I saw the article coincidentally when I was looking at a Zoho product after a long time. A friend in New Bombay who co-owns a fledgling, but growing business was looking for a CRM solution. I was spending the weekend with him so he and I got on the internet and started checking things out. He was already being pitched by salesforce.com. Apparently, salesforce.com has a center in India that calls out to trial users in India. He was getting ready to get salesforce.com for the low, low price of $9 per user (limited time offer) before I suggested that he have a look at 37signals and Zoho. I had never tried them but knew that they both had something on CRM.

The 37signals product, Highrise, is somewhat different from your classical CRM so that didn’t work for my friend. But he loved Zoho – especially, the price – free for up to 3 users, $12 per user after for a full-featured CRM product. I tried out the product myself and I was very impressed by it. CRM software functionality is not rocket science. It’s been done many times before. But Zoho had managed to improve on it considerably. For example the one feature that totally wowed me was how you could convert a list of contacts or leads into a Zoho spreadsheet (nice cross-integration, guys), edit it and then save it back to the CRM database. Very cool.

Back to the topic at hand. The Face Value story was about how Sridhar and Zoho were creating a new disruptive model in software based upon a dramatically lower cost of operations. Not just lower cost Indian engineers, though that probably doesn’t hurt.

If Mr Vembu still expects to make money, it is because of his firm’s frugal ways. This has little to do with low Indian wages: these are rising quickly, and most Western software firms also do much development in India. More importantly, he says, Zoho’s software and data centres are built for efficiency. The firm spends a pittance on marketing. And it uses free technology developed by others wherever possible. Its subscribers can, for instance, use Google’s authentication service to sign on to Zoho.

And further,

But Mr Vembu is unfazed: “We’ve heard this before from the likes of Digital Equipment and Sun Microsystems. But look what Dell did to them.”

So while the SaaS model upends the high cost licensed software model, Zoho aims to become the cost leader amongst the SaaS business software vendors. And do what Dell did to the PC industry a decade ago.

But there are some crucial differences. The PC and hardware business is a variable cost business. Lower costs translate into a pricing advantage that leads to more sales and better margins. On the other hand, software, especially in the SaaS model, is largely a fixed cost business. Lower fixed costs don’t automatically turn into a pricing advantage and more sales.

According to the Face Value article, Zoho has wired its business so that a variety of costs are lower:

1. Fixed costs – use of open source, engineering and most of the company is in India. Almost no Marketing costs. Just word-of-mouth.
2. Variable costs – data center efficiencies. Minimal Sales costs. Service costs are presumably India based.

This is a comprehensive, across-the-board cost advantage. But what we must note is that while some things have a lower cost at presumably no trade-off, having lower Marketing, Sales and Service costs than say salesforce.com is a strategic bet. The bet is that sales can scale without them.

Does this comprehensive cost advantage automatically translate into success in the market? Not necessarily. If the lower costs enable Zoho to offer a somewhat lower price, say 15% lower, it may not matter to the customer. The design and quality of the software may matter more. Part of what makes one software product better than another is simply feature coverage, which is more a function of cumulative investment in engineering rather than this year’s fixed cost, giving incumbents the advantage. The other part of it is just how it is designed. “Code is poetry”, as wordpress.org says. Lower costs make no difference whatsoever in this regard.

In my opinion, lower costs are only part of the story here. The big bet that Zoho is making here is that there is a lot of room at the “bottom of the pyramid”. My quick assessment is that a Zoho CRM subscription is between 4 to 5 times cheaper than salesforce.com (ignoring their limited time offer). That is not a measly 15% less. That is 75 to 80% less!

At these prices, they don’t have to fight salesforce.com for customers. They are going after an entirely different market. A market that includes my friend in New Bombay and his Indian startup. Or a Chinese toy manufacturer. Or a small business in the US. You get the picture.

I’ll leave you with an excerpt from my post Go South, Young Man from two years ago.

I think the bottom of the global pyramid in SaaS (borrowing heavily from Prof. C. K. Prahlad) is a great opportunity for Indian tech startups. India abounds in technical talent but is stymied because it can’t develop cutting edge software for developed markets. Indian technologists aren’t deeply knowledgeable about business practices there and thus lose out. My contention is – forget developed markets. Go for the bottom of the pyramid. There are thousands of businesses – small and large – in China and India that need the same software that is being served up by today’s SaaS providers in the US. While these companies are trapped in their first world pricing traps, Indian companies can create similar SaaS products and target the South. These products, at first will be similar, but will eventually diverge as the needs and price points take them in a different direction from their US competitors. And that is good. It creates entry barriers for when the SaaS companies from the North wake up and realize the potential in the South.

