Sanjeev Bikhchandani Age, Wife, Biography, Net Worth & More
Some Lesser Known Facts About Sanjeev Bikhchandani
- Does Sanjeev Bikhchandani smoke?: Not Known
- Does Sanjeev Bikhchandani drink alcohol?: Not Known
- Early in his teens, Bikhchandani found out that he is partially colour-blind.
- After graduating with a BA (Hons) degree in Economics, he joined the advertisement firm – Lowe Lintas – as an executive trainee. He worked for the company for 3 years before enrolling into IIM Ahmedabad for a Post Graduate Diploma in Management (PGDM).
- Bikhchandani then secured a job with GlaxoSmithKline (then HMM), where he handled and managed the brand- ‘Horlicks’. After a one-and-a-half year stint with the company, he decided to quit so as to start his own business venture.
- In October 1990, he, along with a friend, started two companies. While one company conducted salary surveys, the other was aimed at developing a database of trademarks, the information procured through which could then be sold out to pharma companies, which were looking to apply for one. They contacted as many as 5,000 companies, of which, the interested ones were given a printed search report for INR 350.
- Since they were operating from the servants’ quarters at Bikhchandani’s home, the two paid a monthly rent of INR 800 to his father.
- The two partners, however, parted ways in 1993, which also led to the division in their business. While Bikhchandani kept the first company that conducted surveys, his partner kept the trademark business as it was solely his idea.
- At the 1996 Asia Exhibition, Bikhchandani came to know about the Internet through a retailer, who was reselling VSNL e-mail accounts. The person showed him how to use Yahoo! to browse the vast information available on the web. Fascinated to see this, the budding businessman asked the retailer if he could help him set a website. Since a server was needed to set up a website and all the servers at the time were located in the US, the retailer couldn’t help him.
- A dejected Bikhchandani, however, did not give up and immediately contacted his brother, a professor at the UCLA business school, California, so that the latter could hire a server on his behalf.
- Meanwhile, to make ends meet, he took up a job as the Consulting Editor of The Pioneer’s career supplement, named Avenues.
- When a server was arranged by his brother, Bikhchandani offered him a 5% share in the company as he did not have enough money to repay his brother. He then approached two of his friends, who were very good at programming and offered them a 7% and a 9% stake in the company, respectively. When both his friends agreed to build the website – Naukri, an online job search portal – for him, he hired some data entry operators who would help compile the vacancies listed in daily newspapers.
- Since the Internet was new and did not have a good reach in 1997, there were only 14,000 average web users in the country. At first, Naukri struggled to generate traffic; however, after the newspapers began writing about ‘Internet’ and were looking for Indian examples to talk about it, Naukri was the first to get extensive media coverage.
- According to Alexa.com, Naukri.com attracts 75%-80% share of the job traffic in India.
- Not many people know that Bikhchandani is the person behind successful websites like Jeevansathi and 99Acres.