From by-lanes of Delhi to an IPO at Dalal Street | Dinesh Agarwal
Dinesh Agarwal is the founder and CEO of IndiaMART, India’s largest B2B marketplace for small & medium enterprises (SMEs), large enterprises, and individuals.
Before starting IndiaMart, Dinesh worked at HCL technologies in Silicon Valley as a software engineer and gained early exposure to the internet and the power of technology.
He shares his experience of overcoming loneliness and other challenges of living in a foreign country. However, the two things close to his heart that kept him going were India and computers. The urge to come back to India and start his business kept growing stronger with each passing day.
He was so fascinated by the Internet that he made up his mind to leverage its potential and create something massive out of it. Rest, as they say, is history.
What started in the early internet era as an idea, is now a platform that has more than 10 crore registered users on it. And of course, it continues to grow even though it's been almost 25 years since it started.
He recalls IndiaMart’s early years when his wife would answer queries from buyers outside India and he would use a simple hack of going to trade fares to build his dataset and generate leads.
He talks everything about Internet and ECommerce.
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Some of the things he shared:-
Cultural challenges of living in a foreign economy.
The ups and downs of establishing an internet company in India.
The dot com boom from someone who saw it happen!
How did IndiaMart get its first client-paid order and how did it generate leads.
Additional readings:-
1. Building India’s largest online marketplace: IndiaMART CEO Dinesh Agarwal shares 25-year journey
2. IndiaMart and the turf wars of the B2B e-com market
3. Inside IndiaMart’s $100 mn bet on nine startups in FY22
4. IndiaMart’s Dinesh Agarwal shares how the profit doubled during the lockdown
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