India should borrow Silicon Valley’s crazy talk

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Like many others, I find myself admiring Zoho, one of the most successful SaaS companies that has come out of India.

The company started not long after the Dot-Com Bubble in the midst of competition doing the exact same things and offering the exact same product. Yet it emerged as one of the leading Made in India software exports despite harsh competition by players such as Google and Salesforce.

What is largely responsible for the success of Zoho, according to the founder, is the company’s early diversification into broader markets with multiple software products, frugality in spending, and a long-term orientation resulting in a refusal to accept multiple acquisition offers that came up.

However, one disappointing moment for me in the company’s detailed story coverage by Tech in Asia was the moment where the founder felt at ease in acknowledging the company really doesn’t have a mid-term vision. The founder said:

I still don’t know what Zoho’s path will be 10 years from now, which is part of the fun – discovering new things to do.

When a founder of one of the most successful Indian SaaS companies say this, it is worthwhile to stop for a moment and contemplate: what example is it setting for budding Indian entrepreneurs?

This attitude looks to me like a complete antithesis of Silicon Valley culture where your vision (even if it’s incredibly vague) is to disrupt something or anything and create the future.

Such an over-obsession of Silicon Valley companies with disruption, with leaving nothing untouched, no stone unturned, and no industry unaffected has gone too far for many people. There’s an appropriate term for it – crazy talk.

Crazy talk is a catch-phrase to capture all the world-conquering, visionary mambo-jambo which are nothing but marketing and PR spiel.

Why is it bad? Because it depicts the standard mentality of a newly emerging class of people: solutionists and entrepreneurs who are mostly geeks who want to use technology to solve the world’s most trivial problems – even non-existing ones.

Timothy O’Reilly, the well-known founder of O’Reilly Media Company, stands on top of this massive pile of crazy talk, at least that’s what one of his harshest opponents, Evgeny Morozov claims.

We need a dose of crazy

But there’s a flip-side.