Sanjeev Bikhchandani is a classic story of spotting an opportunity and chasing it with guts, determination, lots of hard work and a little bit of luck. Naukri.com (the company is listed as Info Edge India Ltd on the Bombay Stock Exchange) is India's number one job portal at a time when there is a serious scarcity of employable people in just about every sector of business and industry. It is also an extremely successful dot-com, having weathered the 2000 meltdown. How much better can it get? Naukri's CEO spoke to MoneyLIFE editors Sucheta Dalal and Debashis Basu about the road he took and its various turning points.
Shall we start with a little bit about your background and your upbringing? When and how did you decide to be an entrepreneur? There are no business people in my family. My father is a doctor and he was in the government from 1950 to 1983. So we were brought up in government
colonies. I studied at St. Columbus School in Delhi, so did my brother. There was no business background in the family, no great financial acumen or anything. My brother went to IIT, Kanpur, then IIM Ahmedabad and then did his PhD from Stanford. It was forgone in our family that one would do engineering or become a doctor -- the standard middle class aspirations of parents in government service. So I dutifully prepared for IIT entrance, took the exams and qualified.
Then two or three things happened. My rank wasn't great. I wouldn't have got the top three or four departments.
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