One of the most important differences between building for the next quarter and building for the next decade is where you choose to invest.
Instead of putting more capital into sales and marketing, we invested heavily in R&D and built our own technology capabilities. We relied more on organic, word-of-mouth growth.
That is why we built our own cloud infrastructure instead of relying on public cloud like AWS or Google Cloud.
When Zoho was small, building that cloud infrastructure looked like an unnecessary investment and distraction. But over time, it became a technology foundation that we could open up to developers through Catalyst, our serverless platform.
The same long-term thinking continues today. We’re investing heavily in Catalyst and making it free for students, giving them infrastructure to build and deploy real applications without worrying about infrastructure costs. We’re also setting up Student Clubs in colleges.
Not every investment has to create immediate revenue. Some investments create capabilities. Some create opportunities that may not become visible for years.
That’s the difference between optimizing for the next quarter and building for the next decade.
One of the early things we did at Zoho was build our own cloud infrastructure to run our applications. From databases, identity and messaging to search, storage and compute, we built it ourselves rather than depending on AWS or Google Cloud.
We have opened this infrastructure to developers as Catalyst, our serverless platform. What started as a way to extend Zoho is now being adopted by developers outside the Zoho ecosystem as well.
We are investing heavily in Catalyst and making it free for students, so they can build and deploy real applications without worrying about infrastructure costs.
Our goal is to give developers the infrastructure to turn their ideas into real products.
catalyst.zoho.com