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Sabeer & Hotmail
Nov, 2002: A successful scholarship at the California Institute
of Technology was followed by a Masters from Stanford University
and a stint at Apple Computer. It was while he was there that
Sabeer Bhatia made the phone call that would transform his life
and revolutionise the internet. Frustrated by a corporate e-mail
system which did not allow them to communicate privately, Bhatia
and his college friend and colleague Jack Smith hit upon the idea
of a simple, free and secure way of talking on the net.
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They called it Hotmail. Two years later, with 22 million subscribers
(now 65 million) and advertisers clamouring to subsidise the system,
he sold the company, Hot Net, to Microsoft for a reported $400m:
proof, if any were needed that, even in the digital age, the American
Dream lives on. By now Bhatia, still only in his mid-twenties,
was a major player in two interlocking circles First, he was among
that select group, almost exclusively male, of anonymous Masters
of the Internet Universe: modern-day avatars whose merest utterances
would inspire miles of journalistic copy and provoke even the
dourest venture capitalist into handing-out vast amounts of money
as if it were chaff in the wind Besides this, Sabeer Bhatia found
himself at the very pinnacle of India's new entrepreneurial elite:
a young, highly-motivated jet-setting crowd which has blazed a
trail from Bombay to Bel Air bringing with it new products, new
management attitudes and, above all, an unshakeable belief in
the transforming power of technology. No wonder, then, that 30%
of the software engineers in US corporations hail from India
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