founder Girish Mathrubootham has announced that his autobiography ‘All In’, co-authored with renowned journalist Pankaj Mishra, will be released soon.
Speaking on the sidelines of SaaSBoomi 2025, a founder-led community event held in Chennai last week, Mathrubootham shared with YourStory that the book offers an unfiltered, behind-the-scenes look into his life, going beyond the typical business handbooks.
“It’s my life story. I have not written it like a business book, per se, just by offering gyaan about business models. It starts off with my early days, pursuing engineering and then coming to Chennai, searching for a job, and then ending up doing an MBA..”
Mathrubootham also revealed that he briefly considered calling the book ‘G’–a nickname fondly used by his peers and employees.
When asked about what inspired the title of All In, he jokingly said that it stands for AI (Artificial Intelligence). However, the phrase first cropped up in a 2016 article titled Making of Girish, which was also written by Mishra.
“One of my close friends Rajesh Rajshekhar said in an interview that ‘Girish is an ‘all in’ kind of a person–there’s no half-hearted approach’. I have started learning how to play poker too. It’s been more than 12 months..,” he says.
Widely recognised for his business acumen, Mathrubootham said that his story aims to inspire builders and founders with humble beginnings, those without any elite pedigrees.
“The number one takeaway is: to be successful in business, you don’t necessarily have to be Ivy League educated or have friends in places. Normal people with a normal background, even with a difficult childhood, can actually win,” he said.
Mathrubootham further pointed that the book has ‘key moments’ and ‘counter intuitive decisions’ that led him to build the first Indian SaaS firm to get listed on Nasdaq—such as turning down a Rs 12,000 job in favour of a Rs 5,000 position in software, simply to stay in the industry he believed in.
“Now, many founders can see that it’s not the obvious choice—it’s all about the decisions you make when life presents you with choices,” he says.
The book has eight chapters focused on major influences in Mathrubootham’s journey of building Freshworks.
One, titled ‘Kumar Vembu–Through the Eyes of a Mentor’, paying tribute to an early guiding figure from his time at Zoho, and ‘Thalaivar–The Hero Who Shaped My Dreams’, which refers to actor Rajinikanth, someone who Mathrubootham believes has ‘shaped his life’.
L-R (Actor Rajinikanth and Girish Mathrubootham, Founder and Chairman, Freshworks)
However, Mathrubootham is wary of giving away too many details. “I don’t like to do spoilers!” he said with a laugh.
Moreover, the book lays bare all the uncensored hardships along the way, including with his early struggles as an engineering graduate in Chennai. “It covers everything exactly as it happened. So a lot of the hardships are covered in the early phases, some of the challenges as we go on. Entrepreneurship is never about trends,” he adds.
