Article · 15 min read

Rural Revival: building world-class products from small towns

Sridhar Vembu / Zoho · Zoho Free Beginner India

This is the India proof of the answer's edge: great people in smaller cities are underpriced and overlooked, and hiring them is a real advantage. Zoho built a multi-thousand-person, globally competitive engineering org from Tenkasi and 100+ small-town offices on exactly the thesis Vembu states plainly: 'the talent is already there, we just have to nurture it.' For an Anywhere Founder deciding whether to hire outside Bengaluru or Delhi-NCR, it is the most credible Indian precedent that distributed, small-town teams ship world-class work, with retention and loyalty as a bonus, not a compromise.

  • Talent in smaller Indian cities is not lesser, it is unnurtured and overlooked, which is precisely why it is available to you
  • Small remote offices of 20 to 30 people work; you do not need everyone in one metro to build seriously
  • Hiring locally where people already live cuts the migration pull and buys you loyalty a metro salary war cannot
Open on zoho.com ↗

The question it answers

  1. How do I hire remotely across Indian cities and manage a distributed first team well?

Read with it

  1. This is the operating manual behind the answer's core rule: don't run a remote team on vibes. GitLab runs 1,600+ people across... The GitLab Handbook Article · 25 min read Asynchronous communication for remote work GitLab
  2. The answer says over-invest in one in-person offsite early to build the trust Slack can't, and this is the concrete agenda for... First Round Review Article · 18 min read Use This Startup's Playbook for Running Impactful Virtual Offsites First Round Review (with the Sitka team)
eChai Partner Brands The partnership →