Both things can be true. India has produced Zerodha, Zoho, Freshworks, Razorpay, Skyroot, Agnikul and Sarvam despite the system. But if top founders repeatedly choose to build frontier-tech companies in the US, it's worth asking what friction they're avoiding. The goal shouldn't be finding a villain. It should be removing the friction.

Im trying to figure out why they invested in freshworks

⚡ Ever wondered why your next video feels exactly right? Behind every recommendation lies a fascinating concept: 🚀 Vector Embeddings 🎤 Harish S How Vector Embeddings Keep You Scrolling? 📍 Freshworks | Chennai 🗓️ July 4 | 2–6 PM 🎟️ digitaldreamersden.in/meetup… #D3Meetup8 #AI

𝗢𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝗛𝗮𝗹𝗳 𝗢𝘂𝗿 𝗖𝗼𝗱𝗲 𝗪𝗿𝗼𝘁𝗲 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝗶𝗿 𝗦𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲 Freshworks had a good quarter. Revenue hit $228.6 million, up 16% year over year. The company closed its first contract exceeding $1 million in annual recurring revenue. Then its second. The pipeline was the strongest in company history. Then Freshworks cut 500 people. Eleven percent of its workforce, gone. It was the second round in 18 months. The first took another 11%. Combined: 22% of the company, eliminated during the most profitable stretch it has ever had. CEO Dennis Woodside explained why at Refresh 2026, the company's annual conference. He did not hide behind restructuring language or "strategic realignment." He said six words that no enterprise CEO had said on the record before. "Over half of our code is written by AI." Read that backward. The CEO of an enterprise software company just told a conference audience that AI has already replaced the majority of his engineering output. Not "will replace." Not "could replace." Has replaced. Present tense. Quantified. On stage. Then read it against the layoff notice filed weeks earlier. Five hundred engineers received severance packages. The math is not subtle. If AI writes over half the code, you need fewer than half the coders. Woodside did not make that connection explicitly. He did not need to. The irony is structural. Freshworks sells AI-powered customer service and IT automation tools. Its product pitch to enterprises is: deploy our AI agents to handle the work your human agents handle today. The company's own workforce is now the proof of concept. The AI tools Freshworks sells to other companies are the same category of tools that made 22% of Freshworks employees unnecessary. And the timing makes it worse. Freshworks held Refresh 2026 in celebratory mode. Record revenue. Record deal sizes. A CEO on stage talking about AI's transformative power. Weeks after 500 people cleaned out their desks. The conference was not a contradiction. It was a demonstration. Freshworks demonstrated, on its own org chart, the pitch it makes to every enterprise buyer: AI does not augment your workforce at this scale. It replaces portions of it. The revenue keeps growing. The headcount does not. Every VP of Engineering who has told their board "AI coding tools make our developers more productive, they don't reduce headcount" now has a counter-example with a name, a date, and a number. Over half the code. Twenty-two percent of the people. Record revenue. The severance was not written by hand.

Your argument collapses under its own contradictions. If Indians are so incompetent, how did they ‘capture’ the world’s most competitive industry? If only 1 in 10 can code, why are American companies paying billions to hire them? If Indian CEOs are products of a conspiracy, then apparently the boards of Microsoft, Google, Adobe, IBM, Palo Alto Networks, Micron and dozens of Fortune 500 firms are all too foolish to notice. As for products: UPI processes more transactions than most Western payment systems combined. Aadhaar is the world’s largest digital identity platform. India Stack is studied globally. Zoho serves customers in 150 countries. Freshworks listed on Nasdaq. You don’t defeat facts with stereotypes. And blaming ‘TamBrams’, Telugus, North Indians, Gujaratis or anyone else for your theory is not economic analysis. It’s ethnic grievance dressed up as expertise.”

A broken LED TV and a rude shipping company gave the world Freshworks. The grudge built a Nasdaq-listed SaaS giant. @FreshworksInc - Featured on YesPress yespress.io/freshworks?utm_s…

Respectfully again, the numbers complicate this story. Credit where due — India is the world's 3rd-largest ecosystem, 1.5 lakh DPIIT startups, 100 unicorns. Zoho, Freshworks, Skyroot, UPI are real wins. But your own Commerce Minister said it plainly: too many "delivery boys and girls," too little deep tech. The data backs him, not the tweet. Deep tech is only ~5% of our startup funding. India spends ~0.65% of GDP on R&D; China spends 2.5% — roughly $550B to our $65B. We filed ~61,000 patents in 2023; China filed 1.58 million. We have ~3,600 deep-tech startups to China's 6,400 and the US's 26,000. So where is the scale? Where is the frontier innovation? Much of what we celebrate is consumer convenience, funded by foreign VC chasing quick exits — and 2025 funding actually fell ~17%. The demographic dividend is real. But a 0.65%-of-GDP R&D economy and a rote education system won't capture it. Twelve years in, the honest scorecard reads: strong distribution, thin invention. Closing that gap is the actual work. #12YearsOfYuvaShakti

unpopular opinion: TCS and Infosys are not employers, they're salary anchors they set what feels "normal" for freshers - ₹3.6–7 LPA and the whole market calibrates expectations around that a developer with 4 years at TCS earns ₹12–18 LPA the same developer with the same skills at Freshworks or Razorpay earns ₹18–28 LPA not because they're smarter. not because they work harder. because company type is a salary multiplier and nobody explains this during campus placement season. the brand is real. the pay ceiling is also real. how did you find out the difference existed?

