     
|
|
 |
|
Driving Ambition
25th June 1999 Soundara Rajan @mcdecom.net
How a Bangalore whizkid became a Silicon Valley posterboy.
Up close and digital with Sabeer Bhatia, the man behind Hotmail
By STUART WHITMORE
Olivier Laude for Asiaweek
When he was only 28, Sabeer Bhatia got the call every Silicon Valley
entrepreneur dreams of: Bill Gates wants to buy your company. Summoned
to Microsoft's command bunker in Redmond, Washington state, he was
deposited on the new acquisitions conveyor belt. Round and round the
Microsoft campus he went. All 26 buildings. At every stop, Bhatia's
guide helpfully pointed out the vastness of the Microsoft empire. The
procession ground on until it reached Gates's office. Bhatia was ushered
in. Bill liked his firm. He hoped they could work together. He wished
him well. Bhatia was ushered out. "Next thing is we're taken into a
conference room where there are 12 Microsoft negotiators," Bhatia
recalls. "Very intimidating." Microsoft's determined dozen put an offer
on the table: $160 million. Take it or leave it. Bhatia played it cool.
"I'll get back to you," he said.
Eighteen months later Sabeer Bhatia has taken his place among San
Francisco's ultra-rich. He recently purchased a $2-million apartment
in rarified Pacific Heights. The place looks like a banker's lair, and
Bhatia acknowledges that the oak paneling and crystal chandeliers
might have to go. He hurries over to picture windows that run the
length of the room and raises the blinds. Ten floors below, the city
slopes away in all directions. The Golden Gate Bridge, and beyond it
the Pacific, lie on the horizon. "This is me," he says. "I bought it
for the view."
A place with a view for a man with a vision. A month after Bhatia
walked away from the table, Microsoft ponied up $400 million for his
startup. Today Hotmail, the ubiquitous Web-based e-mail service,
boasts 50 million subscribers - one quarter of all Internet users.
Bhatia is worth $200 million. He is already working on his followup: a
"one-click" e-commerce venture called Arzoo! And Bhatia is looking
homeward with an ambitious plan to wire India.
Bhatia was born and raised in the southern Indian city of Bangalore.
His father, who held a high post at the Ministry of Defense, and
mother Daman, a senior official at a state bank, placed great value on
education. Their only son did not disappoint them. "On parent-teacher
days they would just say 'Sir, why did you come? You don't have to
come! We tell Sabeer to solve the questions on the blackboard for
us,'" says Bhatia senior. Once Sabeer came home crying after an exam.
He had not done badly; he just hadn't had time to write down
everything he knew.
Like many Indian parents, Balev and Daman hoped their son would secure
a lifetime position with a big multinational firm. Sabeer had
different ideas. "I was pretty entrepreneurial even as a schoolboy,"
he says. When a college opened nearby, he decided to open a sandwich
shop and drew up his first business plan. "Then my mom said 'Stop
thinking about these things and go and study.' But that's the culture
in India."
Maybe mother knew best. In 1988, Bhatia won a full scholarship to the
California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena. When his plane
touched down that fall, 19-year-old Bhatia had $250 in his wallet and
butterflies in his stomach. "I felt I had made a big mistake," he
says. "I knew nobody, people looked different, it was hard for them to
understand my accent and me to understand theirs. I felt pretty
lonely." Ten years later you can still catch a glimpse of the innocent
abroad. The Westcoast accent retains the sing-song cadence of his
native Hindi. The CD collection features Bollywood soundtracks and
dance remixes of traditional Indian tunes. Yet Bhatia wears his
American-style success easily, comfortable with his wealth yet
unconsumed by it. His confidence and boyish modesty is an attractive
blend that lends Bhatia serenity and presence, sending friends and
associates into rapture.
People say when Bhatia enters a room he owns it. "I call him the Hindu
Robot," says Naveen Singha, Bhatia's friend, mentor and proud owner of
the third-ever Hotmail address. "He is persistent, focused,
disciplined. He's a superior human being." Others say he glows with a
beatific, otherworldly air. On our way to his office, Bhatia attempts
a U-turn in his midnight-blue Porsche Boxster, stalling the slick
little roadster across two lanes of traffic - and in the path of a
garbage truck. "I'm not superhuman," Bhatia says. Rather, he has
joined the ranks of the over-hyped Silicon Valley celebrities he
idolized. Doing his masters of science at Stanford, Bhatia attended
lectures by such legends as Steve Jobs of Apple and Scott McNealy and
Vinod Khosla of Sun Microsystems. Listening to them speak, Bhatia
"realized they were human. And if they could do it, I could do it
too."
After Stanford, Bhatia found work as a hardware engineer at Apple. "I
think my parents expected me to stay for 20 years," he says. Bhatia
lasted nine months. In his cubicle, he read about young men starting
up for peanuts and selling out for millions. Bhatia pondered what the
Net could do for him, and what he could do for the Net.Then he had an
idea.
It was called Javasoft - a way of using the Web to create a personal
database where surfers could keep schedules, to-do lists, family
photos and so on. Bhatia showed the plan to Jack Smith, an Apple
colleague and they got started. One evening Smith called Bhatia with
an intriguing notion.Why not add e-mail to Javasoft? It was a small
leap with revolutionary consequences: access to e-mail from any
computer, anywhere on the planet. This was that rare thing, an idea so
simple, so obvious, it was hard to believe no one had thought of it
before. Bhatia saw the potential and panicked that someone would steal
the idea. He sat up all night writing the business plan. "Then we
wrote down all variations of mail - Speedmail, Hypermail, Supermail."
Hotmail made perfect sense: it included the letters "html" - the
programming language used to write Web pages. A brand name was born.
Bhatia had $6,000 to his name. It was time to find investors. Drive
through San Francisco today and every other billboard touts some
Internet company or other. It was not always like that. "Four years
ago it was a hard story to sell," says Bhatia. "Few people believed
the Net was real. They thought it was a fad, like CB radio." By the
time he reached the offices of venture capitalists Draper Fisher
Jurvetson, 19 doors had slammed behind him. Steve Jurvetson and his
colleagues quickly saw the potential and put up $300,000. Bhatia and
Smith stretched the money all the way to launch day, July 4, 1996. By
year-end they were greeting their millionth customer. When Microsoft
came knocking, 12 months later, they'd signed up nearly 10 million users
(http://www.pathfinder.com/Asiaweek/technology/990625/bhatia.html.txt)
==========================================================================
N.S.Soundar Rajan, Independent Consultant, City Two Thousand(India)Ltd.
==========================================================================
Visit
The Ultimate Business Show Case,at wwww.city2000.com
a user-specific Business To Business Directory
30th June 1999
Nicky & Rovick Group @del2.vsnl.net.in