[Update: General Electric is going with Zoho on thousands of its desktops. Clearly targeting the bottom of the pyramid does not preclude a smart player at the top of the pyramid (and they don't go any higher in the pyramid than GE). Well done Zoho!]

What does Gridstone Research do? If an Equity Analyst asks this question, the answer we give is what our home page says,

Using cutting-edge technology, Gridstone assembles, analyzes and structures unstructured company information into financial data, guidance, operational data and structured text. Information that could take hours to assemble is available at your fingertips, at our website or directly in Excel.

This describes the end-user benefit. But for those who are interested in such matters, it still doesn’t answer the question of what we actually do. To explain this, I will heavily lean upon an excellent post on ReadWriteWeb, by Alex Iskold. The post is called Top-Down: A New Approach to the Semantic Web.

Wikipedia describes the Semantic Web thus

The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which web content can be expressed not only in natural language, but also in a format that can be read and used by software agents, thus permitting them to find, share and integrate information more easily.

The Semantic Web and associated standards like RDF and OWL are rapidly gaining visibility. But is it anywhere near where it might produce something of business value? Many commentators believe that it is going to be a long haul. Iskold outlines several challenges with what he calls the bottom-up approach to the Semantic Web in another great piece.

The biggest challenge that the Semantic Web is going to face is about what to do with all the existing content. How do the website owners justify the expense related to annotating their content with semantics? And until the content is converted, no useful applications can be built on top of it. There’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem here.

Might there be another approach then? An approach where someone or some company actually builds the technology to annotate web content with semantics. Iskold calls this the top-down approach

The essence of a top-down semantic web service is simple – leverage existing web information, apply specific, vertical semantic knowledge and then redeliver the results via a consumer-centric application.

Iskold believes that this is not only more likely to be successful in the short-term, it is already happening. He talks about Spock, a vertical search company focused on people.

Consider the vertical search engine Spock, which scans the web for information about people. It knows how to recognize names in HTML pages and it also looks for common information about people that all people have – birthdays, locations, marital status, etc. In addition, Spock “understands” that people relate to each other.

This is very similar to what Gridstone Research does, albeit in an entirely different domain – financial information.

We

Additionally, we

In the last two years, we have been busy building the enabling technologies. This isn’t an easy problem to solve and there are many building blocks. But finally, all the pieces are in place. Later this month we will unveil Search on the Gridstone platform. It will be unlike anything you have seen in the Financial domain.

Watch this space.

I whipped up a Slidecast about it. Even if you are not connected to the Financial world, take a look at it. I think it is effective and I spent about a day on it and that too because I tried many different approaches until I hit my stride. Feedback is welcome. If you’re interested in the tools I used, leave a comment.

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An individual can start and run a company all by herself. There is nothing new about that. What is however changing is just how much that company can achieve with a small team. A few individuals can create a company with millions of dollars in revenues and tens of millions of dollars of value.

The photo-sharing site flickr is one such example. Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield created what is today the leading photo-sharing service on the internet with just a few developers. It took in no venture capital and sold itself to Yahoo for an estimated $30-35 million.

An extreme case of a one-man company already looking at a billion dollar plus valuation is a site called Plenty Of Fish – an online dating site. They just hired their first employee – a customer service rep!

There is a long-term trend that is playing out, especially in certain sectors like IT, gaming, media and entertainment – entrepreneurs are able to go much further with very few employees and very little capital. What is common across all these sectors is that what they produce is an “information product” not physical goods and services. And what provides this leverage to innovation and talent is the availability of cheap, simple, pay-per-use technology and the internet as a low-cost channel for marketing and distribution. Open source software, Cloud Computing, viral internet videos and many other things are today changing the rules of the game in industries that produce information products. And this is just the beginning.

How will all this play out? Differently in different industries. The music industry in the west is in the early days of what could be cataclysmic change. The need for capital in the music industry was primarily for marketing and distribution. That need has come down to zero for well-known bands like Radiohead, who create their own buzz. Radiohead has decided to put up its new album for download, without any DRM at all. In an amazing twist, to download the album, you simply pay what you would like to pay for the songs. Even though you can download it for free, most people pay something (figure that out, Mr. Rational Economist).

