The first thing that hit Kirani when he climbed to Freshdesk’s 700 sq feet office in a place called Kilkattalai in Chennai was the furniture.

He hopped on a plane to Chennai sometime in January 2011, and went to check out Freshdesk.

“Really strong product guy, (he’s) respected. But be careful because (Sridhar) Vembu may come after him,” Sanjeevia told Kirani. “Make sure there’s a clean departure (in terms of no-compete clauses), be careful.”

He turned to a former classmate and a former product manager at Zoho, Krishna Sanjeevia . “What do you think of this guy Girish?”

Kirani first decided to ask around. As he admits, he’s not an investor to make a decision based on pure guts. “I believe in analysis and deep research before deciding on giving a term sheet,” he says.

“There’s a new SaaS startup in Chennai led by an ex-Zoho employee; you want to take a look?” Daniel asked Kirani.

Shekhar Kirani was still searching for his first deal as the first-time venture dealmaker at Accel Partners when his colleague Anand Daniel mentioned Freshdesk. (One can never repeat disclosures too often, so here’s it once again: Accel Partners is one of the three investors in SourceCode Media, the company that owns FactorDaily. It or the other investors have no say whatsoever in our journalism.)

“They had really “mixed” furniture — the chairs didn’t match table, which in turn didn’t go with other stuff in terms of colour and design,” he recalls.

“But all six of them had big Macs. It signalled to me that the guys knew where to spend money,” he says.

After a few weeks, Girish met Sameer Gandhi, a partner from Accel’s San Francisco office, in Bangalore when he was visting on a business trip.

“If he had walked into my office in the Valley, I would have ensured he walked out with a cheque,” Gandhi told Kirani after the meeting. In particular, Girish’s storytelling, combined with the market opportunity to disrupt an established incumbent like Zendesk, impressed the early investors.

Let’s hear the investor story from Kirani:

Looking back, every entrepreneur needs multiple skills at different competence levels — product, sales, marketing, team building and so on. So far, you tend to see entrepreneurs slightly above average in most of these skills, but in one skill, they will be exemplary.

Girish was above average in many skills, but he was exceptional in product understanding, from a user’s point of view. He wanted to make a helpdesk simple and easy to use.

In Girish’s mind, there are two kinds of entrepreneurs — one focused on product and the other exceptionally talented on the marketing front. He’s allergic to field sales force. He is also allergic to detailed numbers. He is allergic to Excel sheets.

When he crossed $1 million in revenue, there were massive celebrations. When he crossed $50 million, that expression of joy was different, as if he knew already it was coming.

When he started, he didn’t know how big this could get, he didn’t know how big he would become. When they hit $5 million, the realisation that this could become big hit him.

Despite the growth (Freshdesk’s revenues from its over 80,000 customers were about $70 million in the year to March 2017), he told me last October how small the company is really. This was after we watched MS Dhoni for which we drove Milpitas from Palo Alto. The number of companies of that scale in the Valley are too many, and the likes of Salesforce.com dwarfs them all.

I had met him for dinner three-four months prior to that in Bangalore. “What do you want, Girish?” I asked him. He was crossing the threshold of the toughest valuation for a startup — $500 million to $1 billion.

“Most companies can exit below a $500 million valuation. If you cross that, the number of companies who can buy you is far fewer. Once you cross a billion, there are other options like a merger or even an IPO.”

“What do you want to do? You want to play or exit?” was my question.

Girish has a habit of answering questions by asking a question back. “What would you do, Shekhar, if you were in my shoes?” would be his usual answer.

In this case, he never asked the question.

Girish has changed, I thought. I noticed that he felt like going for the big one. Every month there are interests coming our way, camouflaged, exploring a deal.

I asked if he’s looking for an exit. He said no.

If he leaves Freshdesk and I gave him the same million dollars, he won’t be able (to build another Freshdesk). The context of the market has changed. In my own life, I have seen that things have to come together — the market, competition, team and so on.

“If you have to recreate this, Girish, I don’t know if you can,” I told him.

That was the moment when he decided to stay the course.

The proof for Kirani that Girish is onto big things lies in customer experiences such as those of Saravana Kumar, the founder of the Kent, UK-based software analytics company BizTalk360, Freshdesk is the platform on which his entire business runs. Kumar switched to Freshdesk from Assistly (acquired by Salesforce and now called desk.com) in 2013.

“We had some bad experiences with Assistly that time, mainly around parsing email replies. Once the email thread goes on multiple cycles, it became nearly impossible to read and respond with Assistly email editor. We started looking for alternatives and found Freshdesk promising. We made the switch and never looked back,” says Kumar.

Launched in 2011, BizTalk360 has over 500 customers in 30 countries. Back home, in the Indian market, Lenskart.com, the online eyewear company, turned to Freshdesk in early 2015. One of the pain points addressed by Freshdesk (and its new age rivals such as Zendesk) is ensuring customer support and engagement in the challenging world of social media where even the slightest of problems gets amplified with emotions.

Customer helpdesks offered by the likes of Freshdesk, Zoho and Zendesk assign a unique “ticket” to each complaint or issue and ensure it is tracked and solved in a time-bound manner. Also, with different divisions of a company trying to solve customer issues, there can be confusing overlaps all the time with no clear visibility about the overall situation.

Freshdesk not only automates the entire process of helpdesk and complaint management, but also provides a single, unified view across the company.

“We decided to go ahead with Freshdesk in early 2015. Before that we were using our own in-house ticketing system in which no department had visibility into ticket pendency; it was very difficult to find out who all have actioned on that ticket,” says Nitish Singla, a product manager at Lenskart.com.