Sanjeev Bikhchandani & Info Edge: The Architect of India's Digital Classifieds
Explore Sanjeev Bikhchandani's journey building Info Edge (Naukri.com) from ₹2000 to an internet titan. Deep insights, strategy, and the vision that shaped India's digital landscape.
Sanjeev Bikhchandani, a name synonymous with India's internet revolution, famously observed a core truth of entrepreneurship.
"Successful businesses are built on deep customer insights about unsolved problems of the customer."
This simple yet profound philosophy wasn't just a guiding principle; it was the bedrock upon which he founded Info Edge, a company that pioneered online classifieds in India with ventures like Naukri.com, Jeevansathi.com, 99acres.com, and Shiksha.com, transforming how Indians searched for jobs, life partners, homes, and education. His journey from a modest beginning to a Padma Shri awardee is a masterclass in entrepreneurship.
This deep dive draws extensively from his candid conversation on the Founder Thesis podcast.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.
The Genesis of an Entrepreneur: Early Life & Influences 👨🎓
Sanjeev Bikhchandani's path to becoming a celebrated Indian entrepreneur began with a strong educational foundation and early corporate experiences that shaped his worldview. He completed his schooling at St. Columba's School, New Delhi, in 1981, followed by a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from the prestigious St. Stephen's College in 1984. His pursuit of business acumen led him to the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIM Ahmedabad), where he earned an MBA (PGDM) in 1989.
His initial foray into the corporate world included a stint in advertising at Lintas (1984-1987) and a marketing role at Hindustan Milkfood Manufacturers (HMM Ltd, now GlaxoSmithKline) from 1989-1990, working on the Horlicks brand. However, the lure of entrepreneurship was strong. In 1990, merely a year after his MBA and leaving what was described as a "high-paying job", Bikhchandani took the entrepreneurial plunge. He started with a meager capital of ₹2,000, operating from a small room in his father's house, sometimes referred to as a garage or servant quarter. The decision was daunting.
"I was very nervous. I was scared. For six months, I would tell myself I'll quit today... but I could not muster up the courage to actually quit. I'm from a middle-class family. My father and the family are in life. I wanted a salary check, and I was very, very nervous. But finally, one evening, I went to the marketing manager's house... and I said, look. I wanna quit."
The "Drifting Years" & The Spark of Naukri.com (1990-1997) 💡
The period between 1990 and the launch of Naukri.com in 1997 was what Bikhchandani termed the "drifting years". These were formative times characterized by exploring various small ventures, learning from failures, and immense perseverance with minimal income. As he mentioned on the podcast about these lean times:
"those ten years was you know, I I'm not taking salary for six years because, you know, you're taking salary when the company will pay you and not taking when somebody won't pay you."
His initial entrepreneurial forays included Indmark, a business focused on pharmaceutical trademarks, and another venture offering salary surveys and reports.
The idea for the salary survey was particularly insightful, born from his observations of the intense competition among companies for talent acquisition at the IIM Ahmedabad campus.
"companies compete like this for talent, on IIM campuses. Then if somebody would do a salary survey of what companies are paying fresh MBAs on IIM campuses, that report would sell."
This venture saw early success, generating ₹80,500 from 23 checks through a simple mailer campaign, a testament to identifying and solving a real market need.
Throughout these challenging early years, the unwavering support of his wife, Surabhi, an IIM Ahmedabad classmate, was pivotal. She held a well-paying job, managing household finances, which allowed Bikhchandani the stability to pursue his entrepreneurial ambitions without drawing a significant salary for nearly six years.
The pivotal "aha!" moment for Naukri.com came from a simple yet astute observation during his time at HMM: his colleagues were consistently more engrossed in the job advertisements in business magazines than in the editorial content itself.
"I used to observe that the all my colleagues... would also in an open hall. And I used to observe that when the office copy of Business India would come in, everybody would read it from the back because they used to be thirty five to forty pages appointment at the back of Business India in those days... from there, I got the insight that jobs are a high interest category of information."
Info Edge was formally founded in 1995. Naukri.com was subsequently launched in March/April 1997, at a time when India's internet user base was incredibly small, estimated at only around 14,000 people or, as Sanjeev put it, "fourteen thousand internet accounts in the country".
