Sridhar Vembu reveals mantra to run successful business, says everyone must do it

Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu says entrepreneurs from technical backgrounds should spend more time on sales calls, face rejection and learn to communicate better if they want to build successful businesses.

In Short

• Sridhar Vembu says sales is essential for every business
• He believes rejection can improve communication and patience
• Vembu also warns that rising memory costs are making business harder

Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu has a simple piece of advice for engineers, scientists and doctors who want to become entrepreneurs - learn how to sell. According to Vembu, spending time on sales calls and dealing with rejection can teach lessons that are difficult to learn elsewhere.

“If you are an engineer or scientist or doctor turning to business, the first thing I would suggest is ‘Please go on a lot of sales calls, face rejection if necessary, but persist’,” Vembu said in a recent post on X.

His point is that building a good product or having strong technical knowledge is only one part of running a company. Entrepreneurs also need to convince customers that their product or idea is worth paying for. Vembu said repeated sales conversations can improve communication because founders quickly realise that explaining even a good idea is not always easy. The experience can also help them understand the work done by sales teams.

“You will develop better communication skills as you realise that explaining your ideas is not so easy,” he wrote, adding that entrepreneurs would also “develop respect for sales people”.

Vembu believes the lesson applies to virtually every business because companies ultimately need to sell something to survive. “There is no such thing as a business without selling something,” he said.

His advice struck a chord with several users, with some sharing their own experiences of learning through difficult sales situations. One user said they had called random toll-free customer care numbers across India for weeks to practise communicating clearly and staying calm under pressure.

Another said experience in real estate, advertising sales and selling fire extinguishers later helped while building micro-SaaS products. Others agreed that repeated rejection can build patience and change the way people approach success.

Vembu talks about challenges businesses face

The Zoho founder has also recently spoken about another challenge businesses are facing as the AI boom drives up technology costs. Vembu said memory prices had risen sharply over the past year and, together with AI token costs, were making business operations more difficult. He argued that the increase could force the software industry to rethink how it builds programming languages and compilers.

“For a long time, programming languages were designed with the assumption that memory is ‘free’. That era has now ended,” Vembu wrote.

He believes software needs to become more memory efficient, including AI systems, and said this is now an area of research for him.

His comments come amid a wider surge in AI infrastructure spending, with companies investing heavily in data centres, chips, power and cooling systems. Vembu has also warned that the current AI investment boom could eventually face a correction, while maintaining that the technology could still reach its full potential.

- Ends