My Worlds
IndiaWorld was my first successful venture. I started work on it in late 1994 (after having failed in many of my previous entrepreneurial ventures), launched it in March 1995, and sold it in November 1999 for $115 million. IndiaWorld was a made-for-Internet business. As I experienced the Web first-hand in September and October 1994 during my visit to the US in search of new opportunities, ideas started forming. Many entrepreneurs were starting to talk about what the Internet could do – essentially imagining new worlds. I started doing the same for Indians outside of India and those interested in India. My dream was to build an electronic information marketplace to connect Indians worldwide. In the early months, I imagined IndiaWorld as a virtual mall and would draw it as such when I spoke to people. The word “portal” was still in its infancy then.
IndiaWorld solved the problem of accessing news and information on India by eliminating the barriers of time and distance. That is what many first-generation Internet companies focused on. Because I sold the business in late 1999, I missed the subsequent generations of the Internet – better search, eCommerce, social networks, and mobile apps for virtually everything. The second and subsequent generations of companies were where the real fortunes were made. Think Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook versus Yahoo, Excite, Netscape, AOL.
During my years running IndiaWorld, I was always imagining new “worlds” that we could create. But my definition of “world” was quite narrow. Having been chastened by multiple past failures, I wanted to make something successful. So, I stuck to what was working and built incrementally around India-centric content. As I look back almost 30 years later, perhaps I should have been bolder and reimagined what our future world would look like.
IndiaWorld was my first and last B2C venture. While I did make some small attempts in the early years of the mobile era, none worked, and I decided to keep Netcore’s focus on B2B products. Worldbuilding is harder when selling to marketers worried about how they will meet their revenue targets for the month!
Over the past year or so, ideas like AMP for Email and Atomic Rewards have brought the possibilities for the future back in focus. In Muniverse: A Brand New World, I imagine how the lives of Arun (a consumer) and Jeni (a marketing manager) can be transformed with micro-incentives in a world I term as “Muniverse.” Even now as I think about ideas like Email 2.0, Email Shops, QuizMails, and ProfitXL, I imagine a day in the life of users.
My worldbuilding is at a very small level. Going forward, I need to think bigger – and that is where books like Silo come in. They force us to start from scratch rather than extrapolate from the past. Because that is what tomorrow’s world is about – an exponential change like the Industrial Revolution. And this will happen in years, rather than decades or centuries.
