…and kept its soul intact in the process
Ron Miller
8 hours
The traditional startup fever dream goes something like this: You come up with a revolutionary idea for a startup in your dorm room. You quit school and take your idea to Sand Hill Road, where VCs shower you with cash. Your company grows quickly. You eventually get a valuation of over $1 billion and you go public to great fanfare.
That’s the mythology anyway, but what if there were another way? What if you could grow a $1 billion company without the outside investment, the crazy sales and marketing spend, the pressure to grow ever faster?
Zoho, a company that has a broad set of front- and back-end business software, has defied that growth and investment stereotype to great success. Zoho reports that revenue last year exceeded $1 billion — although as a private entity, it didn’t supply an exact number. Yet it has never taken …
