I'm Girish, CEO and founder of Freshdesk. Ask me anything!

In a forum on Tech in Asia, Girish Mathrubootham answers questions on Freshdesk, SaaS and his experience as a product manager at Zoho

I’m Girish Mathrubootham, the CEO and founder of Freshdesk.

Freshdesk is a SaaS-based customer support software company headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices in Chennai, London and Sydney. We help companies of all sizes talk to their customers wherever they are and however they want to interact.

We founded Freshdesk in 2010 because of a nightmarish customer experience that revolved around shipping a TV from the USA. We’ve acquired over 50,000 customers and scaled to a global team of 500 people in less than 5 years. Before founding Freshdesk, I was VP of Product Management at Zoho. I have over 15 years of experience in managing cross-functional teams who have gone on to build world-class products. 

Ask away!
 

Q. Freshdesk wasn’t the first product in the support space. There were several and they were well known. How did you create excitement for your first round (the rest of the rounds, as you said, are all about numbers and you blew it out of the park.)?

Investor excitement for the first round came from this post – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2340732

While we were engaging with investors, we won the Microsoft Bizspark award (http://blog.freshdesk.com/and-the-winner-of-the-microsoft-bizspark-indi/) and were a finalist at Unpluggd. Both of these brought more investors and we were able to quickly close the deal with the investor (Accel Partners) we liked the most.
 

Q. I know you are a core tech guy. I wanted to understand if non tech guys (I am an FMCG sales and marketing professional) can be successful in starting up in the SaaS space? 
 

I am not a tech guy. I was a Product Manager for more than 10 years. There are only 2 simple rules – 1. You bring some core value to the team. 2. You find co-founders for the other missing core functions who believe in your idea. 

This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here.