Internet
In the summer of 1994, I was looking for something new for my entrepreneurial venture. I had failed multiple times over the past couple years, and needed to pivot. This is what I wrote in 2004:
The Internet was far removed from my life (other than using email through an email account on NCSTs servers, along with the Usenet newsgroups). I had a business developing image processing software. That was just not working. Efforts to sell our Image WorkBench solution to metallurgists and medical institutions had been largely unsuccessful. It was two years since I had returned from the US to set up a business in India, and I could see that we had gone quite wrong in our business activities.
As I started thinking then about what to do, I started reading various magazines trying to spot future trends. It was then that I came across the Internet as the new information highway. For all practical purposes, India’s linkage to the Internet then was through ERNET, the educational and research network. Access to it was limited.
Some more reading and thinking led me to put a concept called SpiderNet. I imagined it as a network that would have all kinds of India-specific information which people could use their computers to dial into. Though I didn’t make the link then, it was a kind-of private CompuServe or AOL. The only operating network then in India was Business Indias aXcess. So, there seemed to be plenty of opportunities.
The summer of 1994 was when I put together my first ideas for an electronic news and information service. As the months passed, the SpiderNet ideas gave way to IndiaWorld, an Internet-based news and information service primarily focused on Indians outside India and others interested in India. Instead of trying to set up our own network, we would use the Internet as the distribution medium.
I launched IndiaWorld as India’s first Internet portal in March 1995. Here is the story:
The IndiaWorld story begins in September 1994. I was in the US, trying to figure out a good business to do in an area other than software exports. It was the time when the Internet and Web were just about beginning to catch people’s fancies. I spent a few weeks at a friend’s place, browsing the Web on a 14.4 Kbps dial-up modem with Netcom’s Netcruiser account. The experience was absolutely amazing. It was quite evident then that the Web as a medium would have a significant impact on how information was disseminated. The Web offered a good business opportunity: attract the NRIs (I was one myself!) with good intent, and then look at offshoots in electronic commerce.
That was the vision of IndiaWorld: a bridge between Indians worldwide.
On my return to India in November 1994, I wrote to various publishers and talked to a number of companies and individuals to participate in the venture by offering their content. It was tough explaining the Internet and the Web to people in India then: there was no commercial Internet access provider (our “shell” account was through NCST/ERNET). Most thought the Internet to be another variation of a satellite channel! I would take a notebook with NCSA Mosaic, and show them the power of hyperlinks. It wasn’t quite clear how it would make an impact on businesses, but yes, it was going to transform how NRIs got their information.
Our focus was on IndiaWorld as a news and information service for NRIs. With help (and content) from Indian Express, India Today, Dataquest, Reader’s Digest, Kensource, Crisil, CMIE, DSP Financial, Professional Management Group and Laxman, IndiaWorld was formally launched from a server in the US on March 13, 1995.
(There is more on the IndiaWorld story here.)
And the rest, as they say, is history! Five years after imagining IndiaWorld, I sold it to Satyam Infoway for $115 million in what was then one of Asia’s largest Internet deals. I am still remembered as one of India’s two early Internet pioneers. (Sabeer Bhatia, who sold Hotmail to Microsoft, for $400 million, is the other.) I did it out of India – riding the Internet revolution and its many ups and downs through five years. The PC introduced me to the digital world; the Internet gave me success, money, fame, and freedom.
