All In: Memoirs of the Freshworks Founder

by Pankaj Mishra, Pankaj Mishra

When my turn came, I tossed aside the script. I stepped on to the stage, not as a polished founder, but as a storyteller. 'I'm thirty-six years old,' I began, letting the silence settle. 'I have two kids and just one wife.' Laughter rippled through the room, breaking the tension. I continued, drawing them into my world. 'In my previous job, I drove a Honda Civic. Life was comfortable, predictable. Then I launched a start-up. Now I drive a Ford Figo hatchback.'

In 2010, Girish Mathrubootham left a cushy, well-paying job and founded Freshworks (then Freshdesk) to create a better way to service customers. What began as a single product focused on customer service is now a company that operates in thirteen global locations to deliver a comprehensive suite of products to more than 70,000 clients worldwide.

In All In, Girish tells us the incredible story of his from growing up in Trichy, the temple town of Tamil Nadu, to finding refuge in rebellion as a troubled teenager and eventually arriving in Chennai after his engineering degree. For Girish, then with limited resources and money, Chennai wasn't about success-it was about surviving. But not only did he survive, he also created one of the fastest-growing product companies in the world.

Candid and forthright, in this book, Girish unveils a rare dimension of himself, opening up about his early entrepreneurial failures, the challenges of being a software engineer in the US and the learnings he took from mentors like Kumar Vembu at Zoho. For all dreamers and aspiring entrepreneurs, All In is a window to a new world of achievements.

Genres: Biography, Entrepreneurship, Business

314 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 15, 2025

About the author

Pankaj Mishra (पंकज मिश्रा) is a noted Indian essayist and novelist.

In 1992, Mishra moved to Mashobra, a Himalayan village, where he began to contribute literary essays and reviews to The Indian Review of Books, The India Magazine, and the newspaper The Pioneer. His first book, Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India (1995), was a travelogue that described the social and cultural changes in India in the context of globalization. His novel The Romantics (2000), an ironic tale of people longing for fulfillment in cultures other than their own, was published in 11 European languages and won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum award for first fiction. His book An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World (2004) mixes memoir, history, and philosophy while attempting to explore the Buddha's relevance to contemporary times. Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond (2006), describes Mishra's travels through Kashmir, Bollywood, Afghanistan, Tibet, Nepal, and other parts of South and Central Asia.

Reviews

[Figin Jose · Rating 3 out of 5]

a memoir co-forged with Pankaj Mishra that transmutes the alchemy of Indian entrepreneurship into a pulse-racing saga of audacious reinvention. From the raw edges of a Chennai engineer's survival scraping by in dingy hostels, chasing code across Silicon Valley's indifferent sprawl to the defiant pivot that birthed Freshworks from a single Freshdesk spark in 2010, Mathrubootham lays bare the entrepreneur's odyssey: Zoho's shadowy mentorship under Vembu brothers honing his blade, the vertigo of quitting security for SaaS sovereignty, and the Nasdaq crescendo serving 70,000 souls across thirteen global outposts, all while wrestling the specters of doubt, betrayal, and burnout. Mishra's pen, steady and empathetic, elevates this not to hagiography but to a gritty catechism resilience as relentless iteration, innovation as empathy's quiet insurgency, where failures aren't footnotes but forges for a "kudumba" culture of fierce loyalty and customer communion that propelled a Tamil Nadu upstart to billion-dollar defiance. Yet, in its buoyant arc, a whisper of gloss lingers over the bloodied ledgers of unprofitability and cloned ambitions, a rose tinted veil that only sharpens the book's clarion call: for every founder adrift in ambition's undertow, here is proof that heart-hustle hybrid, laced with humility's grit, can hack the global code, rendering All In less chronicle than covenant for the next wave of desi disruptors to claim their unapologetic stake.

[Janeesh Logaprabhu · Rating 5 out of 5]

We just get to hear successful exits and failures from the startup world. But rarely get to read about the journey, the person behind the journey, and what got them here. All in: Memoirs of the Freshworks founder delves deeply into what made Girish into what he is today. His personal struggles, aspirations, sacrifices, and the human behind the first (and only) Indian Startup to be listed on Nasdaq. A must read for every aspiring entrepreneur.

[Ramprakash · Rating 3 out of 5]

Such an inspiring story, finished the book in one sitting.

However the big let down is the quality of writing - especially the later parts of the book are entirely written by a free version of a lazily prompted LLM - filled with em dashes and the usual LLM cliches - making it a ridiculous read. Such an inspiring and a well put together narrative could definitely have been better written!

[Chockalingam Csp · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is full of the little and big moments from Girish's life which is also the building years of freshworks. If you are an entrepreneur you will love this book. If you are already working in a saas company you will enjoy the entire book. This also has the untold stories of Girish which gives more hope to anyone who reads it.

[ajay Kumar · Rating 4 out of 5]

among the better written autobography by Indian founders; but still like most of other indian autobiogaphies a lot more factual than story telling; plus start should ideally have been summary of the overal achievment rather than immeidiately day 1 of my life

[Manoj Reddy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great book on an Indian startup founder

[Prateek Sharma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anyone thinking of starting their entreprenuial journey in India

[Sundar Ganapathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Simple. Authentic and relatable.