Obviously, Radiohead isn’t stupid. They have a gameplan. They are betting that the economics of the music industry are better if you give away your music and sell your concerts high. Selling the music at a high price, on CDs and as digital music with DRM, is an exercise in futility. If it was just rogue websites you were fighting you might still be able to shut all of them down. But you just can’t win against peer-to-peer file sharing technologies like BitTorrent.

Radiohead isn’t the only mainstream band having second thoughts about the artist-label relationship in the current structure of the music industry. Madonna, recently signed up with Live Nation a concert producer for both concerts and albums. The deal is quite different from what Radiohead is doing here, but it all points to one thing – there’s going to be a new structure in the music industry emerging soon, and the balance of power is going to shift slowly but surely towards the artists.

In the software industry something similar should be expected. Hosting services, open source software, SaaS and outsourced services – all enable an innovator to think up something new and build it on the cheap. For a consumer internet business, marketing too requires innovative approaches rather than millions of dollars in TV advertising. Enterprise IT still requires capital to build a professional sales force, but even here travel is becoming less and less necessary. Webex type screen sharing technology makes the sales process more productive.

What all this means is that there has never been a time when the leverage to innovation and talent has been this high. A startup essentially is becoming a zero-distortion amplifier for an innovative idea. It thrives or dies on the merit of the idea and its implementation as a product. An innovator with an idea and the skills to bring it to life are all that it takes to make a successful large business.

I was a bit of an odd duck in the group. As it turned out, I was the only company represented that was doing enterprise apps (although I am applying that definition rather loosely – we are both content and software). After a couple of days of networking, it seemed as if I was in a land where the natives spoke a different language. There was a whole bunch of mobile companies, a smattering of networking and storage folks, some social networking types, but no enterprise apps. Where in the world have all the enterprise app startups gone? I think this one deserves a separate post, so I’ll leave it for later.

Random notes on the sessions:

• The panel discussion on Web 2.0 was star-studded (Esther Dyson, Mike Arrington…) but was all over the place. It started with the definition of Web 2.0 which to me is just a random collection of contemporaneous technologies. The panel discussion befittingly dissolved into random musings and some ugly bickering about why Facebook thought it was worth more than $1 billion.
• Ted Leonsis of AOL said that internet advertising could drive a lot more than what it is today. He could see university education one day being offered online, free. Just supported by advertising!
• On the media panel, Om Malik, one of my favourite bloggers said that the disruption of old media was not just about technology. It was about people and their power structures – middle management in editorial and most importantly, advertising sales departments. His own blog is doing well, thank you very much. He said they should hit $— in revenues in 2007 (Update: took out the numbers at Om’s request. His remarks were supposed to be off the record).
• Larry Summers spoke on globalization. The best session of the conference. Riveting stuff. He spoke about the growing markets in developing countries. How China and the OPEC countries were keeping debt cheap in the developed world which was a major reason why private equity’s reign has lasted so long. How the classical assumption in economics that labor and capital went into the same country was being upended, allowing developed world capital to combine with cheaper labor in developing countries. And finally how the coming impact of globalization will be very hard for the US and the rest of the developed world to absorb unless proactive steps are not taken early enough.
• Jared Diamond, the author of Collapse and one of my favourite non-fiction writers spoke about globalization from a geographer’s perspective. The per capita ‘resource’ consumption of the rich countries in terms of oil, metal and so on, is thirty two times that in the poor countries. If the poor countries gain the same level of prosperity as today’s rich countries and the average resource consumption does not go down, according to his calculations it will be as if the earth has to support 400 billion people! Scary thought. Obviously, the average resource consumption will have to drop and quickly.
• Nathan Myhrvold spoke about Intellectual Ventures, his company that he says does “Invention Capital” as in funds inventions that can later become businesses. There was some skepticism in the room about the whole idea of “cornering” patents, which many industry commentators claim slows down innovation, at least in some industries like the software industry. My takeaway from the session was that at Gridstone we were going to continue patenting our inventions. So far we have. Better safe than sorry.

“No matter what we do, contribution of IT-ITES will be marginal in contribution towards Indian GDP unless something dramatic happens.”

