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Om Sri Sai
Job, family or hobbies. What do you love the most? Well, given current circumstances, most of us love our jobs the most! Dear TM and guests, not too long ago, job vacancies would show up in the classifieds section of the daily newspaper. The image of laying out the newspaper on the bed, with a cup of tea in one hand and an Apsara pencil in the other, most of us Indians applied for Jobs. However, in the late 1990s, a spirited entrepreneur came along and changed the way we applied for Jobs. Today in my speech, I will be talking about the birth and meteoric rise of Naukri.com. Naukri means ‘job’ in the Hindi language. I’m sure most of you in the audience may not have heard about this story behind this company. Today’s speech will be split into 3 parts. The early years of the founder, birth of Naukri.com, its meteoric rise
Sanjeev Bikhchandani was born into a humble middle-class family. His father was a doctor and his mother was a home maker. At the age of 12, Sanjeev decided that he will work for himself and start a company of his own. When I was 12, my biggest concern was whether my mother would allow me to play cricket a little longer today evening! So, few years later, Sanjeev appeared for IIT JEE (India’s toughest engineering entrance exam) like any respectable boy from middle class would do. Even though he cleared the exam when most people couldn’t, he decided to do a BA (Bachelor of arts) instead of engineering. He did this because he wasn’t really inspired by engg. So, after his BA at the prestigious St. Stephens college, he worked for 3 years and then joined the India’s top business school IIM Ahmedabad. There, he met like-minded batch mates and discussed entrepreneurship. After his MBA, he left a comfortable job marketing Horlicks and started 2 companies – Indmark and Infoedge. Indmark dealt with pharma trademarks while Infoedge produced salary surveys and reports.
He started the companies in the servant’s quarter of his father’s house. He was supported by his wife, who happened to be his B school batchmate and was working at Nestle. So while Sanjeev was working at Horlicks, he noticed that his colleagues were always looking at classifieds section of the newspaper in their spare time. Also, headhunters would call employees directly offering lucrative jobs. So, Sanjeev thought, there are a number of job vacancies in the market but nobody is able to see all these vacancies in one place. So, he thought a listing of all vacancies in one place would be very valuable for job seekers. But, this idea didn’t really fly until Sanjeev visited an exhibition called IT Asia. There, he had his first encounter with the Internet. He learnt that he needed to set up a website but couldn’t since there were no servers to host in India back then, only in USA. He reached out to his elder brother, also an IIMA graduate and a professor at UCLA. He borrowed money from his brother and got access to a shared American server. He hired a batch mate to oversee operations and friend who was a programmer. They took 1000 jobs from the classified section in 3 days. By the next week, the serve was available. The programmer took care of the website, the database and the user interface. In another week by March 1997, Naurkri.com was up and running! Their initial promise was that there would be a minimum of 1000 jobs on the site and all the jobs would be not older than 30 days.
Initially, they got a lot of press coverage because when media wanted to write about the country’s job situation, they would quote Naukri.com since there was nobody else in that market! Also, companies started taking notice. On a subscription-based model, Naukri.com gave access to companies. In 1 year, their revenues grew eight-fold. Investors started taking notice. Just before the dot com crash, Naukri luckily received funding from ICICI. Since then, Sanjeev’s focus was on building a great team rather than getting into the execution himself. They expanded prudently across India while most dot com companies were going bust. They diversified into a matrimonial site (Jeevan saathi), 99acres (a property site), educational portal (shiksha.com) and naukrigulf (for middle east jobs). In 2006, Naukri was the first pure Indian dotcom to do an IPO. By 2019, it’s revenues reached USD 150 million.
So, dear toastmasters, all of us at some point in life have at least a fleeting thought that we want to start a company of our own and work for ourselves. Sanjeev’s advice to budding entrepreneurs is that if you have an idea or an insight that doesn’t work right now, keep at it. As the technology changes, you will be able to connect the dots and bring your concept to life. If you chase something long enough, sooner or later, you will get lucky. Over to you, TMOD.
