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I read what Sridhar Vembu said about his engineers and it hit me like a cold shower. He told them to "start considering alternative livelihoods," including himself. With calm acceptance.
No spin. No "we're restructuring for growth." No "this is actually a great opportunity for shareholders." Just: the game might be changing, so maybe think about what you'd do if your job disappeared.
That's the most honest thing a CEO has said in two years.
The Chasm
Amazon laid off 16,000 people without explaining why. Just gone. HR sent emails. No statement from Jassy. No clarity. Just silence and severance packages. Meanwhile, Tim Cook talks about "investing in innovation" while cutting 10% of headcount.
The gap between what executives say and what's actually happening has become a chasm. And Vembu just walked across it in the opposite direction.
He started Zoho in 1996 with no money. Bootstrapped the whole thing. Survived the dot-com crash in rural India when everyone thought they were insane. Built it to over $1 billion in annual recurring revenue. Took zero venture capital. Never had to answer to anyone but his customers.
And when the world shifted, he didn't pretend it hadn't.
The Zoho Playbook Is 25 Years Old
I've been thinking about what I wanted to build for two years. The real answer was: I wanted to build the AI version of Zoho. A company that was lean. Profitable. Independent. Built to last because it wasn't trying to squeeze growth out of every quarter.
SimpleDirect was supposed to be that. Instead, it became evidence that the Zoho era is over.
Zoho can survive AI disruption because they built something real. They have customers who depend on them. They have profits. They're not trading velocity for survival. But that playbook is 25 years old now. The conditions that made it possible don't exist anymore.
Stage 5
Here's what kills me about tech leadership in 2026: nobody wants to reach stage 5 of grief. They're all stuck in stage 2—anger. Rage that the market's not cooperating. Rage that smaller teams are moving faster. Rage that they have to cut costs.
Vembu reached acceptance. He looked at his team and said: I don't know if this works anymore, so you should be prepared. That's stage 5. That's growth, even if it sounds like defeat.
Compare that to the narrative from the $700 billion tech industry. They're spending almost a trillion dollars on AI research and infrastructure, and simultaneously telling employees that layoffs are about "productivity." That's not accepting reality. That's denying it while the evidence piles up.
Honesty Is Free
The thing about honesty is that it's free. It doesn't cost anything to tell your team the truth. But it costs everything to maintain the lie. You have to keep the story consistent. You have to answer questions without answering them. You have to smile while the ship sinks.
Vembu chose the harder thing: he told the truth, which meant accepting his own uncertainty. Most founders won't do that. Most founders would rather die on a ship they believe in than admit it's sinking.
I respect that more than I respect almost anything in business right now.
Agency
What Vembu did was give his people agency. He said: I don't know what happens next, so don't wait for me to figure it out. Think about yourself. Make a plan. I'm doing the same. That's radical in an industry where every CEO pretends to have certainty.
When I shut down SimpleDirect, I tried to do something similar. I told my team the truth: the market changed, the playbook is broken, and I'm not sure what comes next. Some people left. Some stayed. The ones who stayed did so knowing exactly what they were getting into.
That's not a death sentence. That's the beginning of something real.
Clarity, Not Resignation
The irony is that Sridhar Vembu might be the only CEO in tech right now who will still have a company in five years. Not because he's the smartest investor or the best strategist. But because he's willing to look at reality and say its name.
Everyone else is playing pretend. Playing like the AI disruption is just another market cycle. Playing like the layoffs are temporary. Playing like the thousand-person teams were actually necessary.
Vembu said: we might need to start thinking differently about how we work.
That's not resignation. That's clarity.
You are the asset. Everything else is infrastructure—including the company you're building, including the narrative everyone tells about growth and disruption.
The only CEO being honest about that is the one who's been independent for 30 years.