The primary conclusion of his data analysis is that the Indian IT Services industry has a low average revenue per employee ($22,000 per employee in 2005) versus Microsoft (over $600,000 per employee). And therefore

“Only a technology product company can add the right kind of money into India at a faster and quicker pace using smaller manpower.”

Here is my rebuttal: 

What economic objective are we solving for? Let’s say that is GDP growth. Why then is revenue per employee (RPE) a metric we should care about? Are industries with higher RPE, higher growth industries as well?

Then there is this befuddling argument that since Microsoft (US software industry) has a much RPE compared to the Indian services industry, that India must have a stronger high-tech industry.

On similar lines, here’s my logic for why India must forget about retail banking and have a stronger investment banking industry - Goldman Sachs has an RPE of $1,317,000 while ICICI Bank’s is only $139,000. I think the analogy is apt. But the argument is wrong.

It is not necessary for a country to have a large and growing high-tech industry to grow. Countries like Singapore and Australia haven’t needed a strong high-tech industry to get wealthy. The software industry is actually highly concentrated in the US. Can you think of any software company headquartered in the UK?

The case for the high-tech sector in India being vastly more important than other sectors isn’t strong. Sectors like Financial Services provide the infrastructure for the economy to grow. Retailing, Infrastructure, Airlines – all serve objectives beyond just growth. When it comes to growth, IT Services is an industry where India has great comparative advantage.  Software has that too, but less so.

Having said that, the fact is that this argument is immaterial. Software companies in India (IP based companies) are anyway sprouting like mushrooms (Gridstone Research, my company, is one of them). Not because of exhortations from bloggers but because there are people who have the skills and the aspirations to build businesses.

So, folks let’s stop bashing the IT Services industry. If you find the software business sexier, start one. Or join one. We’re hiring.

We have broadly two streams in India. Research and Technology. The Research Operations carry out the analysis which goes as content in our product. The software for the product is developed by Technology.

Our Technology development is outsourced to Persistent Systems, who do a fine job, by the way. So our Mumbai operations are primarily Research oriented. Over 120 of the 140 staff in Mumbai are in Research Operations. I think we already might be one of the largest equity research shops in India.

At the entry level, where most of the hiring in Research is done, we have built a solid team. We hire largely from the Mumbai based MBA programs and have been able to attract the cream of the crop. Our training is top-notch and the work involves in-depth fundamental analysis of companies. Outside of buy-side shops, we may be one of the best entry-level jobs around, if someone cares about what they will learn on the job. Clearly, young MBAs do.

At the middle manager level we recruit Analysts and Research Operations Managers. Our Analysts typically have an IIM or other top-tier (ISB is a good program) MBA and 5 years of experience in jobs where they have analyzed industries and companies – typically, management consulting, corporate strategy and equity research. Hiring this profile has been tougher but we are finding our groove as we grow and gain maturity. One of the advantages that we don’t have in India, which we would have in the US, is the advantage of being a startup. The pace of change, the excitement of doing something new, a collegial culture – a startup offers all these benefits for the entrepreneurial, bright sorts. This is pretty well understood in the US, especially in the Valley. The average mid-level employee in India wouldn’t mind such a work environment, but does not readily make the connection between it and a startup. Also, stock options are not terribly well understood. In spite of these early challenges, slowly but surely, we’re building a solid mid and senior management team in India.

Hiring in Technology hasn’t been easy at all. You would think that a company that was founded by ex-Infosys guys would at least pull in the techies. But that hasn’t been the case.

To be fair, we are looking for Product Managers, not techies really. Since Product Management is an almost unknown function in India – the IT Services industry swamps the Software industry, if you can call it that – we knew looking for Product Managers would be like looking for needles in a haystack. Instead, we started looking for IT managers with good business backgrounds. I don’t know if we are picky or not, but so far it’s been slim pickings.

The Product Manager’s job is actually quite interesting. You are shaping the technology product based upon what users want and your understanding of the solutions that technology can offer them. You’ll use your technology experience and will gain an in-depth understanding of the equity research business.

I don’t think the job is so much of the problem. The problem, I think is that to a bright rising IT manager in a growth industry a Product Manager’s job doesn’t look like anything familiar. It seems like too much of a different thing, a risk. ‘What will happen to my career if I do this Product Management thing for two years? Will they count it as relevant experience when I want to get a Delivery Manager/Business Manager job at Infosys/TCS/Wipro?’ Such doubts are bound to arise.

