Why Zoho Co-Founder's Move to Step Down as CEO Isn't Surprising
With this tweet (or is it just an X) Sridhar Vembu, co-founder and the only CEO Zoho has had since 2000, stepped down from that position ito step into the position of chief scientist. And as he said in his post, "The future of our company entirely depends on how well we navigate the R&D challenge, and I am looking forward to my new assignment with energy and vigor. I am also very happy to get back to hands on technical work."
And while the news seems to have surprised many industry analyts and watchers, it doesn't feel like a total surprise. As I was gearing up to speak with Sridhar next week at the company's annual analyst event, ZohoDay, I had been looking back at video from over the years of past conversations I've had with him. One that really struck me was from the last conversation I had with him at 2020's ZohoDay, one of the last events I attended before the world shut down due to the pandemic.
In this clip from that conversation, Sridhar talks about the importance of finding more efficient ways to power the data centers Zoho needed to serve its customers. Now today everybody is talking about data centers and power consumption as AI has fueled an insatiable desire to use data to generate an ever-growing number of things. But this conversation took place way before ChatGPT changed pretty much everything.
So check this clip out and see not only what Sridhar was saying about using new ways to power their data centers but why he thought it was important and the passionate way he spoke about it. And given what he said in his announcement today, maybe the real surprise should be that the annoucement didn't come sooner.
Sridhar Vembu: One of the biggest cost items would be running the data centers to deliver our services and our applications to customers...One crucial ingredient to our data center cost is power; the power consumed by all the servers and the switches and all of that. And it turns out there are many ways now to reduce the power and also provide the power in a renewable like hydroelectric power or solar power - all of these.
We look for data centers with that [in mind]. We built a solar plant to power our data centers in India. We have hydropower powering our data centers in the United States. These are some of the areas that we pay attention to. We also are looking for ways to reduce the amount of power to serve a particular customer. This translates both into lower overall power consumption and it also lowers the cost of service delivery. So these are things that we look at.
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