I am in India now, so was sleeping as this thread happened :-)

I hang out at Hacker News a lot, in fact, almost everyday I send an article to someone or other in the company. I strongly recommend it internally - I love HN (thanks, pg!).

To answer some of the questions: Zoho Corp used to be known as AdventNet. It was bootstrapped from the beginning (1996). Zoho is the latest and the fastest growing division; while we do not reveal our revenues, all I can say is that we are very happy where the Zoho division, as well as the whole company, has gotten. We have solid profits, which we invest in doing interesting new things.

Bootstrapping works, but you have to be very patient. It has taken us 13 years to get here. The fun part is that we now have the human capital as well as the financial capital (the first part is more important) to do a lot of interesting things, and we don't have to worry about VCs or Wall-Street (not that there is anything wrong with them ;-))

On the product side, Zoho has been evolving rapidly, reaching that polish and maturity in stages. If you had tried us 2 years ago, I wouldn't blame you for giving up on us. We are far, far better today - one proof point is that our company, of about 1000 people, has moved to Zoho almost entirely. There are some small bits and pieces that are not on Zoho, but by end of 2009 everything should move. The tools we use extensively within include Mail, Office suite, CRM, Project Management, Meetings, Creator ... just to give an example, we run well over 100 web meetings a day on Zoho Meeting ourselves. We used to pay WebEx about $25-30K per month, and our usage on Zoho Meeting would cost us about $3-4K if we were to charge ourselves. I say that to explain why we have paying customers.

Why the diversified suite? It is not only diversification, it is also a source of differentiation. We believe we can create very compelling integration scenarios that bring substantial productivity increases. One recent example is our Zoho CRM + Mail integration, which has sold over 1000 customers in the 8 weeks or so it has been released. You will see many more such things rolled out, partly addressing the criticism that it has been a fragmented suite.

So how do we do it? Silicon valley style flexible culture mated with Japanese style patient engineering. There are huge lessons to learn from Japan's post-War leap. As one example, Japanese companies (the giants of today) always had a train-your-own-talent policy. Their colleges most certainly didn't do it - for the most part, college in Japan is considered relaxation time before the real work begins. We dispense with what I believe to be non-essential parts of Japanese experience, like the rigid discipline, substitute it with silicon valley style flexibility.

The one achievement I am proud of is not a product or technology: it is our "University" (as we call it) where we recruit and train 17 year olds - the typical school leaving age in much of India. About 100 of our 1000 employees have come from that program now, and it is growing fast. Longer term, we should get 30-50% of our talent pool directly out of high school.

I have written extensively about it. Let me summarize: I do not believe in college. I believe most real education happens in the work-place, an observation Peter Drucker made originally. I regret going to college myself - we would have been 10x bigger if I hadn't gone to college, so that is my opportunity cost. I probably wouldn't have if I had grown up in America.

Sorry for the long comment. I wanted to answer all the posted questions in one shot.