Who are you going to call?

Mumbai: The conference room has walls of glass through which he can see busy directory operators, but V.S.S. Mani’s eyes are focused elsewhere, on some far-away point, as he speaks of the visions he used to have. Back before he founded directory service firm Just Dial Private Ltd, Mani would only have to close his eyes and he would see numbers—not bank balances or account numbers, but phone numbers. “I used to just dream numbers, easy numbers, like 2222 or 8888,” he says. Just Dial’s own number is easy too: 39999999 (across the country). Mani says that there should not be a single person who needs to call Just Dial, but cannot remember the number.

This week, though, Mani is likely thinking of a different number: $18.5 million (Rs77 crore). That’s the amount US hedge fund Tiger Global invested on the weekend in Just Dial (including $1 million, or Rs4 crore) from the company’s first investor). Mani plans to use the money to expand and grow, even to the United States. Tiger is the second investor in the company. Last October, Hong Kong-based SAIF Partners wooed Mani. The story goes that one of the fund’s partners in India wanted information, called Just Dial for help, and thought the company would make a good investment—and then put $12 million (Rs50 crore) in his company.

Mani was born in Jamshedpur, raised in Kolkata, and was studying to be a chartered accountant when the need to go out and earn a living pushed him into a sales job in New Delhi with a directory firm that was selling listings in the yellow pages, then a relatively new concept in India. That was in 1987 and it was while working with that company that he got the “idea of starting a service where people could dial in and receive information 24X7 on any product or service.” A few years later, Mani started a company that did just that, but the great Indian telecom boom was still a few years away. “We were ahead of our time,” he says. Back then “people would apply for a telephone connection and wait for 10 years.” The business wasn’t doing all he wanted it to, and he sold out. The idea of starting a directory service, though, didn’t go away, and so, Mani landed in Mumbai, India’s commercial capital, in the early 1990s with Rs50,000. He didn’t use the money to launch a directory service, though. He needed more money for that, and the financial strength to wait for the investment to deliver a return. His first venture was a matrimonial magazine, a guide of sorts to planning a wedding, that was distributed by a couple of dailies to people placing matrimonial ads in their newspapers. It was a small business, but it was profitable. “The Rs50,000 had produced a surplus (after two years), and so there was enough money to go and apply for telephone lines,” Mani says. And then he began to cultivate Just Dial from 1996, two years after he founded the company.