Anurag Jain's Blog on Bangalore Events, Travel, IIM Bangalore, IIM, IIMB, Management

Sunday, June 13, 2004

Posted 10:57 AM by Anurag

Circa 2000: Revisiting Dotcom Phase

Two event in the last fortnight or so brought back the memories of dot-come phase when I had taken the entrepreneurial plunge briefly (Feb-April 2000). Those were the times when you wanted to 'do a dotcom' just because you didn't want to be left behind the crowd. Also, you were frightened at the prospect of telling your grandchildren that you were sleeping when it all happened!

First news was the acquisition of Netkraft by Adea of USA and the second was Monster buying job portal Jobsahead for Rs. 40 Crore (US $10m). These news brought back memories because we dealt with the people associated in the two Indian companies mentioned above for our start-up. I had started eduisfun - a dotcom in Education domain, with my PGP (MBA) batchmate Vikas Kedia. The seed/angel funding to our venture was provided by Puneet Dalmia, CEO of Jobsahead (also owner of Zipahead). Puneet also happens to be an alumnus of IIMB. As for Netkraft, it was relatively much small company back then. It used to have a product called Tango (I still have a demo copy of that!) which I guess didn't play out very well in the market. Anyways, I think Netkraft had just then recieved the first round of venture capital funding. I interacted with the founders Atul Jalan and Prashanth for strategic tie-up. They were ready to invest in our venture but we had differences over the amount of equity to be shared. We were haggling over .5 to 1% of equity because we were betting big on our company's valuation a few months down. (Remember those were dotcome days :-) Eventually, we couldn't cut a deal and hence we never tied up with NetKraft. Instead I pulled in another small company called N.R. Infotech based in BTM Layout as strategic/technical partners.

Well, those were the heady days. Encore please! :)

(PS: Actually, what a coincidence: These guys are doing an encore with 24-hour dotcom !)

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