Mention Naukri.com, Jeevansathi.com, or Policybazaar, and almost everyone instantly knows what you are referring to. However, when the name Sanjeev Bikhchandani comes up, many people pause. The name seems familiar, yet his identity and achievements are not immediately clear. This reaction is understandable, as in today’s world, brands often grow much larger than the individuals who create them.
This reality is both a moment of pride and satisfaction. Much like parents feel fulfilled when their child becomes so successful that people recognize the parents through the child’s identity, a similar phenomenon has occurred with Sanjeev Bikhchandani. Today, he is more often identified through his brands than his brands are associated with his name. That said, within corporate, business, and dot-com circles, Sanjeev Bikhchandani is far from unknown—he is a widely respected and familiar figure.
Though now regarded as a pioneer who transformed the dot-com landscape and often referred to as the “father of startups,” there was a time when such terminology was barely known in this part of the world. Ironically, in his early years, Bikhchandani himself was unfamiliar with basic digital concepts like email. At an exhibition at Pragati Maidan in New Delhi, he once asked a stall operator a simple yet telling question: “What is email?”
In 1996, Bikhchandani saw the internet for the first time. He recounts, “At an exhibition, I saw a small stall with ‘www’ written on it. I asked the stall owner what it was, and he said, ‘email.’” When he explained it in detail, Bikhchandani’s initial reaction was, “This will fail.” His logic was simple: if very few people have email, who will you send emails to? “It’s like having only one telephone in the world; who would you talk to?” But the story didn’t end there. The stall operator called him back and said, “There’s also the internet.” Bikhchandani says that’s where he heard the name “internet” for the first time. When the man explained that through the internet you could log in from your home or office and access information stored in thousands of companies worldwide, things changed. He opened Yahoo and asked, “What do you want to search for?” Bikhchandani said, “India.” With a click, numerous web pages appeared.
This is where Bikhchandani got the idea that would later make history. He says, “That’s when I thought, why not take job advertisements from newspapers across the country and put them on the internet and see what happens?” After that, as they say, the rest is history. The groundwork for this idea was also being laid elsewhere. Bikhchandani remembers that the young employees in his office always read a magazine from the back pages. They would skip the news pages and go straight to the advertisements. “Back then, the last 30-40 pages of Business India were just appointment advertisements. Whether people read the articles or not, they definitely looked at the advertisements. That’s when the first thing became clear: jobs are always a high-interest category.”
The second important fact dawned on him when he noticed that two or three headhunters would call his colleagues on their landlines every week. This was before the era of mobile phones, and these jobs were often not advertised in newspapers. “That’s when I realized that what appears in print is just the tip of the iceberg. The real market is much bigger, with hundreds of companies and high-interest jobs.”
However, at that time, he didn’t know what to do with these insights. He admits that for the next seven years, he simply drifted, but the idea remained in his mind. The seed had been sown, and once the journey began, there was no turning back. Therefore, it is considered perfectly logical that he is called the ‘Sachin Tendulkar’ of the dot-com business. However, due to his inherent humility, Sanjeev Bikhchandani refuses to take such comparisons seriously. He says, “This is a bit of an exaggeration. It’s a compliment, no doubt, but also an overstatement. My availability to young entrepreneurs probably led to this recognition. That doesn’t mean I deserve it. Every start-up has its own ‘father’.”
He also simply dismisses the idea of having played a revolutionary role in the start-up culture, saying, “Back then, we didn’t call it a start-up, we called it entrepreneurship.” As a child, he hadn’t decided what he wanted to become, but he was absolutely clear about what he didn’t want to become. In his school days, he told himself, “I will do business, I will not do a job.” This was his strongest resolve. Besides this, there were some fleeting dreams like, “I will become a cricketer” or “I will become Rajesh Khanna.” The desire to become Rajesh Khanna was inspired by the popular film Haathi Mere Saathi. Ironically, despite this resolve, he did take a job—a burden he carried for years until he built something meaningful and significant on his own. He felt hollow inside during that period of his life. He says, “Moving from a small cabin to a bigger cabin, having a car a few inches longer than my neighbor’s, or having a bigger house—none of this meant anything to me. I kept asking myself, what will I have after retirement that I can call my achievement?” This question constantly troubled him, and ultimately, this question proved to be the one that changed the direction and destiny of his life. Today, Sanjeev Bikhchandani is a name in the Indian entrepreneurial world that cannot be ignored. Having founded leading digital platforms like Naukri.com, Jeevansathi.com, and 99acres, Bikhchandani went on to support a new generation of entrepreneurs by investing in emerging startups like Zomato. His contribution to the building of the Indian digital economy has now become a benchmark.
Far removed from the obsession with making money, Bikhchandani achieved a level of success that very few can even imagine. He made it to Forbes’ list of India’s richest people, becoming one of the country’s 100 wealthiest industrialists. Once success knocked on his door, the momentum didn’t stop, but this success was not without its struggles; it was built on a foundation of long and arduous days. Starting his life in a servant’s quarter, Bikhchandani even had to endure taunts like, “This man lives off his wife’s earnings.” This was a harsh reality he couldn’t escape during that period. For a long time, his wife bore the financial responsibility of the family. In an interview, he admitted, “The household ran on my wife’s money.” When he left his secure job at a multinational company, he had no option but to believe that this was his last chance. His father was a government employee, a doctor in fact, but he never chose that path for himself. He says, “My background was middle-class, service-class. There was no tradition of business in the family. Some children do what their parents do, and some do the exact opposite; I belonged to the second category.”
This “opposite path” led him to forge an identity distinct from his parents. He was clear that he would neither become a doctor nor take a government job. “I knew what I didn’t want to do, but I wasn’t sure what I would do,” he says. A dreamer by nature, Bikhchandani moved from one dream to another and finally decided to carve his own path. His dream wasn’t to become a film star or a cricketer, but to do business.
