Early life & education of Sanjeev Bikhachandani
Sanjeev Bikhchandani was born into a more or less middle-class family full of engineers and doctors, and so each one of them was taught to have this value of never losing hope. His older brother had been expected to go for IIT Kanpur. His upbringing was so stern that students were expected to choose engineering or medicine. However, after a stint in elementary school, he was discovered to be colorblind, which automatically implied that many potential occupations lay closed ahead of him. He holds a degree in economics from the prestigious St. Stephen’s College in Delhi. The beginning of the first company was sowed at the famed IIM Ahmedabad, where he eventually was able to do an MBA. This proved to be a turning point in his life.
While volunteering at IIM Ahmedabad for his campus placements, Sanjeev observed a fierce competition between two large corporations for the top talent at the university. Young Sanjeev was extremely shocked by this as these were grown men top executives and senior managers at these large corporations—who were yelling and yelling to hire the best applicants from the pool of applicants. At that point, he became aware of the high cost that businesses were prepared to spend to hire the top talent. He had discovered an opportunity to profit from it.
Sanjeev never hesitated to defy expectations. He was always good at trying new things. He forewent campus placements in favor of approaching businesses independently and sending them letters asking for an interview. He then landed a cozy marketing position with Horlicks’ maker, GlaxoSmithKline.
At this position, he observed that all of his coworkers, the most of whom were from IIMs, would read the magazine “Business India” from cover to cover, without even skimming the front-of-magazine contents. The reason for this was that the magazine’s final few pages were devoted to job postings. It could be a really strong product, Bikhchandani thought, if someone created a database of jobs and kept it updated with all the most recent job posts. It was one of the numerous concepts he experimented with during this period.
Founding of InfoEdge
He kept working, but he was never satisfied with his employment because he was always motivated to work for himself. Not even the lucrative salary at his work was enough to keep him on board. He felt it was time to quit after just eighteen months, which coincided with the birth of his first business under the InfoEdge trademark. “I only quit my well-paying job because I had confidence in myself,” he admits in retrospect.
He rented a room in his father’s home for Rs. 800 a month and shifted into the servant quarters. Initially, InfoEdge was providing compensation reports and surveys that stated what employers were paying new engineering and MBA students on campus at IIT/IIM. Since the company was very young and not growing fast, there were often cash flow issues. Now, he mainly relies on his wife’s income and collects extra money on weekends by teaching tuition classes.
Birth of Naukri.com by Sanjeev Bikhachandani
In October 1996, Bikhchandani was at an IT Expo in Pragati Maidan, Delhi, when he noticed a stall with the words “WWW” written on it. He was informed that it represented the internet or the “World Wide Web.” After showing him a demonstration on a black-and-white screen, the stall manager directed him to the website “Yahoo” and asked Sanjeev what he wanted to “browse” on “the internet.” He then urged him to look up “India,” like any good Indian would. In under ten minutes, Bikhchandani decided to start a job aggregation website, which he named Naukri.com, when a plethora of results appeared.
The USA was home to all of the major servers at the time. In order to rent a server for himself, Sanjeev called his brother at UCLA Business School. It cost $25 a month at the time. He vowed to reimburse him when he could, even though he didn’t have the money at the time.
Using about 1,000 advertisements from different magazines, he created Naukri.com in April 1997. If they were able to get enough people to visit their website, he hoped that eventually businesses would start coming to them directly for advertising jobs.
This quickly proved to be the case, thanks to Naukri’s distinctive pricing approach. The cost of each listing was ₹350, and the organization may post all jobs for a year with an annual subscription of ₹6,000. Newspapers and magazines, their rivals, charged ₹3,500 for a single job posting. With its extensive database of professional positions, Naukri was unavoidably a big hit with young people. Businesses eventually favored online listings over newspaper ads, which led to an exponential increase of Naukri traffic.
For InfoEdge, there has been no turning back since.
Ten years later, Naukri.com was the first Indian dot-com company to go public. InfoEdge went on to launch a number of additional websites, including 99acres.com, Shiksha.com, and Jeevansathi.com. Sanjeev manages InfoEdge and is also an active investor. His net worth is an astounding $2.7 billion, which includes a 13.3% investment in PolicyBazaar and a 15.3% stake in Zomato.
Sanjeev thinks that the best way to change an individual’s life is through education. In 2014, he co-founded Ashoka University, a non-profit educational institution devoted to liberal arts, in the state of Haryana. He believes that for any nation to develop, everybody must have access to quality education when possible.
These days, Sanjeev begins his day with yoga and meditation at six in the morning. He then spends the majority of his day overseeing the varied portfolio of InfoEdge.
He looks for a combination of a strong value proposition and dedicated entrepreneurs in the startups he invests in. Since one doesn’t want to have to persuade people of a problem after a solution has been developed, the value proposition is crucial because it shows that there is a need for the product. However, he believes that having founders of caliber is just as crucial as having a good value offer. Any value offer, no matter how poor, can be improved by founders with vision and perseverance.
He thinks that only investments he makes or gains knowledge from are negative investments. An investment may fail for a number of causes, many of which are entirely outside the founder’s control, such as excessive competition, poor financial management, a change in the law, or simply an error. Respect for all entrepreneurs is crucial, regardless of what it is and how the investment works out. Because when an entrepreneur fails, his hard work of 7-8 years, if not more, fails. Making a business function is easier than shutting it down.
Sanjeev Bikhchandani is undoubtedly the master architect in the startup industry, creating both businesses and careers.
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