Sridhar Vembu, Founder and CEO, Zoho Corp
| Photo Credit:
BIJOY GHOSH
Deep tech businesses must try to have commercial applications for their products and not just rely on government support for long-term R&D, Sridhar Vembu, the founder and chief scientist of software firm Zoho, said on Friday.
“Ship vitamins and painkillers to fund your business even as you work on a cancer cure- this is what I tell deep tech startups that face a long complex R&D challenge,” Vembu wrote on social media platform X. This strategy brings the benefit of keeping “the dream alive and morale up” while at the same time preparing founders mentally for the tough long slog, he added.
He noted that every critical technology must be imagined as “dual-use” and that could be a way to spread the R&D cost and risk. Focus on large commercial markets rather than depending only on government or defence contracts, he said.
The government cannot invent a better operating system or a smarter robot. The government should not even fund such things – it is not usually good at picking winners and losers. The government can at best conduct competitions where companies participate and then buy the best… https://t.co/yqU0pqPgbl
— Sridhar Vembu (@svembu) April 4, 2025
Vembu’s comments come when Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal has set off a debate on the quality of innovation in the Indian startup ecosystem. Goyal, while speaking at an event in Delhi on Thursday, hinted that Indian startups need to introspect on the value they are adding, relative to countries like China.
He also urged entrepreneurs to be realistic about government support. “I do agree government encouragement by buying domestic tech is useful but for most companies it is best not to assume that is available or timely,” he said.
Vembu added that deep tech businesses come with long and uncertain timelines, with entrepreneurs often facing self-doubts about when the business can become self-sustaining. “These are very hard questions for any new startup but they are even harder for a deep tech startup and that is true even when we are “only” figuring out what startups in other countries have already figured out. Even that is not easy for a new team,” he said.
Published on April 4, 2025
