Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu attributed Intel’s market decline to prioritising Wall Street returns over employee well-being, contrasting it with the success of competitors like Nvidia, AMD, and TSMC who invested in their engineering talent.
“Intel took care of Wall Street instead, and they have lost comprehensively to TSMC, AMD and Nvidia. And now they have lost Wall Street as well,” Vembu said in a recent post on X (formerly Twitter), analysing the chipmaker’s struggles in retrospect to people calling him “a socialist,” letting them decide if he’s being one on his comments on layoffs at Freshwork.
Vembu pointed to Nvidia and AMD’s success as evidence that long-term investment in engineering talent yields better results. He highlighted how both companies, led by Taiwanese CEOs, built their success through retaining engineers who developed deep technical expertise over time.
He drew particular attention to Taiwan’s semiconductor industry success, noting that TSMC built its dominant position by following a similar talent-focused approach despite having a population comparable to Sri Lanka.
The Zoho chief executive criticised what he called a “perversion” of capitalism in America’s current system, where companies prioritise short-term financial gains and executive compensation over sustainable growth. He pointed to practices like seeking Federal Reserve bailouts and maintaining artificially high asset valuations as examples of this distorted approach.
“We bet other people’s money and if we win we keep a lot of the gains and if we lose we run to the Fed to bail us out,” Vembu said, describing the current U.S. financial system. He warned that this approach, which has led to CEO compensation reaching 500 times average employee wages, could drive the country toward civil unrest.
Referencing last year’s Silicon Valley Bank bailout, Vembu noted how tech entrepreneurs who typically advocate for free-market capitalism quickly abandoned those principles when facing losses. He argued for a return to what he calls “real capitalism” – one that prioritises employee well-being and long-term company building over short-term financial engineering.
“That is how real capital building works: take care of your employees, your most valuable asset and build long term successful companies,” Vembu concluded, framing his people-first approach not just as good business practice but said that “This is also our dharma.”