High-wire act of conviction

A BUSINESS LEADER WHO GOT LOTS OF BOUQUETS ALONG WITH MANY BRICKBATS

- RISHI RAJ

In 2025, Sridhar Vembu made headlines for two very different reasons.

One burnished his reputation as a rare Indian tech founder who builds patiently, locally and at scale. The other exposed the risks of a public persona that strays too far beyond the boundaries of evidence and expertise. Taken together, the year reads like a case study in how conviction can be both a founder's greatest asset and his most fragile liability.

On the positive side of the ledger were two developments that mattered. The first was Arattai, Zoho's homegrown messaging app, which rode a wave of nationalist enthusiasm and official encouragement. The second was the Central government's decision to migrate its internal email system to Zoho after a rigorous audit process—an endorsement that went well beyond symbolism. On the other side were a series of avoidable controversies sparked by Vembu's public interventions on vaccines, fertility and social prescriptions—areas where confidence outpaced consensus.

Start with the substance. Arattai's surge in sign-ups was not merely a function of ministerial endorsements or the zeitgeist around digital sovereignty.

Unlike hurried "me-too" apps that surface whenever geopolitics intrudes into technology, Arattai bore the unmistakable stamp of Zoho's engineering culture: built for low-end devices, resilient on patchy networks, and designed with privacy-first defaults. India's history with domestic social platforms—from Hike to Koo—offers a cautionary tale: nationalism can ignite downloads, but it rarely sustains habit. If Arattai endures beyond its moment, it will be because Zoho understands the unglamorous work of reliability, scale and incremental improvement.