Sanjeev Bikhchandani was not always the successful technopreneur he is today. Before hitting on his big idea in the form of naukri.com, he had been a struggling entrepreneur whose business returns were sometimes not enough to afford him a salary. Several of his ideas did not take off and when India was hit by recession in 1996 his firm saw a negative growth of 40% destabilising a business that was just gaining some stability. Sanjeev had to take on part time jobs to prevent the situation from getting desperate.
What is remarkable is that he never once gave up on being an entrepreneur and resorted to a stable job with a predictable monthly paycheck and a less chaotic and secure lifestyle. ?I always knew I had to do something of my own. Independence is a big thing for me,? says Sanjeev. On finally getting lucky with naukri.com after almost nine years of struggle, he says, ?Being in enough places at enough times, means that you are bound to get lucky sometime. Also if you don?t give up at trying to be lucky, one day you will. Maybe not now, maybe two years later maybe five or maybe even after ten years. Its all part of being an entrepreneur.?
Sanjeev landed his first job when Lintas, an advertising company, came for campus recruitments to Delhi?s
St Stephens college. Having decided to gain some work experience before pursuing a management degree, the young economics graduate decided to go for the job. ?I sat for the exams, cleared them and was made a client servicing trainee. My first salary was Rs 1500,? says Sanjeev. He worked with Lintas for three years between 1984 and 87? with the last two being in Bombay. ?Our salary increased to Rs 1800 but it was still a stretch even in those times,? he says. ?We traveled by locals, ate batata vadas and Maggi for dinner.? Sanjeev says that even in his student days, Mumbai?s professional attitude caught his fancy. ?Delhi, Bangalore and other hubs are only now catching up but Mumbai had the work culture even then,? he says.
He prepared for his IIM entrances between ad shoots and made it to IIM Ahmedabad. ?We had a group of about five-six who always spoke of entrepreneurship,? he says. Many of Sanjeev?s IIM friends have become successful entrepreneurs in their own right today. R Subramaniam of Subhiksha and Nirmal Jain of India Infoline are a few of them. Could any of their earlier entrepreneurial ideas have worked today? ?No, the era was different, our ideas were more suited to those times,? he says.
After graduation, Sanjeev joined HMM (now Glaxo Smithkline Beecham) but quit after a little more than a year to start his own company. ?I thought for over six months to take the leap. I would go with my resignation each day, but could not muster the strength. I had also married my wife then, a batchmate from my management classes at the IIMs and had more responsibilities,? says Sanjeev. He finally quit to set up his own firm InfoEdge in typical start up style in quarters over his friend?s garage. His firm did salary surveys and did trademark searches for pharmaceutical companies. In 1993, he and his partner went their separate ways and it became a solo show for Sanjeev.
So what does he think of new entrepreneurs today? ?Most of us today are bound by the monthly EMIs and the visiting cards. Once we learn to look beyond them, one can take the leap. You have to be convinced that this is what you want to do and then go for it,? he says.
Since his firm could not afford to pay him a salary his wife?s job at Nestle took care of both their expenses. She quit the job in 1995 to take care of the kids after the business had stabilised a bit. (She now works half days with him on an honorary salary of Rs one a year).
Unfortunately, due to an economic recession in 1996, his firm?s profits crashed. That?s when he took up a job in the media, later working for the financial restructuring of the Pioneer newspaper when then owners, the Thapars, decided to move out. It was the first time he cut his teeth on brokering deals with Indian financial institutions. ?It was also the first time I had a large team reporting into me. Learning the art of people management proved to be invaluable,? he says.
Sanjeev?s ?aha? moment came in October ?96 at the IT Asia exhibition. Seeing a small stall intriguingly marked with the now familiar ?www? prefix, he decided to enquire about the same. He found a vendor selling VSNL?s email Internet accounts. One thing led to another and the seller explained Sanjeev the concept of Internet, till then, not a very known term in India, by opening the Yahoo.com site. ?Something immediately clicked in my brain. I knew this was the opportunity that I was waiting for.? The rest is history. Bikhchandani borrowed money from his elder brother, a professor at UCLA, to buy a server, roped in techie friend Anil Lal to develop the website, got an IIM Ahemdabad junior VN Saroja to run the operations and thus the new company InfoEdge was born. In March 1997, the naukri.com site was set up as a division of the same.
The process could move at a furious pace as in an earlier attempt in response to a Department of Telecom?s (DoT) advertisement to launch a videotex service in Delhi, Sanjeev had already worked out a database of jobs. The project never took off. The database was put into cold storage as their could be no viable model for its marketing as per then available channels and technology. ?As an entrepreneur you are constantly coming up with ideas. You file them away and forget them but the important thing is to keep thinking,? says Sanjeev. As for focusing on the recruitment industry particularly, Sanjeev says that even at HMM he noticed that everyone would discuss job offer s even if one had no intention to switch. ?There were head hunters calling in and there was much gossip about job offers. I figured that if one gathered all the information sources in one place, constantly upgraded it, then people would be interested,? he says.
Bikhchandani holds that his early days as an entrepreneur taught him a lot. ?I see huge value in bootstrapping. You learn that it?s hard to make money, so you learn not to spend it foolishly. I struggled but learnt a lot,? he says. So where does he look at inspiration and support when he needs advice? ?Our company now has a depth of talent that one can count on. There are several friends in the industry that one can count on. My family has been a big support and continues to be so,? says Bikhchandani. He is also not very big on management books. ?I just read a few. In recent times, Chris Anderson?s The Long Tail and Jon Battelle?s The Search are books I have admired a lot. I even bought 10 copies of the same for our libraries and insisted that everyone read them,? says Sanjeev. ?I do admire companies like Google, Yahoo, Infosys and Tata as well,? he says. It is only now Bikhchandani has started taking Sundays off. For chilling out he spends time with his kids and loves to travel over the weekend. Off late, he has developed an interest in history and biographies. ?One needs perspective to understand why history is important,? he says.
So what?s the next step in his entrepreneurial journey? ?We will be looking at growing the company and will be launching more websites in different domains.? He adds that there is very little likelihood of his company getting into an offline business. ?We do have Quadrangle as an executive search division that works offline but that is forward integration of our ?jobs? platform.? That may be a type of offline activity we may undertake. Bikhchandani also rules out acquisitions in the near future. ?Most companies that survived the dot com meltdown are either too expensive or unwilling to sell. The newcomers are too small for acquisition,? he says.
What strikes one about Sanjeev Bikhchandani is the ability to have used each of his experiences in their totality. From his trainee days at Lintas, to earlier business ideas, to a newspaper job, one can see all of them coming together in his online business. At 44, Sanjeev believes that he is not very successful yet. As he strives for success, one is sure to see more credits to his name.
