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Hailing from Tanjore, Tamil Nadu, Sridhar Vembu grew up in a middle-class family. He is co-founder and the CEO of Zoho Corporation, a company with recent revenue that exceeds $1 billion.
Tenkasi Days: Sridhar Vembu’s global village
× The soul of India lives in its villages declared Mahatma Gandhi nearly a century ago. But it was the cities that moved the wheels of commerce and where the talent and spotlight shifted. Until Sridhar Vembu, the charismatic founder of Zoho Corp, took it upon himself to prove that the village could be a coding hub of creativity and commerce.
Vembu, recently awarded the Padma Shri award, argues that it was a decision based on first principles to move to a rural outpost near Tenkasi in southern Tamil Nadu nearly a decade ago, and no quixotic ideals. Cities were getting crowded, polluted, facing water shortage and things needed to change. But it’s taken a pandemic during which work from anywhere became an accepted notion to prove how far-sighted was his premise.