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A decade after a one-man blog was launched from a room in New Delhi’s Mayur Vihar, VCCircle Network has caught the eye of New York-headquartered media giant News Corp. Rupert Murdoch-led News Corp on Monday acquired the digital media platform for an undisclosed sum.
“It’s a great deal. I could have held it for some more time. I could have got bigger valuations, but definitely I wouldn’t have got a company like News Corp,” PV Sahad, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of VCCircle Network, told BusinessLine over the telephone.
“This is a right decision that I am making,” he said, after the deal was formally announced. News Corp has made other acquisitions in India, although not in the media space. It had earlier bought a 25 per cent stake in the parent company of online property portal PropTiger.com
VCCircle was started by Sahad in 2005, who “boot-strapped” the firm for the next two years. Some revenues, by way of advertisements and job postings on web sites, trickled in. Those were tough times, admits Sahad, adding building an online media firm needs a lot of money and monetisation was nowhere in sight. “It was like running on a treadmill. You were running, but you were still at the place where you started,” he reminiscences those days.
“You don’t know whether you are doing the right thing or not; you don’t have your pay cheques coming; you don’t know where it’s going…. I could have left it and gone back to a job, which was the easiest thing to do, but I didn’t.”
It would take two more years before the company raised funds from certain investors, who pumped in their personal money, which was used mainly to hire people. Now, VCCircle, with offices in Mumbai and Delhi, is a 100-people strong organisation.
Following the acquisition, Sahad will head the company as its CEO, while VCCircle Network will be a wholly-owned subsidiary of News Corp. VCCircle will invest the undisclosed proceeds to “beef up” it existing portfolio.
VCCircle has been in talks with News Corp and certain other Indian and global media for the past six months.
As the news of the acquisition broke out across online and social media, Sahad was inundated with congratulatory messages from family and friends, a testimony of perseverance and hard work.
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