Pressure to manage stock price would be brutal: Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu amid top deck rejig at Freshworks

Zoho Corp’s founder and chief executive Sridhar Vembu on May 2 said on X platform (formerly Twitter) that running a public company is a lot harder than running a private company and added that being private has helped Zoho to invest long term in R&D without worrying about how quarterly numbers.

“Personally, as a public company CEO, I won't be able to live in a remote village and work on my own deep tech projects along with the school, the farm and rural works - the pressure to manage the stock price would be brutal and then I would have to transmit that pressure to everyone else in the company. That relentless pressure leads to employee burnout and attrition. We remain private because I want to work with our people long term on critical projects,” Vembu wrote on the social media platform.

Zoho, one of India’s most profitable privately held firms, has been bootstrapped since inception, with not a penny in external funding.

While Vembu didn’t give context for his tweet, the timing didn’t go unnoticed. He posted hours after Freshworks founder Girish Mathrubootham handed over the CEO reins to company President Dennis Woodside and transitioned to executive chairman.