Where did the idea of a job site come from?

It was an old idea. While I was with GlaxoSmithKline in 1989-90, there were about eight of us in the marketing department and we all sat in an open hall. I noticed two things. First, that when the office copy of Business India came in, everybody turned to the back where there were about 40 pages of job ads. People discussed jobs a lot. Now, everybody was happy in their current jobs and no one was really applying, but jobs were still something they discussed. It dawned on me that it isn't always when you need a job that you look for one.

Second, I noticed that every week, headhunters offered a few of my colleagues jobs. Every time it was a different head hunter, with a different job. And these jobs were never advertised in newspapers and magazines. I figured that what appeared in print was the tip of the iceberg. With thousands of recruiters, each with four or five clients and armed with 10 or 15 jobs, there must be a massive but fragmented database of jobs out there.

By 1990, I figured that if somebody were to build a database of 'live' jobs and keep it updated, they would have a very powerful product. It could become a business and money could be made -- although I was hazy how it would work. The Internet was not around at that time.

In the meantime, we started InfoEdge. We did salary surveys, we made some databases, and in '96, I saw the Internet for the first time. I kind of joined the dots. I told myself that this was the way to do it: put a job database out on the Internet and sell it.

How did you ensure that the dotcom bust did not affect Naukri's business?

We launched in 1997, before the boom, but we already knew that all would not be well when the boom started. When the boom came, we could see that it would be corrected soon. But it happened about six months sooner than we thought.

In fact just a month before the correction happened, in April 2000, we opted for some venture capital --$1.8 million from ICICI Ventures -- 14.7 per cent of the company (it was worth about $12 million-plus, then). Instead of wasting this on advertising, we took on new offices and hired new sales staff. We began to invest in servers, technology, people, products, sales offices. We began to focus on growing the business -- not just by spending -- but through better products and an on feet-on-the-street approach. Around this time, the IT meltdown began. This was in November 2000. Since we had invested our money into setting up new business opportunities, developing new markets and developing new and more exciting products to keep our sales team busy, when the bust took place, we were already on an upward curve. Today, where is Naukri placed vis-a-vis other job sites? How did you become a household name?

We are the market leader in the online job space with a 50 per cent market share. We have held this position for about two or three years. Our next competitor has about 30 per cent and the third place has about 15 per cent.

When we started, we were the first site that targeted Indians in India. All other job sites and search engines, including Rediff, Khoj and Samachar, targeted Indians in the US. Around that time, the Indian media began to write about Internet businesses and Indian examples were held up as examples. As a result, we began to get massive coverage. In our first year, we had two fat files of press coverage, which really helped us. It got us traffic. Our contact strategy was good: we allowed people to log on for free. With only about 14,000 people on the Internet in India, we had to get people to keep coming back.