Startup turns UNICORN in 8 years

Girish Mathrubootham, the Founder and CEO of Freshworks (known earlier as Freshdesk) had worked for 9 years with Zoho Corporation (It was AdventNet when he joined in 2001 as a PreSales Engineer) and his last role was VP Product Management at the ManageEngine division of Zoho Corp.

The concept of helpdesk systems was building in his mind since 2004. He had experience with an ITIL helpdesk, a customer support helpdesk and had also known a lot about these markets. Besides, he had a ringside view to all the action in cloud computing happening in Zoho.

Around mid-2009, he was reading an article on Hacker News that referred to Zendesk raising prices by 60 – 300 % and that their users were unhappy. As he was browsing through the comments, one of the comment by megamark caught his attention.

Here was an opportunity that he could tap with the domain knowledge as well as knowing about massive transition to cloud and he decided to build something in the customer support market delivered as SAAS.

The next few weeks were actually pretty stressful. He couldn’t sleep because of the excitement and the fear (school fees, home mortgage etc.) He had not talked to anyone (not even to his wife), but he was researching all the companies in the space.

The Hacker Monthly according to Girish, is the best resource for entrepreneurs. Now It was time to have a co-founder and Shan Krishnasamy – a great techie agreed. For a few weeks they worked on weekends and nights but both resigned in October 2010. Commenced operations with a team of six– (3 developers, 1 UI/UX designer, 1 QA / Customer support engineer and Girish himself as – the Product Manager / CEO).

US Company or India Company?

Being based in India, he couldn’t find payment gateway provider offering recurring payment solutions in India. The best payment processors that the company looked forward to only worked with US bank accounts.

Hence, they decided to incorporate Freshdesk in the US. The story of incorporation is at how we incorporated a US company from India here. Simultaneously, they also registered a company in India to have employees and hire an office space etc.

(This short write up is based on https://freshdesk.com/blog/author/girish/ )