Sanjeev Bikhchandani’s Eureka moment for what is now the most popular job-search portal, Naukri.com, occurred when he was at HMM (now GlaxoSmithKline), selling Horlicks.

He says he used to see his friends and colleagues buy business magazines and start reading them from the back. “I used to think that people bought magazines and read the editorial. But actually they would read the appointments ads first, from the back,” he recalls.

He quit HMM in 1990, but Naukri.com came into being only seven years later. After giving up his job selling Horlicks, Sanjeev started two companies with a friend. One was into salary surveys and the other built trademark database. He ran his business from a small room in his father’s house in Delhi.

“We were somehow breaking even. That company grew a bit, and we did a lot of small things for seven years, and finally in 1997, we launched Naukri as seemingly one more small idea,” he says, during a recent interaction in Delhi.

And, that idea turned out to be big, he points out.

Seeing his colleagues scan through 35-40 pages of jobs advertisements in business magazines made Sanjeev realise that jobs were a high-interest category of information.

“Seven years later, when Internet came and I saw it for the first time, this insight came back to me, and I thought we should launch a jobs site,” says Sanjeev, 49, an economics graduate from St Stephen’s College, Delhi, and an MBA from IIM-Ahmedabad.

Initial years

In the initial years, Naukri just ran jobs advertisements that had appeared in newspapers and other publications on its site, for free. Sanjeev was confident that the site would get traffic, which it did. Finally, Naukri was able to charge for the listings.

The salary survey business — studying what companies were paying fresh MBAs and engineers — wound up two years after Naukri was launched, because the job-search portal became much bigger than the salary-survey business quickly.

“That is when we figured that maybe we are on to a bigger thing, and this idea has got legs,” says Sanjeev.

In the initial years of Naukri, the challenge was one of Internet access. Those were still early days of the Internet and access was only through a dial-up modem and the then State-owned VSNL was the monopoly provider.

According to Sanjeev, in the initial years, there were only 14,000 Internet accounts and so the challenge was one of market size first. The other challenges were infrastructure related, access to capital and poor Internet access. “But gradually when we raised capital, we were able to invest in some of these,” he says.

India focus

Info Edge (India) Pvt. Ltd, the company that owns Naukri.com and other businesses, got private-equity funding from ICICI Ventures, which itself was a validation of its business. Further validation came in the form of PE firms Kleiner Perkins and Sherpalo picking up a small stake just before a public listing, which came about in November 2006.

Info Edge, of which Sanjeev is Founder and Vice-Chairman, ended last year with revenues of about Rs 420 crore.

“We have got about 30 million resumes on the site. We get between 12,000 and 14,000 new resumes in a day; 46,000 employers recruited through us last year. It is a busy market place,” says Sanjeev of Naukri’s performance. Companies pay naukri to list their jobs and to access resumes.

Info Edge, according to Sanjeev, will remain India focused, but may start other verticals. Naukri has a similar job-search portal for the Gulf, Naukrigulf. Besides, Info Edge has a matrimony site (Jeevansathi.com), an education site (Shiksha.com) and real-estate listings site (99acres.com).

Sanjeev is an active angel investor and mentor for entrepreneurs. Info Edge has invested in a handful of Internet start-ups that show potential — Policybazaar.com, Meritnation.com, Mydala.com, 99labels.com and zomato.com. It has a significant minority stake in these ventures. “Some of these investments are doing well for us,” says Sanjeev.

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