work VCs do on a $100 million investment is not 100x more than the work they do on a $1 million investment. I hope that model gets disrupted!

http://sfari.org/news-and-opinion/news/2013/large-study-link...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15546805 --- abstract -- Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a spectrum of behavioral anomalies characterized by impaired social interaction and communication, often accompanied by repetitive and stereotyped behavior. The condition manifests within the first 3 years of life and persists into adulthood. There are numerous hypotheses regarding the etiology and pathology of ASD, including a suggested role for immune dysfunction. However, to date, the evidence for involvement of the immune system in autism has been inconclusive. While immune system abnormalities have been reported in children with autistic disorder, there is little consensus regarding the nature of these differences which include both enhanced autoimmunity and reduced immune function. In this review, we discuss current findings with respect to immune function and the spectrum of autoimmune phenomena described in children with ASD. -- end quote ---

The immune system in new-born babies and young children is immature and under-developed.

The Party looked at the "end state" of an industrialized, prosperous middle-class nation and then decided to will that end state into existence. In that end state, China needs to urbanize on a massive scale and these cities are simply the physical manifestation.

This is the grandest scale human experiment ever, collectivist decision making at its finest (those farmers who are forced to give up the land don't have much of a voice).

Will this work? I don't believe we can begin to calculate all the consequences of this experiment. In any case, it is not obvious the causality runs the way that is implicit in this experiment: build cities, move people, and forge a vast urban middle-class out of rural peasants.

This book is a somewhat sympathetic description of that grand experiment (mildly sympathetic to the Party):

http://www.amazon.com/Chinas-Urban-Billion-Migration-Argumen...

To understand what is going on in Indian society, I recommend this book by Naipaul, written over 20 years ago, but still very relevant: "India, a million mutinies now" http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55676.India

Basically India is in an utterly chaotic transition from an old established hierarchy where your caste and gender fixed your place in society to something that looks very different.

One part of the societal transition is that there is a vast horde of (mostly male) migrants to major cities in India and these men are absolutely not rooted in anything. They are away from their villages, their families, their social networks. For most of these young men, the social system, particularly gender roles, they experienced in the villages is very different from what they see in a big city. You put a lot of young men in that situation, they think anything goes, particularly when they see a foreigner or an urbanized Indian woman. They think of her not as a person, but as an object - but it is a different kind of objectification, where they feel inferior to the object, it is unattainable to them, so they act with cruelty and savagery. That is what is different between this form of objectification and normal patriarchal behavior which would try to be patronizing and protective towards women.

Those very same men, in their own village, would not do the same thing to a foreigner, because normal social restraints would apply. In a vast urban space, they feel the protection of anonymity and feel they can get away with anything.

The only short term solution, being tried in states like Tamil Nadu, is a massive increase in female police presence, both uniformed and plain-clothes police officers in public places in big cities. This does improve security for women where it has been tried (Chennai is an example of such a city). I hope her post serves us a wake-up call for the governments in India to think of measures like this.