Building Info Edge: From Bootstrapping to IPO 🚀
Naukri.com's initial strategy was pragmatic: culling classified job advertisements from newspapers and reproducing them on its website to populate the platform when direct online job postings were scarce. This low-cost method of content acquisition was a clever bootstrapping tactic.
The early financial journey was modest. By March 1998, the venture was generating approximately ₹2.35 lakhs in revenue. Sanjeev shared on the podcast:
"in the second half of the year, from September to March, we did about two lakhs thirty six thousand rupees revenue." And then the growth: "ugly as hell, this, thing went to eighteen lakhs for the same strategy as mailing out."
A significant turning point came in 1999 when the company successfully raised its first round of venture capital. This was followed by a notable investment of ₹7.29 crore from ICICI Information Technology Fund in April 2000. The decision to seek VC funding was partly spurred by the launch of a well-funded competitor. Sanjeev initially found the world of venture capital baffling:
"I was totally cut off from the rest of the world. We did not know that there's something called a dot com valuation... I never heard of venture capital."
VCs suggested:
"spend on adverting? That will brand and barrier twenty, and then we'll risk price the money at four times evaluation in six months time. And then one year from now, we list you on Nasdaq."
His reaction was one of prudence:
"if you spend eight crore at, you know, you'll never call the money... We are profitable because I was not taking a salary, but we are profitable."
With funding, Info Edge professionalized its operations. A key to its scaling success was the discovery of the "repeatable profitable unit."
"a fully loaded cost of a salesperson, bank card, conveyance, incentive, mobile phone bill reimbursement... we discovered key the average salesperson in six months was generating revenue [₹50,000 at a cost of ₹22,000]... It basically means that each sales guy, each salesperson was making a twenty eight thousand profit for us... We should simply expand by hiring more and more salespeople."
Within two years, Info Edge had 240 salespeople across eleven offices, scaling revenue 35x in about two and a half years.
The ultimate validation of Info Edge's model and vision came in November 2006, when it created history by becoming the first Indian internet company to be listed on Indian stock exchanges. The IPO raised ₹170.36 crore, providing significant capital for growth and strategic initiatives and signaling the maturation of the Indian internet industry.
Today, Info Edge is a financial powerhouse. For the fiscal year 2023-24, the company reported consolidated revenue of ₹2,950.07 crore with a profit of ₹594.55 crore. Naukri.com has consistently been the primary revenue driver, accounting for over 70% of the company's income as of 2018.
A Diversified Digital Conglomerate: Info Edge's Portfolio 🌐
Info Edge strategically expanded beyond recruitment, leveraging its core competency in building internet platforms to address other critical needs:
Naukri.com (Recruitment): Launched in 1997, it remains India's No. 1 job site, commanding over 75% traffic share in its category.
Jeevansathi.com (Matrimony): This portal was launched in December 1998. Info Edge acquired Jeevansathi Internet Services Private Limited in September 2004. It has a strong presence in North and West India.
99acres.com (Real Estate): Making its debut in September 2005, 99acres.com has grown to become India's largest online property marketplace.
Shiksha.com (Education): Launched in 2008, Shiksha.com serves as a comprehensive one-stop solution for students seeking information on courses and colleges.
The company also nurtured other ventures like NaukriGulf.com, FirstNaukri.com (for campus recruitment), and made strategic acquisitions including Quadrangle (an offline executive search firm in 2000) and AmbitionBox (a platform for company reviews and salary insights). More recently, emerging ventures like JobHai (focusing on blue-collar jobs) are showing promise. This diversification followed a pattern of identifying large, fragmented, information-intensive classifieds markets and applying the successful online aggregation model.
The Investor Mindset: Info Edge Ventures 📈
Info Edge, under Bikhchandani's guidance, has distinguished itself as an astute and active investor in the Indian startup ecosystem since 2007. Its early and highly successful investments in companies like Zomato and PolicyBazaar are legendary. The initial investment in Zomato was ₹4.7 crore (totaling ₹86 crore over time), and Info Edge's combined shareholding in Zomato and PolicyBazaar is now valued at over ₹31,500 crore.
