Sabeer Bhatia made a fortune selling Hotmail to Microsoft almost 10 years ago as a young Indian engineer in Silicon Valley. Now he sees a second windfall in a software program from a small start-up company in India's high-tech hub.
Bhatia, 37, became an overnight celebrity with the sale the free Web-based e-mail service in 1997 for US$400 million, making it big before his 30th birthday.
He splurged on a life of partying and purchases, including a Ferrari and a start-up Internet company in Silicon Valley, called Arzoo.com, which went bust.
PHOTO: AFP
Now, a little older and wiser, he says he's focused on a new product that allows companies to hold meetings over the Internet and edit documents or spread sheets in real-time.
But this time, he's counting on scrappy software engineers at a start-up company in Bangalore instead of the world's largest software company to bring it to the market.
"The beauty of technology is that it is not constant. Nobody has a monopoly over intellectual capital. In start-ups the decisions are made faster and I truly believe in it," said Bhatia, who lives in the US.
Bhatia has come home to invest in InstaColl -- short for instant collaboration -- and will become chief executive of the Bangalore-based company with about 100 employees.
A pilot version of the software is already available for free download and has drawn good reviews from the trade press as a cheaper and direct competitor to Microsoft's Live Meeting.
"It is powerful but easy to use. It will open up a new frontier. It is integrated with Microsoft's Office," Bhatia said. "The competitors' products require high bandwidth while InstaColl does not."
"The choice of Microsoft Office suite is simply because it has more than 400 million users across the world," he said.
Kiran Karnik, the president of Indian software lobby group the National Association of Software and Service Companies, said Bhatia's latest venture will have to gain acceptance.
"There is a lot of space for new concepts in the technology area but a lot will depend on how the users react and accept it," Karnik said.
Bhatia says it is also an effort to shed his image as a one-hit wonder and take advantage of his connections to India.
"I was with Microsoft, but I was not comfortable. So what have I done? Am I a one-hit wonder? People might say you have done one Hotmail and that is it. But I always wanted to jump into being an entrepreneur," he said.
He said his high life of parties after selling Hotmail has come to an end.
"I do not party anymore as I did it when I was 29 years old. I rarely go out," he said.
But repeat success has eluded him. Arzoo.com, which offered a global pool of engineers and developers to solve technology problems that companies encounter, shut when the Internet bubble in the US burst in 2001.
"I actually lost faith in Internet after Arzoo because wherever you looked in Silicon Valley was littered with dead bodies of companies. Electronic commerce at that time did not take off the way it was expected," Bhatia said. "We were living in a bubble economy. But since then, the Internet has fulfilled its promise."
He credits the ability of companies to make money off Internet applications to the emergence of India and China as major content producers that are set to rival the US.
"Outsourcing is inevitable. I think one of the opportunities that any entrepreneur should make use of is this great disparity. To finance an idea in the US you may require US$5 million. In India you can finance five such ideas," Bhatia said.
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