Venture Capital

When Sanjeev Bikchandani first had the idea for digitizing the job classifieds that were posted in the newspapers he has to make a call to his brother in US to find about what Internet is all about and to buy some server space for him to host his website. That costed him $25 per month and in those days the servers were only in US. That was 1996 and the company was naukri.com. From then to the recent IPO of naukri everything else is history. I got my first job in India through that portal. That was the fate of entrepreneurs in the post-liberalization and pre-dotcom bust world.

Now, fast forward that to 2008 and we have a totally different world. If you have an idea there are bunch of opportunities to fund it. Starting with angel investors, venture capitalists to the recent TATA NEN initiative, you just need a business idea and a way to monetize it and capital is almost secondary. To take this to different level, Google made an open invitation for the Indian developers.

Develop your software or content with the Open software tools, run on the Google infrastructure and attract 5 million page views per month. Hosting is the half the battle won for any idea. Most of all it gives a platform to see if your idea works. Now that you know your idea works you can monetize it. That is exactly how Google became a company it is today. Now, compare this opportunity with what Bikchandani has to work with back in 1996.