Right for the job

IDG News Service — Wed, 14 May 2008 12:09:53 -0700

Sanjeev Bikhchandani, CEO and co-founder of InfoEdge, says that IT can help his company with product innovation.

In boxing as in business, footwork is everything. And a back step means something big's coming.

When his entire industry came crashing down around him, Sanjeev Bikhchandani, took a step back, focused on the business and pulled Naukri through the dotcom bust. In the years that followed, he made Naukri a household name.

Now again, Bikhchandani is taking a step back. With the imminent launch of Shiksha (an education portal), he's taking the fight away from the frenzy of the online job space and is focusing upstream -- on tomorrow's job hunters.

Bikhchandani has proved that he can pull an idea out of the future and nurture it. And he's made his move. Watch out for the back step.

CIO: Why did you give up your day job to start something of your own?

Sanjeev Bikhchandani: I worked for GlaxoSmithKline before. I always wanted to be an entrepreneur, even when I was in business school. It was something I wanted to be, I did not know when exactly, but I knew I would be an entrepreneur. I made all my plans accordingly, including my career choices, my studies, my three-year job, and so on. It was very important for me to be my own man, doing my own thing.

Is entrepreneurship a growing trend among young technocrats?

Absolutely. I was a speaker at the TAAI (Travel Agents Association of India) summit last December. There were 1,600 attendees. It was one of the largest gatherings of entrepreneurs and of people interested in being entrepreneurs. The numbers are just growing. I think entrepreneurship is becoming a movement.

Another recent trend is the emergence of Indian investors. Until now VC firms raised money overseas and invested in Indian companies. Now wealthy Indians are investing both as angels and VCs. I expect this trend to gather momentum in 2008.

As a consequence of these changes, a new class of entrepreneurs has emerged in India: well-educated, first-generation and with experience in best-in-class companies. It is these entrepreneurs, and the companies they build, that will be one of the major engines of growth for the Indian economy in the decades to come. Today, almost every business school in India has an entrepreneurship cell and actively promotes it as a viable career option. Twenty years ago, entrepreneurship was a fringe movement at business schools. It is now mainstream. However, even as more business school graduates are likely to become entrepreneurs in 2008, it will be tough for most to get funding since investors value experience, domain expertise and a proven track record.

How did you envisage an online business even before the Internet came to India?

On a visit to IT Asia in 1996, I saw a stall with the letters WWW written on it. I wondered what it meant, and found out that it stood for Worldwide Web. That's how I came to know about the Internet. Although it's hard to imagine today, in those days there was no TCP/IP access. An agent gave me a demonstration on a black and white monitor, and I had my first peek at the Internet. I saw how e-mail worked. I looked at Yahoo.com. I realized that I finally had a medium on which my business could run. I decided I wanted a website -- especially after I came to know that there were 14,000 users in India. But I could not do this sitting in India, because all the servers were in the US. My brother, who lived there, helped me register my website and get a domain name. In March 1997, Naukri.com -- a division of InfoEdge -- was set up.

Where did the idea of a job site come from?

It was an old idea. While I was with GlaxoSmithKline in 1989-90, there were about eight of us in the marketing department and we all sat in an open hall. I noticed two things. First, that when the office copy of Business India came in, everybody turned to the back where there were about 40 pages of job ads. People discussed jobs a lot. Now, everybody was happy in their current jobs and no one was really applying, but jobs were still something they discussed. It dawned on me that it isn't always when you need a job that you look for one.

Second, I noticed that every week, headhunters offered a few of my colleagues jobs. Every time it was a different head hunter, with a different job. And these jobs were never advertised in newspapers and magazines. I figured that what appeared in print was the tip of the iceberg. With thousands of recruiters, each with four or five clients and armed with 10 or 15 jobs, there must be a massive but fragmented database of jobs out there.

By 1990, I figured that if somebody were to build a database of 'live' jobs and keep it updated, they would have a very powerful product. It could become a business and money could be made -- although I was hazy how it would work. The Internet was not around at that time.