Lesson from Freshworks: "Build where it is cheaper. Sell where they pay more. Let the product sell itself." India-built, globally-sold. Engineering cost advantage became a pricing advantage. newsletter.vridhilabs.com/po…

exactly, that’s a good take. Zoho in india is not venture backed it’s bootstrapped.. $20B company.. There is Zoho like paypal mafia one famous is freshworks Recently Chatbase is bootstrapped n they are employing more ppl.. in age of ai it’s gonna get more n more common imho, this started as shade: ‘no one cares’ ; ‘bootstrapped founders help no-one but themselves.’ but explanation is fine now another example is Simon from Turbopuffer.. VCs are frothing to get in the action.. he raised as little as possible, essentially bootstrap / friends n family level.. he’ll raise at his own terms vcs pretend not to care n don’t celebrate turbopuffer enough.. customers n engineers do

The Freshworks framework: 1. Identify bottleneck 2. Build distribution moat 3. Own customer 4. Expand 5. Compound undefined

5 GTM playbooks from Indian startups: 1. Freshworks: Build where it is cheaper. Sell where they pay more. Let the product sell itself. 2. Indian AI Startups: Show revenue, not demos.

🚨 SOFTWARE STOCKS BLOODBATH IN 2026 😱 YTD Performance - $INTU (Intuit) → -52% - $ASAN (Asana) → -51% - $HUBS (HubSpot) → -50% - $TEAM (Atlassian) → -47% - $MNDY (Monday.com) → -46% - $WDAY (Workday) → -40% - Figma → -39% - $DUOL (Duolingo) → -38% - $BILL → -34% - $PATH (UiPath) → -33% - $NOW (ServiceNow) → -33% - $CRM (Salesforce) → -32% - $ADBE (Adobe) → -30% - $GTLB (GitLab) → -29% - $DOCU (DocuSign) → -28% - $SAP → -27% - $FRSH (Freshworks) → -26% - $SNOW (Snowflake) → -22% The Reality Check: Even the biggest and best-known software/SaaS names are down 30–52% this year. High valuations are getting crushed as growth slows and investors rotate into AI infrastructure plays. Big contrast: While chips and AI hardware are booming, pure software is in a deep reset. Are you buying any of these dips… or staying far away? 👇 #SoftwareStocks #SaaS #TechSelloff #Investing #2026Markets

Turns out FedRAMP® is pretty fun. We teamed up with Drata last Wednesday night after Coalfire's RAMPCon for mini golf, drinks, and GOATed vibes. We all had a great time! Shout to the many people that made this event one to remember: Forrest McMahon, Talal Ahmed, Bradley Josephs and Tiffany Josephs from Netskope, Andrew Ellis from Fortra, Chad Spears and Gary Daemer from InfusionPoints, LLC, Eric Beasley from Earthling Security, Brad Little, Daniel Massarsky, Jorden Foster, Adam Shnider, Marc Zurcher, Karen Laughton and Mike Spicer from Coalfire, Kylie Hunter from RegScale, Ingrid Woodley and Matthew Earley from 38North Security and Sandeep Kamble from SecureLayer7. Avery Lyford from RAPIDFORT. Sreedhar Gade from Freshworks. Benjamin W., Rachael Jenner, and Anil Markose from Oracle, Terry M. and Todd Kistner from Vbrick. Tara Houlden from Red Hat and so many other great people (we hit the mention limit lol) We'll see you at the next one 😎

Freshworks Refresh 2026: pivot to AI-driven employee experience bit.ly/4fN1lrH

Freshworks Refresh 2026: pivot to AI-driven employee experience securitytc.com/TT14cr

Girish M (of Freshworks) used to say, Revenue is an excellent deodorant.

🚨 SOFTWARE STOCKS BLOODBATH IN 2026 😱 YTD Performance - $INTU (Intuit) → -52% - $ASAN (Asana) → -51% - $HUBS (HubSpot) → -50% - $TEAM (Atlassian) → -47% - $MNDY (Monday.com) → -46% - $WDAY (Workday) → -40% - Figma → -39% - $DUOL (Duolingo) → -38% - $BILL → -34% - $PATH (UiPath) → -33% - $NOW (ServiceNow) → -33% - $CRM (Salesforce) → -32% - $ADBE (Adobe) → -30% - $GTLB (GitLab) → -29% - $DOCU (DocuSign) → -28% - $SAP → -27% - $FRSH (Freshworks) → -26% - $SNOW (Snowflake) → -22% The Reality Check: Even the biggest and best-known software/SaaS names are down 30–52% this year. High valuations are getting crushed as growth slows and investors rotate into AI infrastructure plays. Big contrast: While chips and AI hardware are booming, pure software is in a deep reset. Are you buying any of these dips… or staying far away? 👇 #SoftwareStocks #SaaS #TechSelloff #Investing #2026Markets

Built in India. Scaled for the world. Zoho operates in 180 countries. Freshworks earns 60% of its revenue outside India. OYO generates ~$500M internationally. BrowserStack serves clients across 135 countries. These are not exceptions. This is the new normal for Indian startups