I sat in front of my laptop in a blue-coloured room. It was 2:30 pm. Rajesh Jain, founder of Netcore, appeared on my screen in a crisp white shirt, two pens clipped neatly into his pocket. He smiled warmly, and when I asked where it all began, he took a walk down memory lane- back in November 1999, when he walked away after executing what was one of the biggest internet deals that India had ever seen.
He had just sold IndiaWorld, a cluster of India-focused websites, to Satyam Infoway, later known as Sify, for Rs 499 crore. The sale was very interestingly timed – at the peak of the dotcom boom, when valuations could change in weeks, and the internet still felt like a frontier. In India, where most entrepreneurs were still building software services businesses, the idea that someone could create and sell a web company for that kind of money seemed almost impossible. Jain had become India’s first internet billionaire.
Where it all began
“I returned to India in mid-1992 from the US,” he said during his exclusive interview with Financialexpress.com. “In late 1994, the internet was just starting up in India. I connected two things: the power of the internet to connect people globally, and my own experience in the US of the inability to get information on what’s happening in India. That was the origin of IndiaWorld.”
He launched IndiaWorld in March 1995, “around the time eBay launched, around the time Yahoo launched,” he added, saying focussing on Indians outside India, because commercial internet access had not even fully arrived domestically.
Working out of Nariman Point with a 20-member team, Jain and his wife built 13 websites, including Samachar.com and Khel.com. “The quality of the websites that we had were very good, quick codes, search engines in India, recipes, and news aggregation. And that helped us grow,” he recalled.
They did not raise money. In fact, he says simply, “I’ve not raised external capital in my 30 years”.
A business funded by customers
IndiaWorld initially ran on subscriptions. Users had to pay to access the content. Jain has described the plan as well thought out and ahead of its time. It also collided with a truth about the Indian consumer that he learned quickly.
Jain soon realised that companies were sharing login credentials. “It was not there for me to control it. This is not scalable at all,” he said.
He found it by doing something that would later become a familiar pattern in Indian internet entrepreneurship: using one business to fund another. IndiaWorld began helping companies set up their own websites. Businesses found it convenient to build on the same platform that powered IndiaWorld. Companies selling products to NRIs found a ready audience.
“We had done, I think, about 200 websites for most of the leading Indian corporates at that time,” he said. That services arm created steady revenue.
“One was maybe a 20% gross margin business. But the other one was like a 90% gross margin business. The combination helped me drive profitability,” he explained.
Profitability, he says, is not a slogan. It is structural freedom.
“There are only two sources of capital: you get it from your investors, or you get it from your customers,” Jain said. “Profitability gives you the option to say no to investors and deal structures that you don’t like.”
His father’s advice stayed with him. “The mindset was always that you should not lose anyone else’s money,” he said.
The exit that changed everything
By 1999, the dotcom boom had reached India. Satyam Infoway, fresh off its Nasdaq IPO, wanted content to complement its ISP business. There was also interest from a US player. “We had two companies bidding for us,” Jain recalled.
The deal closed in November 1999 for Rs 499 crore. When I ask him whether selling felt like winning or walking away, he tells me a story.
“The day after the deal, my photo was on the front page of all the business newspapers,” he said. “Bhavana (Jain’s wife) saw me gloating when I saw my face. She told me, if you think about what you’ve done and the money in the bank, you will never do anything again in life. What has happened is done. You are an entrepreneur. Find the next set of problems to solve.”
There was another voice that influenced him — his banker. “He said, more important than knowing when to enter a business is knowing when to exit a business,” Jain recalled. “You are a creator. The money you earn will give you the freedom to go wherever you want to go. Don’t get too emotionally attached.”
Looking back, Jain says selling when he did was one of his best decisions. “If I had waited six months, I think two zeros would have got knocked off from the valuation,” he laughed.
The business that was already waiting
Even before IndiaWorld was sold, Jain had already stumbled into his next business.
As clients began receiving online inquiries through IndiaWorld-built websites, they ran into a problem: they had no reliable way to manage customer emails. Enterprise tools like Microsoft Exchange were expensive and out of reach.
“We leveraged Linux, the open-source platform, and built mail servers for companies,” he said. When he later sought funding, investors argued he was trying to do too much. The portal and web services belonged together, they said; the mail server venture was a distraction.
He split the businesses. IndiaWorld was sold to Sify. The mail server arm became Netcore Cloud, and the company Jain still leads.
When he exited IndiaWorld, he had something to return to. “I had a business to come back to,” he said with a twinkle in his eyes.
Over 28 years, Netcore pivoted multiple times, from mail servers to email marketing, to marketing automation, to customer engagement SaaS.
A detour into politics
For a few years, Jain stepped away from the corporate world and into the periphery of politics. His motivation, he says, was not power but a question that had stayed with him since his time in the United States – “Why is India poor? I lived in the US. You see the prosperity out there,” he said.
Around 2011, he wrote publicly about how the Bharatiya Janata Party could win a majority in the 2014 general election and worked in the background, on data and strategy. “I analysed election data and realised that the BJP would win 300 seats at least once across elections,” he said.
He believed it needed to become a “wave election” rather than a summation of state-level wins. After 2014, however, he stepped back. “Some things work, some things don’t work,” he recalled. “We always want to find the big problems to solve.” Eventually, he concluded that he was most effective as a technology entrepreneur and returned his full attention to Netcore.
On AI, disruption and being the incumbent
Jain sees parallels between the dotcom era and today’s AI surge. “Every 12 years, there is a dramatically different new technology,” he said. “For the first time, we have seen white-collar work being impacted.”
But he does not see a case to panic yet. “People are resilient. People adapt. It won’t be the same jobs. Maybe the job of a coder will go away. But there will be opportunities for building new things,” he noted.
There is one key difference. “That time I was a disruptor. Today, in a way, we are the incumbent,” he chuckled. “If companies don’t change, they die.”
Profit as philosophy
Jain coined a term years ago – Proficorn.
“I used to complain that no one writes about profitable companies,” he said. “So someone said, why don’t you coin a word? I just said — Proficorn.” He contrasts it with the unicorn narrative. “In a unicorn, you may own 10% by the time it goes public. In a Proficorn, you can create the same wealth with more control,” he recalled.
His summary of the journey is unusually calm. “No regrets. Always look forward,” Jain thought after thinking for a few seconds. “Entrepreneurs have to be optimistic. Your odds are completely against you.”
And then, unexpectedly, he names his two best decisions. “One is the arranged marriage to my wife,” he said, followed by a laugh. “She has been the backbone throughout my life.” The second was selling IndiaWorld when he did.
When I ask him how he looks back on 35 years of building, selling, pivoting and starting again, Jain does not romanticise the arc. He reduces it to a simple tally. “I look at it as sort of two and a half successes and probably 30–40 failures,” he said. IndiaWorld counts as one. Netcore is another. The political experiment, perhaps half. The rest, he shrugs, were attempts, ideas tried, tested, discarded.
Failure, he insists, is routine. “Just as you don’t let success get to your head, you don’t let failure get to your head,” he said. The numbers, then, are not the point. What matters is the habit of returning to work the next day, of finding the next problem, of building again.
Editorial Note: This profile is based on original reporting, including direct communication with Rajesh Jain. To ensure a comprehensive perspective, FinancialExpress.com corroborated this information with public records and third-party sources. This content is not sponsored, and FinancialExpress.com retains full editorial independence and final authority over all editorial decisions.