On the podcast, Sanjeev recalled the early signs for Zomato (then Foodiebay):
"Deepinder said, you know, file folder, you know, you know, to wait... I was hungry and to work through... So one Saturday, I came in, and I scanned all those menu cards and uploaded them on my personal page on the office intranet. Within two days, the IT in front, I came to me and said, what have you done? Why is all the internal traffic going to your page? And he said, that's when I got the customer insight."
For PolicyBazaar, which was just a PowerPoint presentation at the time of investment:
"He came to me and he said that I'm willing to bet you're spending sixty percent more for your car insurance than you need to... he got me some twelve alternate quotes. And sure enough, you know, the lowest quarter forty percent lower than what I was paying."
In 2019/2020, Info Edge formalized its investment activities by setting up Info Edge Ventures (IEVF), an early-stage Alternative Investment Fund.
IEVF operates across three funds with a total corpus of ₹3,422.94 crore, to which Info Edge has committed ₹1,613.75 crore; shareholders recently approved an additional ₹1,000 crore for IEVF Fund III.
To date, Info Edge has backed 111 companies through this arm, including 18 deeptech startups.
Bikhchandani's investment philosophy is clear: "natural traction" and the quality of the founding team are non-negotiable.
"I think we look for signs of natural traction if it's already launched a product. Is it getting traffic downloads without having to advertise? What about is the word-of-mouth good? Is it solving unsolved problem?"
Sanjeev Bikhchandani: The Man, The Leader 🧭
Sanjeev Bikhchandani's leadership is anchored in a set of core values that have shaped Info Edge's enduring culture:
Unwavering Customer Focus: He consistently emphasizes deeply understanding customer needs and solving their problems effectively. "Follow the customer" is a recurring theme.
Perseverance and Stubbornness: These qualities were critical for navigating the challenging early years.
Frugality and Fiscal Discipline: The bootstrapping origins instilled a discipline of achieving more with less.
Trust: He believes trust is fundamental in all business relationships – with the team, co-founders, investors, and customers.
Continuous Innovation: Essential for survival and growth, especially with evolving technologies like AI and ML.
Valuing People: Info Edge has famously prioritized its employees during crises like the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2009 financial crisis, choosing to sacrifice profits rather than implement downsizing.
His leadership style emphasizes building great teams and leading from the front.
"Hitesh did eighty plus sales calls himself with the local sales teams who travel all over the country, and I did sixty plus sales calls myself, travel all over the country. Because that's how salespeople will observe you and learn to sell."
Looking to the future, Bikhchandani envisions Artificial Intelligence becoming an integral component of every product and offering at Info Edge, aimed at building superior products and creating enhanced customer experiences. The company is strategically focused on leveraging its vast data troves through AI and ML, and has even established a central Research Lab dedicated to advanced data science and developing sophisticated, scalable search and matching algorithms.
Key Lessons for Builders 🛠️
Sanjeev Bikhchandani's journey offers timeless advice for entrepreneurs:
Customer Insight is King: Don't just build; solve a genuine, unsolved problem that you've deeply understood from the customer's perspective.
Embrace Frugality: Especially in the early days, lean operations build discipline and resilience.
Find Your "Repeatable Profitable Unit": Identify what truly works and makes money, then replicate it to scale sustainably.
Persevere Through Ambiguity: The "drifting years" are often where the most valuable learning and refined insights emerge.
Value People & Build Trust: Long-term success is built on strong relationships with employees, partners, and customers.
Raise Capital Strategically:
"customer money is better than the investors... Second thing I say is that it's a great idea to raise money when the investor comes to you rather than you want to the investor.”
An Enduring Legacy and a Future Yet to Unfold
Sanjeev Bikhchandani's story is more than just a business success; it's a testament to the power of vision, perseverance, customer-centricity, and ethical leadership. From a ₹2,000 startup in a nascent internet market to a diversified digital conglomerate and a respected investor, he has not only built Info Edge but has also played a pivotal role in architecting India's internet economy. As Info Edge continues to innovate and navigate the future with a strong emphasis on AI and data, its journey, and the "founder thesis" of Sanjeev Bikhchandani, will continue to inspire builders for generations to come.
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