Founders' Mentality

Accel seeded the passion of entrepreneurs into its investing DNA to spot early winners in the consumer business. Its next big bet: SaaS unicorns

- Rajiv Singh

Chennai, circa 2011: Shekhar Kirani had sniffed an untapped opportunity. Kirani, who joined global venture investment firm Accel as a partner the same year after stints with two Silicon Valley-based startups, knew the nuances and magic of the subscription business. Both his former companies (LightSurf and StarFish) made loads of money and got eventually sold to Motorola and VeriSign. So when the young venture capitalist (VC) started hunting for his maiden investment, SaaS (software as a service) turned out to be his first segment of choice. He zeroed in on Freshdesk, a SaaS-based social customer support startup co-founded by Girish Mathrubootham and Shanmugam Krishnasamy in 2010. “I knew what SaaS meant, and how powerful subscriptions could be,” he recalls.

The opportunity, though, came with an equally titanic problem. In fact, there were two. The first was to do with Mathrubootham’s educational and professional background. He lacked pedigree. “He was not from IIT or IIM. Nobody would have taken him seriously,” Kirani recalls. The only serious accomplishment, he lets on, was that Mathrubootham worked with software developer Zoho before turning entrepreneur. His résumé didn’t have a Google or a Facebook mention or a Silicon Valley background. “So credibility-wise his résumé was not up to the mark,” he recalls. Kirani, though, was looking at two boxes: The category which Freshdesk was going after, and a team which could execute the plan. Mathrubootham and his Chennai-based compact team ticked both.