Mathrubootham started Freshdesk, a cloud-based customer support platform, in 2010 and won the Microsoft BizSpark Startup Challenge. Today, Freshdesk has 200 employees and supplies services to over 20,000 businesses and organizations.
As a passionate young entrepreneur, Mathrubootham says he either saw people as aggressive or submissive, and thought the only way to be successful was by being the former. His former boss Kumar Vembu, CEO and founder of GoFrugal Technologies, told him he was abrasive with his colleagues.
"He told me that while I was getting stuff done, I was breaking the gentle fabric of relationships, which is irreversible," Mathrubootham says. "From that day onward I realized the importance of personal relationships, and I have taken care to treat everyone fairly and focus on building new and existing relationships. The lesson has proved extremely valuable as many of Freshdesk's early employees were people who have worked with me before, who came and joined a startup because they valued the relationship."