Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu has offered a straightforward piece of advice to engineers, scientists and doctors looking to enter entrepreneurship: learn how to sell. He believes spending time making sales calls, handling rejection and continuing despite setbacks can provide lessons that are difficult to gain elsewhere.
“If you are an engineer or scientist or doctor turning to business, the first thing I would suggest is ‘Please go on a lot of sales calls, face rejection if necessary, but persist’,” Vembu wrote in a recent post on X.
According to Vembu, creating a strong product or possessing technical expertise is only one part of building a successful company. Entrepreneurs must also persuade customers that their product or idea is valuable enough to pay for. Repeated conversations with potential customers can sharpen communication skills because founders soon discover that explaining even a strong idea can be challenging.
He also believes that personally experiencing the sales process can help entrepreneurs better appreciate the role of sales teams.
“You will develop better communication skills as you realise that explaining your ideas is not so easy,” Vembu wrote, adding that the experience would also help entrepreneurs “develop respect for sales people”.
Vembu argued that the lesson applies across almost every industry because businesses ultimately depend on selling something to remain viable. In his words, “There is no such thing as a business without selling something.”
His advice received support from several users, some of whom shared their own experiences of learning through difficult sales situations. One person said they spent weeks calling random toll-free customer-care numbers across India to practise communicating clearly and remaining composed under pressure.
Another user said experience in real estate, advertising sales and selling fire extinguishers later proved useful when developing micro-SaaS products. Others agreed that facing rejection repeatedly can develop patience and alter how people think about achieving success.
Vembu on challenges facing businesses
The Zoho founder has also recently highlighted another problem confronting businesses as the AI boom increases technology costs. Vembu said memory prices had climbed significantly over the previous year and, combined with rising AI token costs, were making it harder to operate businesses.
He suggested that the software industry may eventually need to reconsider how programming languages and compilers are designed.
“For a long time, programming languages were designed with the assumption that memory is ‘free’. That era has now ended,” Vembu wrote.
He believes software, including AI systems, will need to become more memory-efficient and said this has become an area of research for him.
His comments come as AI infrastructure investment continues to expand, with companies spending heavily on data centres, chips, electricity and cooling. Vembu has also cautioned that the current AI investment boom could eventually experience a correction, while maintaining that the technology still has the potential to reach its full capabilities.
