"It's not what you would typically see and it is going to stay that way," he says. Zoho digitises businesses with apps that handle tasks ranging from customer acquisition and management to sales and customer support and has 45 million users across 180 countries. However, unless your business is one of the "tens of thousands" using Zoho in Australia it's unlikely you've ever heard of the tech giant. Barefoot billionaire On the sidelines of Zoho's annual 'Zoholics' conference in Austin, Texas, Vembu is dressed in his standard t-shirt branded with a Zoho logo, jeans and sandals.

Despite his low-key appearance Vembu owns 88 per cent of Zoho along with his family, and Forbes estimates his fortune at $US1.6 billion ($2.23 billion) and growing, with Zoho's turnover estimated at almost $1 billion a year. Vembu says Zoho flies under the radar because it is outspent on marketing "20 to 1" by its competitors which include Salesforce, Microsoft and Google. Despite counting Qantas and BHP as its customers in Australia, the tech company is only just opening its first offices here. Timothy Kasbe is the managing director for Australia and New Zealand of Zoho. Avoiding venture capital and staying private

The 50-year-old entrepreneur has boot-strapped Zoho for its entire existence with no external funding and no plans to sell or list the company. "From the profits, we keep reinvesting, reinvesting," he says. "It also helps that from the beginning, from the earliest days it was never about how much you have in your bank account, it was what interesting things can you do with it. Startups are supposed to aim towards exit. You do something because you love it, if you do something because you love it why exit?". It's a radical approach in a sector that chases venture capital funding, initial public offerings and "unicorn" valuations. In 2015 Zoho put up ads in train stations around San Francisco targeting industry giant Salesforce, which was not profitable at that stage saying "Dear Salesforce, sorry for your losses." "These companies are post-IPO but operating like a non-profits," Vembu says. "Not in a good way, they are burning money. It is a problem because it distorts markets. If you look at the cloud, extreme amounts of money is spent on customer marketing and a much lesser percentage goes into research and development."

Vembu believes technology stocks are currently in a bubble and warns that history shows bubbles always burst. "The present bubble will come to the same end, so we need to build durable companies that can navigate these cycles," he says. "There was a time when business was too easy. We have built this company to survive these bubbles. This is what taught us to engineer patiently, because if we rush and we take shortcuts we pay for it and the customer pays for it." Starting at the bottom Vembu was born in the small village of Thanjavur in southern India and got his PhD at Princeton before being offered a job as a lecturer at Australian National University in Canberra. "I got the job and paid for the permanent residency, then I had the remorse and I thought 'I actually don't like what I am doing, I don't like this work and research, I don't believe in it anymore'," he says. "I was 26 and I called them up and apologised and said 'I can't do this in good conscience, it is not about you it's about me'."

Vembu says he decided to "start at the bottom" as an engineer where he was introduced to software and realised he liked it. He saw opportunities for a software business in India and started a business, AdventNet, along with two siblings and three friends, which eventually became Zoho. Zoho has more than 40 apps for its Zoho One product alone and Vembu says the firm's wide-ranging product suite, which includes everything from online games to accounting software, is a result of letting his staff run with their ideas. "My philosophy of leadership is I identify good people and then get out of their way," he says. Christopher Lau, founder of eCargo with his father and eCargo's controlling shareholder John Lau. Credit:Christopher Pearce

'Classic' entrepreneur Christopher Lau, founder of ASX listed company eCargo, which is a Zoho customer, says Vembu is a "classic example" of an entrepreneur. "He certainly epitomises all successful entrepreneurs, trying to do everything at once," he says. "It's like Jack Mah [founder of Alibaba], every day there is a new business idea, every day a new business initiative, his hit rate is very low but when he hits, he hits." Sramana Mitra, founder of One Million by One Million, a Silicon Valley virtual accelerator says Vembu has followed a number of unique strategies to build Zoho. These include creating a product that is very similar to Salesforce's customer relationship management product but dramatically slashing the pricing on it, making it affordable and attractive for small businesses.

"Over time, Zoho has applied the same model of copying successful products by Google, Microsoft, etc to create a broad portfolio that caters to small businesses very effectively," she says. Vembu says his vision for Zoho is that it will be the software that drives all functions for businesses from sales to finance with competitive pricing from $1 per employee a day. "To build this kind of company you almost have to be crazy or insanely ambitious," he says. The reporter attended Zoholics in Austin as a guest of Zoho. Follow MySmallBusiness on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.