Playing fair and square

Bharat Kumar

It is easy to believe that Ram Shriram is ready to retire at 44. He's seen it all -- been there, done that. But he doesn't look it. If anything, his enthusiasm for his new ventures exceeds that for his older passions.

After Junglee.com, the company he co-founded was sold to Amazon.com, he had a short stint with Amazon before turning angel investor and a member on the boards of several companies in which he has invested. A few are: Google.com -- a directory search facility, eLance.com -- a C2B marketplace for online services, and Yodlee.com -- a financial services portal. According to him, all three are doing well -- which means a score of three out of three for the Man with the Midas touch. And retire? Well, not yet. He has two more aces up his sleeve - 24/7 and Invertica.

Ram Shriram spoke to eWorld on his visit to Chennai. Excerpts from the chat:

The last time we met a couple of years ago, you said you wanted to make eLance.com ``the eBay of services''. How far have you come?

In the last year-and-a-half, eLance has grown well. We now have about 40-50 pages of 30,000 projects up on our site. Areas that have a demand are creative services such as design, HTML programming and simple programming services.

Has the slowdown affected eLance's fortunes?

The big guys come down in a slowdown. Also, numerous professionals on H1 visas are on their way back here, thanks to cost cut-backs. Through eLance, we wish to demonstrate that professionals need not leave the shores of India to earn a pretty penny.

What's the road ahead for eLance.com?

We are planning to take the eLance concept into the Intranets of companies. In doing so, we will create a marketplace in which individual companies will have suppliers coming onto the Intranet and bidding for projects. In doing so, the company will have access to a larger base of suppliers and hence will be able to ensure good quality of products and services consistently over time.

But, isn't this a form of a private exchange with one buyer and several sellers? A section of the industry here feels that private exchanges are not fair to sellers since information is controlled by one buyer.

True. But in this case, we give the buyer the option to create an open or a closed marketplace.

What are the pitfalls in a marketplace environment such as eLance's?

We are concerned about the grey market. In other words, if a seller tells the buyer he is willing to sell his services for $40 and offline sells it for $400, eLance loses out on the commission it could have made. This is a challenge that exists in any auction model. For someone like eBay, it is less painful since theirs is a mature environment. Services is a different game.

How is Yodlee.com doing?

Well. In the last two years, its market share has become dominant, after it bought out its competitor, VerticalOne. We have set up a centre in Bangalore. We already figure as one among the top 100 financial services companies.

What else is on the cards for Shriram, the angel investor?

An interesting company I have invested in is Invertica (www.invertica.com). There are just too many enterprise applications that run across departments in all companies in all industries. ERP, CRM, eCRM, SCM are all stuff that organisations have invested between $5 million and $10 million in. But what makes all these applications talk to each other? If they do, good. If they don't, you only see islands of information -- from which no company can derive any good. Invertica seeks to set this right.

For instance, networking communications giant recently wrote off $2.5 billion because it did not have direct access to crucial information. It could not link its demand system to its supply chain. Hence inventory piled up. And, technology inventory is not like bar soap. You can't sell it a few months later. Once obsolete, it is a liability.

How customised will Invertica's products be?

We are still thrashing that issue out in the company. To begin with, we would like to make this application readily deployable across five to six hottest selling applications in the market.

At a general level, would you endorse the charging of users of search engines or such services on the Net? The e-mail service with the usa.net appellation recently switched into a pay-mode from being a free service.

There are two things to consider here: One is taking payment from companies who want to figure high in a search. You can have sponsor links that are shown first if a particular keyword search is on. Otherwise, it is like mixing editorial with advertisements, which is unhealthy.

Secondly, there is the issue of charging surfers every time they use a Web service, such as e-mail or search. I am not in favour of this. Firstly, they vote for you with their eyes. So it's not fair charging them. Secondly, there are many different ways of making money. You don't need to depend on them for money. Finally, even if you decide to charge them, you would need a micropayment model in place. Else, how can you charge them say one cent, every time they use your service?

Have you thought of letting users have accounts that exist for a time period, such as $20 for a month for using a Web facility?

In my own endeavours, I have not considered such a model. I am not in favour of it.

Pic.: Mr Ram Shriram.

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