Sabeer Bhatia

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sabeer Bhatia (सबीर भाटिया) is a co-founder of Hotmail.

[edit] Biography

Sabeer was born in Chandigarh, India, and did his early schooling at the St. Joseph's Boys' High School in Bangalore. He started his undergraduate education at Birla Institute of Technology & Science, BITS, Pilani, India. After two years at Pilani, he transferred to Caltech to pursue his undergraduate education. After graduating from Caltech, Sabeer went to Stanford to pursue his MS in Electrical Engineering - specifically Ultra Low Power VLSI Design.

At Stanford, Sabeer was bitten by the "entrepreneurship" bug. He attended many a brown bag lunch to hear entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs and Scott McNealy. These lunches inspired him to become an entrepreneur. Instead of pursuing his PhD at Stanford, he joined Apple computer after finishing his Masters at Stanford.

After a brief stint at Apple, that lasted a year, Sabeer joined a startup called Firepower Systems Inc. After spending two years at Firepower, it became clear that the company was not going to succeed. At this point, Sabeer started working on new ideas on the Internet, which instinctively knew was going to become universally used. Sabeer teamed up with his partner Jack to explore different ideas. One of the earlier ones was a web-based database idea called Javasoft. While pursuing this idea, the two of them hit upon the idea to create a web-based e-mail system which they would call Hotmail. In order to get big fast (GBF), they decided to give the service away for free and make money by way of advertising. They were able to raise a small sum of $300k from Draper Fisher Ventures which later became Draper Fisher Jurvetson. They launched the service on July 4, 1996 and in less than six months grew to over 1 million subscribers. At this point, they knew that they were on to something big. Sure enough, Microsoft took notice when their subscriber base crossed 7 million. On December 30th., 1997, they sold Hotmail to Microsoft for a reported sum of $400M. This acquisition started the Dot-com craze that lasted 2 1/2 years.

After the Hotmail acquisition, Bhatia worked at Microsoft for about a year and in April 1999, he left to start another venture, Arzoo Inc, which was shut down when the Dot-com bubble burst. In 2006 he relaunched Arzoo at http://www.arzoo.com as a travel portal.

Currently he has started a new venture called BlogEverywhere http://www.blogeverywhere.com with co-founders Shiraz Kanga (cut-off in the above picture) and Viraf Zack.

He latest passion is to build a new city in India called Nano city at www.nanocity.in In Nanocity, he aims to replicate the vibrance and eco-system of innovation found in Silicon Valley. It is an ambitious project but nonetheless required for a country like India which suffers from poor infrastructure.

[edit] Awards

1. "Entrepreneur of the Year," Awarded by the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson (1997)
2. Named to the "Elite 100," Upside magazine's list of top trendsetters in the New Economy
3. Recipient of the "TR100" award, presented by MIT to 100 young innovators who are expected to have the greatest impact on technology in the next few years
4. Selected by the San Jose Mercury News and POV magazine as one of the ten most successful entrepreneurs of (1998)
5. Named by TIME as one of the "People to Watch" in International Business (2002)

[edit] External links

• Interview in the Business Standard March 14, 2006

• P O Bronson's Book Nudist On the Late Shift . contains a fascinating chapter on Sabeer Bhatia's life in silicon valley and his story of funding, bootstrapping & selling Hotmail to Microsoft.