'This is not good': Finance-driven economy would destroy society, feels Zoho's Sridhar Vembu

Sridhar Vembu, the co-founder of Zoho Corporation, has voiced his concerns over a growing trend among Indian-American children from engineering and tech backgrounds shifting towards high finance. In a tweet on Tuesday, Vembu reflected on his personal experience and warned against the consequences of a finance-driven economy.

"Smart Indian-American children, whose parents work in engineering or tech, are moving to High Finance," he noted, comparing it to a long-standing trend in the US where bright minds gravitate towards Wall Street rather than innovation-driven fields.

Vembu recalled an incident from 1994 when he earned his PhD from Princeton University. "A former engineer from Silicon Valley, who moved to a Wall Street job, tried to persuade me to join their quantitative analysis and trading team. Instead, I took a lower-paying job as an engineer at Qualcomm," he said, adding that he never found "making money on money" appealing.

According to Vembu, this shift of talent from engineering to finance is a troubling sign. "Recently, I have noticed that smart, well-educated Indians are gravitating to Finance. This is not good," he stated. He emphasized the importance of channeling intellectual capabilities toward solving real-world challenges.

"We need to apply our talents to solve hard engineering and tech problems, hard urban and rural infrastructure problems, hard healthcare problems, and so on," he urged.

Vembu warned that an economy overly reliant on finance could lead to societal instability. "Making money on money feels easy, but a finance-driven economy would destroy society," he cautioned. "This is ancient wisdom, and we must pay heed."