Many of you will remember the story I wrote exactly three years ago titled “The making of Girish Mathrubootham.” The story chronicled how Girish used lessons from his troubled childhood and early entrepreneurial failures to build Freshworks, one of India’s fastest growing product startups, and whether he can make all this count?
Since then, a lot has changed. Freshworks is now valued at over $3 billion with annual revenues of over $200 million. For his part, Girish has shifted to the U.S. to continue learning and “pushing himself out of the comfort zone” as he describes it.
In this episode of Outliers: Season of Resilience, I bring you an hour long conversation about how Girish is navigating the ongoing pandemic for his startup, and himself as a founder.
“The game has suddenly changed and we are not in control. The entire world is going through pain. What I would like to say is pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional”.
Girish uses a cricket analogy to describe what’s going on.
“It’s almost like a cricket match, so you want to hit 300 runs and you’re batting but suddenly there is rain and then now we all know that Duckworth Lewis method comes into play. It seems so unfair but nobody understands how Duckworth Lewis works but suddenly you are given that oh, you can only, you have say 10 overs and you have to make 160 runs or whatever, something like that,” he tells me.
Please tune in, and listen.