Sridhar Vembu on Becoming Zoho's Chief Scientist - I've Always Been Focused on Efficiency

Zoho held its ZohoDay analyst event last week in Austin, Texas. It was the first time Zoho split the event up to focus solely on enterprise products and strategies.  A similar event will be held later this year for the SMB space.  

ZohoDay came on the heels of the announcement that Zoho cofounder Sridhar Vembu had stepped down as CEO to be the company's chief scientist. I had an opportunity to spend a few minutes with Sridhar to ask him why he and the company felt it was time for him to transition to his new role. In addition to learning about his move, I also asked him about Zoho's upcoming 30th anniversary and what that milestone means.  

Check out his responses in the video clip below, with an edited transcript of this exchange beneath the clip.

Brent Leary: I actually had a chance to look back at some of the conversations we've had over the years. The last one we had was before the pandemic shut everything down. It was it was in Texas five years ago. And we started talking about how you're looking at data centers and how to look at conserving power. And this is well before ChatGPT and all the GenAI stuff; you were already focused on that.

And one of the reasons that you were talking about it was you were always looking for ways to, you know, make sure you weren't a costly input to customers. You were already talking about power being one of those things. And now fast forward to last week, you announced you were chief scientist. I wasn't really surprised because you already were talking about this. So why now did you want to be known as the chief scientist?

Sridhar Vembu: I've always focused on efficiency. And whatever we do, we have to be good to the planet too, to be efficient, and not throw energy away and all that. And now particularly in this year, you’ve heard about the new power plants, nuclear power plants, all the green power built just to feed the AI monster, if you will. And you have to do this better, right?

There is a lot of low hanging fruit. You know, the way software runs today is quite inefficient. There's layers and layers, layers of crud accumulated. So, I've been thinking about these issues, and I've made some progress around the edges, but I desire to plunge in full time and get this done. I think this will help our efficient computing. That's one goal. And make it for programmers from a programmer productivity aspect.

It turns out there isn't a tradeoff between programmer productivity, runtime efficiency, energy efficiency, all these goals. There is kind of an aesthetic way of approaching it that you can achieve all of them. Well, and that's the quest I'm on.

And now is the time, because now this is our AD moment - After DeepSeek. Yeah, things change. They change really quick.

Brent Leary: I'm guessing it makes it simpler and easier for you to switch from CEO to chief scientist because you have so many people that have been here for so long. What role does that play in making this transition?

Sridhar Vembu: A lot. You look at for example, Tony [Thomas], our co founder. Now he's our CEO for U.S. operations. They've got Shailesh [Kumar Davey] who's our global CEO. He has been nearly 28, no, almost 30 years with us. The people know their stuff and they've been running the business in many ways because I'm in a remote rural area. So, I felt particularly this is the moment. And it is also the consensus among everyone.

I'm relaying what other people also felt, and also the company should think long term. Nobody lives forever, right? It's not good to just hold on to something further. So I think it's time to step aside and make a transition. At the same time, I want to pursue this passion of efficient computing. And so I'll be very much focused on technology. I get much more time now to do it. That's what I really like about it.

Brent Leary: We're in 2025. Zoho started when?

Sridhar Vembu: ‘ 96 approximately.

Brent Leary: So we're coming up on 30 years next year. This time when we're talking, this is going to be 30 years. What does that mean to you, Zoho 30 years in?

Sridhar Vembu: It's been a long, long journey. We've seen ups, downs,  two to three big ups, big downs. And we are now coming up on the next big bubble: the AI bubble. And the company has stayed relevant. We are relevant to whatever the customers need today.

I take satisfaction in that. We are able to reinvent ourselves, and I just hope that with the next reinvention we can also do this because every time it's always a risk, right? Can we navigate this whole AI landscape?  I'm more confident now than say I was a year ago.

Brent Leary: Why are you more confident now?

Sridhar Vembu: My presentation laid out the road map, all of that. We kind of get where things are going. I say that because sometimes people make this breezy prediction; All the relational database, everything is going and SaaS is dead because all of the stuff will be ingested into LLMS. I don't think so, right.

The software landscape is going to change for a different reason. And the reason is not because the data got ingested in LLMS, but because the code part of it becomes easier, simpler. Programmer productivity jumps tenfold, a hundredfold. And then productivity in a critical sector goes up. The fruits of that are widely distributed throughout the economy, not necessarily accruing to that sector.  This is as true for farmers, true for weavers, all of it.

And so now we have more food than we can eat and we have more clothes than we need. But the people growing the food, people producing the clothes are not very wealthy, right? So the same thing could happen to us. We have more software than we ever need, but maybe the people producing the software, people like us, may not end up in very good economic shape. That transformation, if it’s going to come, we have to figure out how a company like ours survives and navigates this transition.