Special briefing: Accel’s Shekhar Kirani on Freshworks and the science and art of succeeding as a VC investor

It was about 10 years ago that Shekhar Kirani took a flight from Bangalore to Chennai, and spent the better part of the day talking to a couple of young entrepreneurs before taking an evening flight back. He had been introduced to them by a colleague and the partner at Accel was looking to find out if the VC firm should invest in them. The two entrepreneurs—Girish Mathrubootham and Shan Krishnasamy—came from simple backgrounds and hadn’t attended any of India’s Institutes of Technology or top business schools. They had experience working at Zoho, a small software products company at the time, which helped but many would have rejected them, Kirani says. There was something about the duo and their fledgling venture, called Freshdesk at the time, that convinced Kirani Accel should go ahead and bet on them. And Freshdesk, which would eventually become Freshworks, got its first million dollars in VC money with Kirani joined the company’s board. He certainly couldn’t have imagined then, that the little Chennai outfit would go on to deliver Accel’s first US IPO from its Indian portfolio—and an India-founder-led software products company at that. Forbes India caught up with Kirani, a day after he returned from attending Freshworks’s billion-dollar IPO on the Nasdaq. We spoke about everything from what was going through his mind on the floor of the exchange to how Mathrubootham had matured as an entrepreneur, and what it takes to succeed as a VC investor