In a way, the job is self-selecting. To be interested in a Product Manager’s job, you have to be looking for more intellectual stimulation than you can get at your current job. You have to be entrepreneurial enough to take some risk. And you have to want to work in a small-company, open culture setting.

If you do, drop us a line. We are looking.

Why are flat world startups underserved by the venture industry? Like all startups they need capital, connections (customers, partners, senior hires), and counsel. But it is very rare that you will find a VC who is as familiar with the Indian market as he is with the US market. His expertise, his connections are typically more slanted towards one of the two markets, but not both. So if he has spent his entire career in tech companies and VC firms in the US, his networks are in the technology sector in the US and can help in making introductions to potential customers and partners, but isn’t much help in hiring senior tech personnel in India. If, on the other hand, his background is in the Indian corporate sector or one of the early venture firms in India, he can use his connections to hire senior technology or product executives in India but can gain no market access.

This has an impact on the availability of funding to entrepreneurs as well. VCs like to keep the management of their investee companies as close as possible to where they are. Sequoia, I believe, doesn’t invest in companies that aren’t in or won’t move to the Bay Area. What this means is that entrepreneurs in India don’t have access to VCs in the US. They will typically have to go to VCs in India. However, out of these Indian VCs, only some will have the experience in developed markets that is necessary to evaluate an investment opportunity. And those few that do, because they just moved into India, will be ill placed to help their investee companies – no networks in India and too far away from the US to actively help in making connections there.

I recently met a couple of old batchmates from IIM Ahmedabad. Their startup is having to deal with this gaping hole in Indian VC setup. Their startup offers a service that is a very sophisticated and niche service – a derivatives processing platform targeted at hedge funds. The market is large, growing and pays top dollar. The founders have great resumes. They already have an implementation going at an Indian securities shop. Normally, you’d have VCs eating out of your hands with a story like this. But that isn’t the case here. Their product/market is so specialized that there aren’t any VCs in India who can assess the market opportunity/risk equation.

This story is going to be repeated again and again for flat world startups where the founders are in India. The entrepreneur will have to compromise – take dumb money or settle for a low valuation. Which is a shame because I think there is great potential in flat world ventures, certainly more than in the small Indian domestic tech market which seems to be getting more press than it deserves.

In case there are VC firms out there that realize the potential in the flat world theme, here’s what they would have to do:

1. Have offices in both India and the US with General Partners in both offices. It is important that the Indian office not be perceived as a satellite office staffed with junior staff.
2. Associate two partners with every flat world investee company. One, in India and one in the US. Assuming only one board seat, the other would be observer. But both would be actively involved in the company. This is a big commitment but believe me, it is worth it.
3. Create a culture of sharing and ‘boundarylessness’ within the firm which allows ideas, connections to flow freely across the globe. This will bring a global perspective to firm partners in both India and the US and make them both look smarter to entrepreneurs.
4. Get used to doing business over video conference, telephone or skype. Its that, or constant jet lag – take your pick. The reassuring handshake will get rarer, unfortunately.
5. Be ready to partner. If you can’t immediately do 1 through 4, do the next best thing – build a network of like minded VCs at the other end of the world who you can co-invest with.

In short, if you are a Venture Capital firm and believe in the flat world theme as a big one to bet on you’ll need to ‘flatworld’ yourself to make it work. There, I’ve made a verb out of it now. I wonder if I’m the first person to do that? Well, I’ll just have to Google that and see what turns up!

Startups in India have opportunities and challenges that are quite different from the ones in the US. Ditto for VCs. A few observations:

- Unlike in the Valley, Web 2.0 has no relevance to the Indian domestic market. Internet penetration is low (5.4%), broadband is lower (<0.5%). Even if you include use at work, account sharing and internet cafes, the consumer internet is a tiny market. It may be interesting for some compelling ideas or if someone wants to bet on growth. But in my opinion, it is not going to attract much investment unless there is a broader ‘global Indian’ or a ‘click and mortar’ play.