In the meantime, we started InfoEdge. We did salary surveys, we made some databases, and in '96, I saw the Internet for the first time. I kind of joined the dots. I told myself that this was the way to do it: put a job database out on the Internet and sell it.

How did you ensure that the dotcom bust did not affect Naukri's business?

We launched in 1997, before the boom, but we already knew that all would not be well when the boom started. When the boom came, we could see that it would be corrected soon. But it happened about six months sooner than we thought.

In fact just a month before the correction happened, in April 2000, we opted for some venture capital -- Rs 7.3 crores from ICICI Ventures -- 14.7 percent of the company (it was worth about Rs 50 crore-plus, then). Instead of wasting this on advertising, we took on new offices and hired new sales staff. We began to invest in servers, technology, people, products, sales offices. We began to focus on growing the business -- not just by spending -- but through better products and an on feet-on-the-street approach. Around this time, the IT meltdown began. This was in November 2000. Since we had invested our money into setting up new business opportunities, developing new markets and developing new and more exciting products to keep our sales team busy, when the bust took place, we were already on an upward curve.

Today, where is Naukri placed vis-à-vis other job sites? How did you become a household name?

We are the market leader in the online job space with a 50 percent market share. We have held this position for about two or three years. Our next competitor has about 30 percent and the third place has about 15 percent.

When we started, we were the first site that targeted Indians in India. All other job sites and search engines, including Rediff, Khoj and Samachar, targeted Indians in the US. Around that time, the Indian media began to write about Internet businesses and Indian examples were held up as examples. As a result, we began to get massive coverage. In our first year, we had two fat files of press coverage, which really helped us. It got us traffic. Our contact strategy was good: we allowed people to log on for free. With only about 14,000 people on the Internet in India, we had to get people to keep coming back.

How comfortable are you with IT? What has IT done for Naukri?

I am not a technology person. I have an advertising and marketing background and I studied economics in college. However, I have always been an avid user of technology.

IT has always enabled business. In the last three years, we have realized that we need to keep abreast of the competition -- at least in product and tech innovations. Our investments in innovation is what keeps Naukri ahead. Going forward, too, IT's going to be one of the most important factors.

You started a matrimonial site. Why diversify?

InfoEdge has started and has plans to start a number of diverse portals. We've got Jeevansathi, a matrimonial website, we've got 99acres, a real estate exchange, and this quarter we are launching Shiksha, an educational site.

The most important reason for these diverse areas of interest is that we are chasing large markets. The strategy is to launch in unchartered areas and take on unsolved problems. We are trying to enter markets where we believe there is a great possibility to utilize the Internet's efficiency. We know that we have the leadership and the bandwidth to service these opportunities.

What does e-commerce need to take off in India?

There are many things required for the development of e-commerce in India. Basically, there's an issue of Internet penetration itself. Second is the willingness of people to use credit cards on the Net.

The third is question is: do we really have great e-commerce sites with great products at the right prices, with dispatches being delivered on time? Why should consumers buy online? Are we giving consumers something cheaper or better? Or we giving a product to the user faster, or making it more convenient? Are we offering something that is not available in a consumer's neighborhood? Unless these conditions are fulfilled, e-commerce will not take off.

Downtime is a nightmare in your business. How do you tackle this?

You build redundancies, backups, mirrors and replicated servers. That's the only way to minimize downtime.

IT has a lot to do with our daily functions because it's the base of our businesses. Our product runs because of IT. Our entire backend is all IT-enabled, and all processes depend on IT. We also have different product and technology heads for different businesses.

Do they play a role in business development?

Our technology heads play a significant role. For example, we are implementing ERP -- it is a key project moving forward. We are starting with Naukri. Here, Vibhor Sharma is playing a very big role and the entire IT infrastructure reports to him.

What's next at Naukri?

We are planning to launch Shiksha and are investing in a few startups. We will make a few big announcements in the next quarter. We are also planning to expand our Naukri franchise in the Middle East.