But for the duo, who came of age in the heady era of consumer Internet growth, the lure of the fastest growing Internet population in the world was too strong to resist. Her parents lived in the US and Gupta had grown up in Oklahoma. But she was a frequent visitor to India, and had picked up Indian music and dance, interests she pursued while at Stanford.
Chordia, who has a PhD in computer science and music, is also a trained sarod player who helped launch online start-ups in the US such as IndusLive, an Indian music website, and Bol records, a desi record label. Taking time off from his full-time teaching job at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Chordia worked with Gupta to build the yaari site, which integrates mobile with Internet services. Gupta believes Yaari Mobile, an SMS alert service, sets yaari.com apart from its peers.
“I hate being bossed around. I like creating my own things and working on them. So it was a natural decision to turn into an entrepreneur,” she says—independence she hopes to preserve for as long as possible by running yaari.com as a self-funded outfit with support from a small circle of angel investors.
VISHNU INDHURI, 29
Business head, Bharatstudent.com
Started: March 2007
Users: 1,400,000
This guy crashed the party, upsetting the slow and steady pace that other networking sites in India had adopted. Launched in March 2007, Bharatstudent.com has had an explosive beginning, registering 1.4 million users in 10 weeks and emerging the top-ranked Indian SNS on Alexa, the Web information company that offers a daily ranking of the most popular Internet sites.
Nothing to unlearn: Vishnu Indhuri (with the laptop) and his team in Hyderabad
A native of Vijayawada, a city in Andhra Pradesh, Vishnu Vardhan Indhuri studied computer science at the Illinois Institute of Technology in the US. His first job was with Northgate Technologies, an Internet advertising firm that has its headquarters in Hyderabad. “I have no work experience apart from the Internet space. I feel this has helped me, as I have nothing to unlearn,” says Indhuri, who was handpicked by Northgate Technologies to build its social media business.
In less than 60 days, Indhuri and his eight-member business development team came out with a unique model for the social networking space that was built around hiring “campus reporters” (reps) from college campuses in India and abroad. The only brief was that the students had to be of Indian origin.
As interns hired for three months, these campus reps are paid a monthly stipend of Rs4,000 and earn incentives for every lead they generate for the site.
“We just went after the student’s need to be a hero on campus and have money in his pockets,” says Indhuri. Unlike other sites that focus on socializing, Indhuri feels today’s youth are more focused; they want recognition and want to earn good money.
The aggressive no–holds barred marketing push had its downsides. “We had cases of objectionable content being used to draw in new users through the month of May,” he says.
Site managers trawled through the Internet for a clean-up campaign and new user registrations declined through the month, before they regrouped to hire a fresh set of campus reps from June. “We aim to make students part of the management of our site,” says Indhuri.