- Mobile however is hugely interesting. Mobile penetration in India is twice that of the internet and is growing at rates close to 50%. There are opportunities to develop mobile applications that the developed world never needed because of high internet penetration. Booking a cinema ticket in the US is probably done 95% of the times over an internet connection and 5% on a cell phone screen. In India it may be totally different. This also holds out the opportunity that Indian startups may develop mobile applications for the Indian market and then take them to Europe and other developed markets. I hear that OnMobile, a Bangalore based startup that does voice-based mobile apps did its latest round of funding at about $250 million pre-money. I’ll be surprised if they aren’t already selling their services in other countries in APAC or Europe.

- B2B Tech does have a play but in global markets, not in India. This poses a unique problem. Startups targeting the global markets need help from VCs in those markets – access, hiring and advice – which can’t really be expected from a VC based in India. Most VC firms will tell you that when you do a deal with them, you get the connections of the whole firm, but it is a rare firm that operates like that. On the other hand, no US based VC is comfortable funding a management team based in India – the distance is too much. This is a hard nut to crack. I hope some VC can come up with an innovative solution.

- Most people agree that plain outsourcing is no longer a great investment idea. There is a lot of competition and you have to get everything right to build a defensible business. However, managed services – services combined with a software platform – can be very competitive.

- The big opportunity, and one that doesn’t get talked about much, is in non-tech consumer oriented products and services. The Indian middle class is growing and so is its buying power. Every category is growing at a rate that should interest any VC. The discerning Indian consumer wants quality products and services that meet her very unique needs. Food, recreation, entertainment, leisure travel and retail are huge and growing markets. Seeking funding for startups in these areas is also going to be tricky if the entrepreneur wants expertise. Most of the VC expertise in the Indian market is technology and services related, reflecting the expertise in the US market where technology and healthcare are the two largest areas of venture investing.

- Listed companies offer significant opportunities to VCs via PIPEs (private investment in public enterprises). Because of the low hurdle to a public listing in India, many listed companies remain small and in need of growth capital.

In conclusion, the Indian venture business is going to be quite unique. VCs and entrepreneurs, who take a cookie-cutter approach to it, are in for a rude shock.

So for a change, let’s look at the glass half-full. Let’s talk about some Indian startups that are being noticed.

Last week was Office 2.0, a conference that brings together people and companies that see office productivity tools like word-processing and spreadsheet software move from the desktop to the internet. Two companies announced their office suite launches the day before Office 2.0 – Google and a small company called Zoho that apparently is a subsidiary of AdventNet, a Chennai based company. I say ‘apparently because there is very little information about the antecedents of Zoho or the people involved in it.

Zoho’s products have been widely reviewed. Techcrunch, perhaps the most widely read web 2.0 blog, has reviewed it several times. Zoho Virtual Office, which is what was announced, is a bundle of existing Zoho products with a single sign-on. As you can see from the reviews, Zoho is generally considered one of the top contenders in the online office productivity race. The competition is tough and the market is crowded (at one time I counted 13 online spreadsheet offerings). And not just with startups. Zoho is challenging the hegemony of Microsoft Office that dominates this space. And let’s not forget Google which has perhaps the best tech talent in the world today and knows what is at stake here. So this is David versus two Goliaths. So far David’s holding his own.

I have tried a couple of Zoho products. The spreadsheet works well and will probably work for most people who don’t do complex things with Excel, like pivot tables. I also tried out their CRM product, and will be doing a more detailed evaluation of how it fits our needs at Gridstone. Currently we use SugarCRM. Zoho’s functionality seems richer at first glance. The one peeve I have with Zoho is that they give very little information, even where information can help them sell. You could argue that consumers and the home office crowd may not care much about the company behind their word processing software. But business buyers are going to want to know more – how many years has the software been in production, release history, case studies if not references and more about the company (will it be around?).

Another interesting product I checked out last week was Slideshare from Uzanto. Uzanto is an interesting company that seems like a consulting company that has a couple of products. Slideshare is a tool that allows you to embed a slide show of your Powerpoint presentation into a webpage. It has also been well reviewed.

While checking out Slideshare, I also came across Webyantra.net a blog maintained by Amit Ranjan of Uzanto. Webyantra covers Indian startups and I found the blog quite interesting. Which brings up the question – what is an Indian startup? Ah! but that question is worthy of another blogpost.

Good luck to both Zoho and Slideshare. I suspect that we are going to see many, many more tech startups out of India soon. Umm, I mean Indian startups. Or whatever.