“When I discovered Open Source, it was love at first sight”
If the serendipitous turns in Shuveb Hussain’s life are mapped, they would look like the criss-crossing lanes of a busy shopping district. They feed into one another and, at times, lead to new ones—all converging in a journey that began in the temple town of Madurai in Southern Tamil Nadu, India, and now flowing in stratospheric levels as he peers over the horizon from his vantage seat at Freshworks.
As a young lad studying at the American College, Madurai (a city in Tamil Nadu characterized by its spirited youths and their lilting provincial accents, vibrant multiculturalism and fragrant jasmines), he had the usual dreams. He knew he was destined for something big, but he wasn’t so sure what exactly that was. An English literature graduate (he wanted to become a journalist) with a sunny disposition toward life, work and everything along the way, Shuveb had no burning desires, just an open mind.
If you ask him, he’d say that was par for the course then, because “start-up” as a term hadn’t entered common vocabulary (it was just getting bandied about in some parts) and employment meant a life-long commitment to one company—even as one entered the office the first day, one can imagine the last working day and the send-off cakes, the proverbial gold watch and drily humorous colleague speeches.
Where it all began
In a world marked by homogenous careers and limited opportunity, Shuveb was groping for something ‘fresh’ in his life. He just had one thing going: electronics. He was, and still remains, a hobbyist. Like so many in the good ol’ analogue days, he would work on printed circuit boards and twist the wiggly ends of resistors and capacitors into the tiny holes, working with the paraphernalia of ICs to achieve that final glow of satisfaction. A true-blue enthusiast for whom the tinkering was just as meaningful as the end.
The transition to computers and eventually software was the result of a beautiful instance of serendipity, though a rather painful one: he ended up with a broken leg, homebound for weeks. With nothing to do, he turned his attention to the computer at home. Shuveb encapsulates the moment as though it was right out of a 1980s romance flick: “The computer looked at me and I looked at it, both wondering who would make the first move!”
Back then there was debate around which type of computers was better: Branded or Assembled. For buyers who didn’t want to be bothered with computer innards like the motherboard, RAM, processor and such, brands sold packages. Shuveb took his computer system apart, and started understanding the make-up of it, what the Operating System meant and did, how a computer allowed a user to modify the way it functioned.
It was around this time that Open Source was rolling into a movement. A whole new world was opening up in front of him. Here’s a door that made it possible to tell the computer how to think! He felt like a youngster in the swinging sixties when The Beatles happened.
“For an electronics hobbyist, software means superpowers.”
What followed his love for Open Source was a series of fortunate turns that landed him in one technology company after another, each giving him a new lesson in tech. Once, an entrepreneur in the firecracker town of Sivakasi in Southern Tamil Nadu said he wanted to digitize the whole business of greeting cards: build an interface that would enable anyone to design a card online. The company would then ship it to the destination. This was a time in the early 2000s, when people would walk distances to a “computer centre” to access the Internet. A pre-social media era when email was the gizmo and Orkut with its ‘scraps’ and ‘testimonials’ were the accessories of the hep club.
When the entrepreneur sounded out what he wanted, the problem statement was narrowed down to teaching the computer to accept high-quality images so that customizing greeting cards were possible—it was Open Source that helped Shuveb do it. He learnt an important lesson that day: when the source codes are made available, it is possible to make the computer do your bidding. Shuveb helped the company make the greeting cards offering possible. Since then, Open Source and the possibilities it represented have kept him hooked.
Before the cloud…
He struck out on his own as an entrepreneur in the field of network virtualization. As Shuveb puts it, it was the pre-Cloud era. Quite serendipitously, a bunch of patents held by IBM and others expired around 2005, opening doors for technologists like Shuveb to get into offering products delivered on the Internet. A tool he’d developed (EasyVZ and the start-up was Binary Karma—watch the video below to know why he chose that name) saw significant uptake in the virtualization world; Shuveb started up next in the field of customer engagement for e-commerce, a segment raking in investments in millions now, but back then the VC communities and networks were smaller so the runway was fairly shorter.
Through his ventures, he rewarded his soul with all the building and spirited product development; if there is one thing he rues, it’s the room for scale and community strength that start-ups of today get to leverage. “Well, one lives and learns,” he says.
Following ‘the other Steve’
Shuveb has many idols but they all have something in common. They’re all engineers who built great companies. He points to Steve Wozniak when quizzed about who inspires him every day. In the world of Big Tech, Wozniak is the ‘other Steve’ whose contribution to the idea of Apple was seminal, though somewhat overshadowed by that of Jobs. Shuveb believes it’s important to be as much Wozniak as Jobs in building a company—the spirited engineer and the cold, rational product visionary rolled into one.
In his role as an Engineering leader at Freshworks, this is what Shuveb tries to combine. That means a good part of his job is to inspire programmers and managers to do better even as he lets his mind innovate on widening the scope of the Freshworks engineering platform.
Besides culture, Shuveb parlays his start-up learnings into guiding principles at Freshworks. He doesn’t want his teams to just fail, but fail fast — “get the bad ideas out of the way.” He also has a pithy liner that captures what he’d learnt as an entrepreneur: Fail, Fail fast, Don’t drink your own Kool-Aid, and Know the importance of growing as a community.
Personally, he tries to be humble. An avid reader, he heralds the holiday spirit at year-end by sending out a carefully curated reading list to colleagues. He sets store, a lot, by people. Cleverness is admirable but decouple that trait from being humane and Shuveb would give you a wide berth. Through the years, he’s learnt to love those who lead with the heart. He summed it all up with a quote: “What’s a company? The building, the furniture, or the product? It’s the people.”
Watch Shuveb talk about his journey and how Freshworks enables him to keep the entrepreneurial spirit alive at work.
Cover design: Vignesh Rajan
Video editing: Arjun Pillai
