What is today the memoirs of Freshworks founder Girish Mathrubootham started as a business book on the software company leading up to its initial public offering (IPO) on the Nasdaq in 2021. But Mathrubootham and the leadership team turned it around to a “life story” book. The final product, All In, hit stands on April 15.
Exactly a year ago, when US-based Mathrubootham stepped down as CEO to become executive chairman, he wanted the memoirs to be finished by the time he turned 50 on March 29. “When there is a time bomb ticking, work gets done, right?” says the entrepreneur. The book is co-written with Factor Daily co-founder Pankaj Mishra, whose 2017 profile on Mathrubootham sowed the seeds of a memoir on the self-made, “non-IIT/IIM, non-Harvard, Stanford graduate” startup founder from the temple town of Trichy in Tamil Nadu, who built a billion-dollar company on his own terms, and became the poster boy of software-as-a-service businesses in India. Edited excerpts:
Maybe we will do a sequel.
The timing [of stepping back], in my mind, was perfect. The book has kept me busy. Artificial intelligence (AI) has kept me really busy. I call it a monster wave, compared to previous technological disruptions like the smartphone or the internet. I think AI is equal to or bigger than the internet itself, in terms of how much disruption it is going to cause.
Q. You say emotional detachment is necessary when you are running a business. Still, stepping back from the driver’s seat in a company that you have built from ground up might not have been an easy decision…
One of the life lessons I have learnt is optimising for happiness. I’ve indicated in one of the early chapters of the book that I do not give the control of my happiness to anyone else. How you react is controllable by you, so why do you want to let something or somebody else make you unhappy? I am a product person by heart. I like to work on products and I like to ride the wave. Taking Freshworks public is something that I wanted to do. We could have stayed private for longer, raised money at much higher valuations. But I am a chess player, and if I can, I like to move to the end game sooner. For a VC-funded company, a good exit is either an IPO or a good acquisition. An IPO is actually a preferred exit because the company continues.
Being a public company CEO is a once-in-lifetime opportunity. Most people don’t get it. Very few people get it twice or three times, and even for people who get it, it is a one-time opportunity. I did that for 2.5 years, and the learning was fantastic, but where does my heart lie? It lies in products. I want to work on products and AI was a big disruption that was coming. I work with the Freshworks team on the AI strategy, with our Freddy offering (an AI agent for customer and IT support). It was a great opportunity to focus on generative AI. With the Together Fund, I started to meet interesting AI startups. And we found Dennis Woodside, who is the right leader to take Freshworks forward as a public company.
Q. The customer support space is one of the heavily disrupted areas due to AI. How does a company like Freshworks recalibrate?
We went back to the core of why customers want to do business with Freshworks. It’s because our solutions are not complicated. This means uncomplicated AI is part of our offerings. We saw in the industry that customer support is one of the first use cases to get automated. In fact, since 2015-16, we used to ask ourselves, what would kill Freshworks? We got the answer early on that we are not going to be killed by another company. But if generative AI is automating customer support, that is a threat we needed to be ready for. That’s why we invested early. Today, we have Freddy AI agents to help automate customer support. We also have humans in the loop because humans are needed to make sure that everything a customer has asked for has been delivered. So we have the Freddy Copilot that helps the human in the loop act as the second layer of defence after AI agents have automated support. Generative AI can also deliver insights from unstructured data, and with Freddy Insights, we were early in modifying and reporting our analytics to make sure it is easy for customers to get insights from it.
Also read: We have the potential to nurture champions: Girish Mathrubootham
Q. AI innovation at its core is not a volumes game. It requires companies to have leaner teams, perhaps, or the nature of jobs itself will change. For Freshworks, how do you see AI’s impact on jobs going forward?
For most companies in tech and in general… we will probably hire fewer people than we hired in the past. That is because, everybody is getting more productive. The fundamental promise of AI is that many of the monotonous, mundane, everyday tasks will be automated, which means as human beings, we can step up. When existing employees are getting more productive, hiring has to slow down. But let’s say our AI sells and we are able to grow much faster, then hiring will probably pick up pace again. If generative AI is causing the disruption, are we going to be a beneficiary or are we going to be disrupted? To be a beneficiary, we have to understand, that if money is being spent on automation, we have to be the provider of that automation. That’s where the focus is right now.
Q. Your entrepreneurial zeal has been motivated by your need to have a better life, because you always believed you deserved better. When was the first time you turned that thought into a business idea?
I would call it aspiration, rather than entrepreneurial zeal. I was an aspirational guy, whether I had the money or not. Even when I didn’t have the money and I wanted something, and if somebody said I can’t get it, I would want it even more. I guess that was always my nature. When I did Java training for the time in 1998 or so, it was accidental. When my friend asked me to teach him Java, I had the idea to get more people and start a class. That led to an opportunity to teach the employees of Polaris. That gave me Rs20,000-Rs30,000 for a two-week course. That’s when I really tasted success. Today, you cannot really call it entrepreneurship, it was more like a side hustle or self-employment. But it taught me how to think like a business owner. It showed me what was possible. I learnt how I can get more leverage if I have more people, and I think that was the beginning.
Also read: Girish Mathrubootham's fresh goals: A Messi from Madras
Q. When you learnt how to code, you created a dummy programme through which you got hold your classmates’ passwords. In that context, you said that sometimes, to build something, breaking the rules is necessary. Is breaking the rules invariably part of an entrepreneur’s journey?
In that example, it was more of a young adult’s prank on his friends. Many times, in order to challenge the status quo, you will have to break some rules, right? A great example of that is Uber. Because the rules of that business were created in a different era, for a different structure. In New York or San Francisco, only people with taxi licences could drive those taxis and those licences cost millions of dollars, and normal people could not actually make a living. But the idea [of ride-hailing platforms] meant that anybody could use their existing vehicle to offer rides and monetise on the side. Uber had to break the rules, city after city, in order to make that business. Today, all of us use Uber or Ola and are beneficiaries of that. So you have to see if the rules make sense and if breaking the rules creates a better life. And I think breaking rules is one thing, doing something unethical is different.
Q. When you gave an interview at Zoho (then AdventNet) in the early 2000s, the HR recruiter asked you where you see yourself in five years. You said, starting your own company, and you did that. If you were asked the same question now, what would you say?
I would still be in the journey of being a catalyst in realising two of my dreams. One, seeing India as a product nation, and two, finding a Messi from Madras (through his grassroots youth football academy, FC Madras, that he started with `100 crore of his personal wealth).