One chapter from "Stay Hungry Stay Foolish"

Rashmi Bansal is a prominent writer of India. As of 2019, she is the author of nine books on entrepreneurship and an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. This article is a summary of the chapter "The Book of Job" from her book "Stay Hungry Stay Foolish". This book is a collection of the inspiring story of 25 IIM Ahmedabad graduates who chose the rough road of entrepreneurship.

 

The Book of Job

 

Nowadays, everybody is talking about entrepreneurship. It's a buzzword. I am going to share a story of Sanjeev Bikhchandani. He is the founder of a company named Info Edge India Ltd. If you don't recognize Info Edge, then you must be aware of naukri.com, jeevansathi.com, 99acres.com. These are the various online properties of Info Edge. Today the government provides a lot of support to entrepreneurship, but its 20 years old story and starting Dotcom Company was not easy at that time.    

  

Family background, Education and Job

 

Sanjeev belonged to a regular middle-class family, wherein his father was a doctor at a government hospital with no "under-the-table" income, and his mother was a housewife. Even after being a "Sindhi", he had no relation to business or businessmen. But one thing was obvious to him and so was his dream as well, to pass out of college, work for a few years, and then start something of his own. What? How? Where? He wasn't sure! But one thing was certain that he wanted to get onto the Business wagon. Sanjeev went on to study economics at St. Stephen's college. The interesting thing is that he had admission to IIT but did not take it. He thought it was a four-year course, whereas BA was a three-year course, so he studied economics instead. After graduation, he joined Lintas as an Accounts Executive in 1984. Sanjeev worked for three years and then got into IIMA in 1987. He got a job at Hindustan MilkFood Manufacturers (HMM) which is now Glaxo SmithKline as a Product Executive in 1989. He was given to handle the marketing of Horlicks. Now even though he had a secured and decent-paying job, but this certainly did not justify his talent or fulfilled the purpose. So after working for a year-and-a-half, in 1990, Sanjeev had quit his lucrative management job at Glaxo SmithKline that used to pay him a salary of Rs.8,000 / month, which was pretty decent that time. He came back to Delhi.

 

First Company

 

Along with a partner, Sanjeev set up two companies - Indmark and Info Edge. The first specialized in pharmaceutical trademarks and the second produced salary surveys and reports. The company started its life in the servant's quarter of his father's house, at a modest rent of 800 rupees per month. There were employees to be paid, and he often faced a cash flow crisis on the 29th - just before payday. Luckily, there was an 'angel investor': Sanjeev's wife – and batch mate Surabhi, - who was working with Nestle. She would have to take care of the expenses, and she was okay with it. More importantly, he was cool with it too! You see, it is not easy for a man to put aside his ego and live on his wife's salary. But he knew what it would take to become an entrepreneur. He didn't care about what the neighbours, relatives and society would think about him. Sanjeev used to teach management at various places like the Times School of Marketing, IMT, and IMS coaching classes, etc. over the weekends to earn around Rs. 2,000 a month to meet his expenses.

 

Later in 1993, Sanjeev and his partner decided to part ways, and each partner kept one company, half the employees and assets. Sanjeev got Info Edge along with the database. Info Edge shifted back to the servant's quarters from the office in south Delhi. On a lower-cost model, Info Edge made some money and Sanjeev managed to get construction work done at his residence. Once again the company shifted - this time into the second floor of his own house. It was October '96, and the recession had hit. The company was back in the red. With one kid in the family and another on the way, his wife Surabhi had also taken a break. By then Sanjeev had taken up a second job at the Pioneer newspaper as consulting editor of the Career supplement called Avenues and ran their careers supplements for the next four years.

 

Idea of Naukri.com

 

In October 1996, he happened to attend the annual event of the IT Asia exhibition in Delhi and came across a stall with 'WWW' written on it. Upon asking, he was explained that, it was the World Wide Web and that it was the internet. He was a retailer, reselling VSNL email accounts. So he also gave a demo of what exactly email accounts were, and their potential. He further browsed the internet, showed and also explained its functioning; a lot of information. Hence, he asked the retailer if he could set up a website for him or how to go about it. But because that time all the servers were US-based, websites could only be developed in India but hosted in the US. He required one server for it. He quickly called his brother, who was a professor at the UCLA business school, and explained that he wanted to start a website and wanted his help to hire a server, but didn't have the capital for it and would pay him later. He agreed. And in return, as a goodwill gesture, Sanjeev gave his brother a 5% stake in Naukri.com

 

Launch of Naukri.com

 

In 1997, they launched Naukri.com with 1,000 ads taken out of various magazines. It was a database of resume, jobs and recruitment consultants. It was envisioned to be a platform where job seekers and hiring managers met. In the first year, Naukri made Rs.2.35 lakhs of business, even when 80% of the jobs were free. The second year, the figure jumped straight to Rs.18 lakhs. This was when the VCs began calling Sanjeev, but Sanjeev turned all of them down.

 

But soon Sanjeev noticed that fully loaded and funded competition was on its way, and he would also need to be an equally strong competitor or else, he would be crushed in no time. That is when he decided to get in the venture capitalists, and Naukri received Rs.7.3 crores from ICICI Ventures in return for 15% stake in the company in 2000. Since then, there has been no looking back for them:

 

In 2004: the company earned Rs.45 crores, all from new ads and booked profits worth Rs. 8.4 crores.

In 2006: it became India's first Dotcom Company to get listed on the Bombay & National Stock Exchanges.

In 2012: Naukri entered into the Mobile world and launched their first Mobile App for Smartphone. Due to this transformation, more than half of traffic inflow now happened through Apps and Mobile sites.

And today, Naukri.com with a database of about 37 Million+ registered job seekers, controls almost 70% of the online job market traffic share.

Info Edge also holds a significant stake in a range of companies including – zomato.com, meritnation.com, policybazaar.com, mydala.com, happilyunmarried.com, canvera.com and vacationlabs.com.

 

There were only 14,000 internet accounts in the country when naukri.com was launched, but to Sanjeev, it looked like a large number. From earning no salary for over six years to becoming an industry leader with a market capitalization of $1 billion (Rs.4,300 crores)- story of Sanjeev's life gives a clear message that we have only one life, there's no point wasting it living someone else's dream. One should manage risks, get experience and make transitions when necessary. But stay focused on your dreams and passion.