The Grill: Sridhar Vembu

Sridhar Vembu, the 41-year-old CEO of Zoho, an upstart maker of online applications, is an accidental software entrepreneur. After getting a doctoral degree from Princeton University, he went to work at Qualcomm when it was just a start-up. He says he would have stayed there but was drawn instead to the nascent Indian software business, and in 1996 he formed a company called AdventNet with two of his brothers and three friends. The company eventually built an IT management tool, Manage Engine, which remains its most profitable offering. But the company has become known for a broad suite of cloud applications called Zoho, and last year it adopted Zoho as its corporate name.