And its time to move on — Thank You Zoho!
Today is my last day at Zoho.
After 10 years of a comfortable job, I’ve decided to get out of my comfort zone embrace my dream.
When I joined Adventnet (now Zoho), I made up my mind to work in the company for 2 years, quit and join Infy/CTS and settle down in US of the A ;) I thought that there wouldn’t be anything for me to learn after 2 years in the company. But time flew so fast that it is already been more than 10 years.. And I’m still learning something or the other.
There were quite a lot of ups and downs in this journey, but there was something to be learnt in every step.
After playing different roles in various teams, I had an opportunity to start something new from the scratch. The main goal was to connect Zoho with various Cloud apps. We started with Zoho Gadgets, The turning point of my life at Zoho happened when I did a fun project that integrated Zoho apps with Google. Sensing its potential, I was asked to take that up as a high priority project, which was techcrunched ;)
Later on, I started to closely work with Google team by tightly integrating Zoho business apps with various Google Services. And Google invited us to speak at their annual developer conference Google IO ’11. I showcased Zoho — Google Tasks integration in front of a larger audience. That was my first experience speaking in a larger event outside Zoho.
After steady progress in the feature updates, we became one of the largest vendors in Google Apps Marketplace and started embracing Google everywhere. We even teamed up with Google to give away Chromebooks for free.
Everything came our way and my super focussed team made sure that they did all the hardwork in every single integration. And we went on to become a Premier Technlogy Partner for Google.
I have had a chance to interact with almost all the Zoho teams and have worked on a lot of fascinating projects, with great product managers, engineers not only in Zoho but in Google, Dropbox, Box and recently with the Microsoft team as well :)
I’m really proud to have worked in a company which has a very good work culture with an extensive learning atmosphere and one which also happens to compete in the same league as Google/Salesforce/M$ ;)
Yes.. I’ll be missing quite a lot of other things — mainly the office, many of my friends, chess games, team trips, friday fun, corporate tournaments, Ping pong games, carrom club, badminton, cricfest, fun projects, recruitment drive, and of course the yearly pilgrimage to Google’s office ;)
Above all, I’ll be missing my awesome ZGadgets team. Personally, I think that I’m a better manager than an engineer. I was fortunate enough to hire a bunch of a very talented engineers with the right attitude. And we produced some amazing work together. I treat everyone in my team as my family and is heart wrenching to leave them.. They’ve made sure that my journey in Zoho is a memorable one. I’m very proud of them and wish them all success.
My team made sure that I have a grand farewell. I typed most part of this post from my mobile. Thanks guys for the Google Nexus :)
This post wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t mention my mentor Raju for helping me turn my dreams into reality. I have never had a chance to report to him directly, but he has been my mentor all along and made sure that I went in the right path even when I made mistakes. He has been an inspiration .. without him this post wouldn’t have been possible at all. Thank You Raju!!
Writing this post has made me realize that, this is the hardest thing that I have ever done in my life. Though it was really a tough decision to take, I really hope that this will help me in shaping up as a better individual..
I’m really excited about the move and the new opportunities. At the same time I’m sad about leaving my team members. I owe them so much for their support and encouragement over the years.
My first love will always be Zoho!! Thanks Zoho for shaping up my professional and personal career as well ;)
It’s now time to pull up my socks and go explore the world on my own!!
Signing off from Zoho!!
