The Freshworks Story: Culture Meets Innovation

If you had wandered by one particular 700-foot (barely!) workspace in Chennai in 2010, the last thing to occur you would’ve been that the startup hatching inside would grow to 14 global locations and 5,000 employees—and accomplish that in little more than 10 years.

The outfit that achieved this so handily and quickly is Freshworks (NASDAQ: FRSH), a software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider of AI-informed, cloud-based tools for customer support, sales and marketing teams, and information services that now serves more than 67,000 customers. 

CEO and co-founder Girish Mathrubootham (everyone calls him “G”) was there at the start in Chennai and is as hands-on as ever today, even in the wild wake of Freshworks’ $1 billion IPO in 2021 that gave the company a valuation of many times that amount. 

Seemingly always cheerful, and the picture of youthfulness at 48, Mathrubootham joined me from the Freshworks office in Bellevue, Washington, just outside of Seattle. G divides his time between rainy Seattle, even-rainier Chennai, and sunny California (Freshworks’ HQ is in San Mateo, just south of San Francisco.)

I had expected our discussion to focus on technical tips and trends. And we got to those, for sure. But what Mathrubootham wanted to focus on even more were the frameworks that Freshworks strives to hold to both internally and externally, and how they drive everything from product design to pricing to how to treat your suppliers during an economic emergency such as the COVID-19 lockdown.

Product development, he was quick to tell me, “isn’t a neutral or values-free proposition.” Certainly, you can accidentally happen upon something different from what you were aiming for (3M’s happy accident Post-It® Notes example, for instance, is legendary), but he’s found it’s “far better on average to be clear about what you’re going for and how you want to get there.”

To this end, Freshworks follows a development-and-design philosophy that Mathrubootham, who describes himself “as still a products guy at heart,” calls Indian Democratic Design. 

“We base our product design principles on values that are important in India, particularly these five; simplicity, self-reliance, scale, craftsmanship, and affordability,” he told me, before walking me through them one by one.

“Simplicity: A democratically designed product should be approachable, easy-to-use, and self-explanatory.

Self-reliance: Any product that is democratically designed will be such that people can use it themselves; there shouldn’t be a need to rely on external consultants who come in and take 18 months or more for implementation. 

Scalability: Democratically designed products are developed with a large number of users in mind and to work for businesses of all sizes and to adapt to the journey of businesses that are on even the steepest growth trajectory.

Craftsmanship: It’s paying attention to every pixel when developing a product and every customer experience touchpoint when delivering that product.

Affordability: in particular, involves passing the economies of scale on to the customer.”

A company culture, likewise, can either evolve in random ways or be purposefully seeded and nurtured consciously along the way. To this end, Freshworks wraps itself internally in what it calls “Kudumba.” 

“Kudumba is what binds our company together,” G explains. “The word ‘Kudumba’ is short form for ‘kudumbam,’ which means ‘family’ in Tamil. While no company, even Freshworks, is akin to a family in all ways, this is a guiding metaphor for us.”

I heartily agree that no company is identical to a family in all ways. In covering other businesses, I’ve heard a lot of lofty “culture talk” from the C-suite (and marketing department) and then watched in dismay at how quickly these “we are family” proclamations go out the window, when executives feel the pressure to please their venture capitalist backers or other shareholders by suddenly laying off a swath of their “family members,” or slicing their benefits to the bone. But, as far as I’ve been able to determine from afar, Freshworks’ claim of treating you like family appears to be more than hot air. 

For one thing, Freshworks backs its Kudumba-talk with money, including stock ownership for a majority of employees. According to G, the money has often been enough so an employee “can consider a car, wedding, or even a home purchase without taking out a loan,” plus (and this made quite an impression on me), Freshworks actually made sustenance payments to non-employees—its contracted vendors and suppliers—when work ground to a halt during the COVID-19 downturn. 

“When COVID-19 hit, suddenly there was no need for food to be delivered to our office or for cab services and other ancillary services, and our vendors were facing the necessity of laying off nearly all their employees. So, we said, ‘hey, these people’s livelihoods depend on Freshworks, so we would like to make sure that they are not impacted.’ And that’s what we did to the best of our ability.”

Where does Mathrubootham think the tech world is heading, inside and outside of Freshworks? And do such current and looming developments align with Freshworks’ frameworks and values?  

“The headline for everything moving forward in customer experience right now has to be the AI revolution.” As far as how this AI revolution aligns with Freshworks’ values, particularly of Indian Democratic Design, G is quick to concede there can be anti-democratizing aspects to AI; used like a technical jackhammer, AI can be a detriment to the power of the people: the artisans, the content creators, who have been honing their crafts all their lives and now find these unneeded in the post-revolution landscape.

But, Mathrubootham is quick to explain, “there is amazing democratizing power to AI, beyond what we could imagine even a few years ago: AI can empower generalist agents to become temporary experts; let non-native speakers, whether they’re travelers, support agents, or aspiring scholars, thrive through live-speech and real-time source translation; and allow a layperson on an airplane or in the Himalayan wilderness to provide lifesaving care based on an analysis done somewhere in the cloud.”

“It’s an exciting new world,” he concluded, “and it energizes me to be immersed in it every day.”   

“The word ‘Kudumba' is short form for ‘kudumbam,’ which means ‘family’ in Tamil. While no company, even Freshworks, is akin to a family in all ways, this is a guiding metaphor for us.”

“We base our product design principles on values that are important in India, particularly these five; simplicity, self-reliance, scale, craftsmanship, and affordability.”