Over the past few days, many friends and colleagues sent me a link to an X post by Parimal. It told the IndiaWorld story. [And also this on LinkedIn from Akash.]
I have written about IndiaWorld in my book and discussed it in many interviews. But Parimal’s account is perhaps the best and most succinct one I have come across. We have never met or spoken, and yet he got the essentials right: the stock data arriving on floppy disks, the cricket scores keyed in by hand from the TV broadcast, the road trip back from a temple in Rajasthan when Bhavana and I came up with the idea of separate Indian-named sites. His knack for storytelling shows up wonderfully in the post.
Reading it brought back many memories from a life I had lived three decades ago.
IndiaWorld came after multiple failures in my early entrepreneurial career. Until then, I had known only failure. I had spent more than 18 months on Image Workbench and had just a couple of orders to show for it. Bhavana and I had just had an arranged marriage and barely knew each other. My confidence was at its lowest point. IndiaWorld was not just another venture; in many ways, it was my last chance to prove to myself that I could build something that worked.
It was a huge challenge. We were the first with India-centric portals, but I was addressing an audience of NRIs spread across the world rather than people I could meet locally. It was an entirely bootstrapped operation. After the first year, we also had well-funded competitors. There was no margin for error. There were many landmines to be negotiated, and a single mistake could be fatal.
Some of those moments come back vividly. I sent nearly 100 letters to publishers asking for free content. Only a handful said yes, but those few built the foundation. Then there was the domain crisis. I watched two years of work and our early-mover advantage wash away, and I sat numb at home, unable to see a way out. It was Bhavana who suggested we go to a temple. That was the first time I asked God for help. There were also my many attempts to raise money, every one of which failed. At the time, each rejection felt like a verdict. Only later did I see that the lack of capital forced us to be profitable, and that profitability is perhaps why the ending happened at all.
And yet Bhavana and I managed it, with our team. Bhavana did far more than support me from the sidelines. She was in the thick of it, even writing movie reviews for the site. The team grew to 20, and the thirteen sites became daily habits for Indians around the world.
The ending, of course, was surreal. It was something I could never have imagined in those years of failure. I still remember what Bhavana told me the day after the deal: that we should think of ourselves as custodians of God’s money, and that there was a purpose for it which I had to figure out.
One line in Parimal’s post stayed with me. He wrote that today’s startup mythology has almost no living memory of that version of the Indian internet. He is right. For many of my colleagues at Netcore, IndiaWorld is a story they have heard, not a time they lived through. For me, it is still very much a lived memory.
Even today, when I am in a challenging situation (and there are many), I ask myself, “How would the Rajesh of IndiaWorld have reacted?” I think I know the answer. He would have closed the door that wasn’t working, without much sentiment. He would have looked for the one move that mattered, the crux. He would have read every customer email himself. And because he had so little to lose, he was rarely afraid.
Of course, I am not the same person, and the world is very different. The internet then was a blank page; today, AI is rewriting the page we thought was already written. But some learnings carry forward and are timeless.
Thanks, Parimal and Akash, for taking me back, for a brief time, to a period in my life that I can never forget. We rarely get to hear our own story told back to us by a stranger. When it happens, it reminds us that the past is not really behind us. It is the ground we still stand on.
Also see: Life Notes #53: The 1990s, Life Notes #65: Yeses Matter, Not the Nos, My Life System #56: Crisis and Crux – 1, My Life System #30: Religion and God
