Life lessons from the SaaS “Thalaivan”, Girish Mathrubootham
by Bharat Verma & Sanjay Vijayakumar
What is common to yummy, piping hot biriyani and the UI on a great SaaS product?
The flavours, buddy; it’s the flavours.
No one would mistake Girish Mathrubootham for a chef; but when he strides into a room full of eager young startup founders and tells them they be building ‘the biriyani’, you’ve got to listen.
Girish is the Founder and CEO of Freshdesk, one of India’s most successful SaaS startups. Today Freshdesk, a cloud-based customer support solution, employs over 900 people worldwide, serves more than 100,000 customers.
Six years ago, Girish and his co-founder Shan Krishnaswamy were building their first prototype and struggling to get their first funding and customers.
Like any combat veteran, Girish is full of little anecdotes about his battles and full of wisdom, knowledge and insights from his own startup journey.
He shared these in his commencement address to SV.CO’s January 2017 batch consisting of 33 teams and 135 founders.
Freshdesk is a partner [Story: SV.CO partners Freshdesk] of our School of SaaS and Girish has personally been helping design the programme framework for SV.CO in the firm belief that we can change how students in this country work and learn.
Girish set up a deck and shared his key learnings through an online session that every early stage entrepreneur should read [Get Inspired Essay] about, no matter what startup they are building.
“Anyone who has ever been on an entrepreneurial journey will never be the same again,” he says. “You have been infected with the ‘idea virus’ and you’ll never be satisfied with the mundane, ever.”
He asks aspiring entrepreneurs to dream big, but think up solutions to existing, not imaginary problems. He tells them to learn from the best and then best them. Business models are harder to upgrade, so focus on innovating on the product, he says.
On ideation, he advises to look for problems, trends and technology around you; the idea for Freshdesk took seed from a customer support problem that Girish personally encountered.
He speaks about the joy of seeing the idea take the shape of a product and of hitting the first revenue targets. Follow your passion and go all in, says Girish; if you are a student in college taking the first step into the startup arena, you need not let the fear of failure dog you.
“You are learning valuable skills and these will stay with you for the rest of your life,” he points out. “If you pour your heart and soul into what you are doing now, put in the blood and tears and actually build something worthwhile; the worst case scenario is that you will have failed, but still learned something; the medium scenario is maybe it will help you get a good job; and the best case scenario is that you have a successful startup, and we can all celebrate together.”
Sixty days after his commencement address, Girish and his team celebrated with our startups at the Alpha Launch at the Freshdesk HQ.
So, what about the biriyani?
As Girish says, it’s all about the flavours! Read the course commencement address here to know more.
