Sanjeev Bikhchandani

Timeline

1. 1963Born in Delhi into a Sindhi family.he was raised in the city and has lived around it since
2. 1981Finishes school at St. Columba's School in Delhi.the school has produced a long list of Indian business figures
3. 1984Takes a bachelor's degree in economics from St. Stephen's College at Delhi University.the same college Deep Kalra of MakeMyTrip would join a few years later
4. 1989Completes an MBA at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad.by his own account he was among the worst placed in his batch a decade later
5. 1990Leaves a marketing job at Hindustan Milkfood Manufacturers, which made Horlicks, to start a business of his own.he set up a searchable trademark database in his father's garage in east Delhi
6. 1991The Department of Telecom shortlists his videotex business plan and then cancels the pilot.the setback ended the partnership he had with the man who would later run Info Edge's first satellite venture
7. 1993The partners split, with his partner taking the pharmaceutical business Indmark and Bikhchandani keeping Info Edge.he taught at management institutes and MBA coaching classes to add to his income
8. 1995Info Edge becomes a private limited company on 1 May.the business by then was selling salary reports and resume databases
9. 1997Launches Naukri.com on 27 March, hosted on a server in the United States that his brother paid for.the first version was a text page built from jobs collected out of 29 newspapers
10. 1997The site goes commercial in October, charging recruiters to list jobs.jobseekers were never charged for searching
11. 1999Jobsahead.com enters the market and takes the lead from Naukri.the competition is what forced him to raise outside money
12. 2000ICICI Venture invests about 7 crore rupees in April, one month before the dotcom market collapses.the company hunkered down rather than expanding
13. 2004Acquires Jeevansathi.com for matrimony, and Jobsahead sells itself to Monster.com.the sale removed his most serious competitor
14. 2005Launches 99acres.com for real estate.the first of the classifieds businesses built next to the job portal
15. 2006Info Edge lists on the Indian stock exchanges with the ticker NAUKRI.ICICI Venture exited with a return of about 28.5 times its investment
16. 2007Launches Brijj.com for professional networking and Naukrigulf.com for the Gulf market.his stake in the listed company was reported at about 43 per cent, worth roughly 1,800 crore rupees
17. 2008Shiksha.com opens for education listings and he wins the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year award.the classifieds portfolio now covered jobs, property, marriage and education
18. 2010Info Edge backs FoodieBay, the restaurant listing site that was renamed Zomato.the investment arm would put about 86 crore rupees into the company over four rounds
19. 2013Info Edge is the controlling shareholder of Zomato after four funding rounds.it also held a stake in Policybazaar, which it backed before the site launched
20. 2015Zomato ceases to be a subsidiary of Info Edge in September.the stake stayed on the books as an investment
21. 2016Ashoka University, which he co-founded, admits its first undergraduates.he is part of its governing body
22. 2020Awarded the Padma Shri for trade and industry in January, and listed at 68th on the Forbes India rich list with about 2.1 billion dollars.Info Edge also set up its venture capital arm that year
23. 2024Forbes ranked him and his family 75th in India with about 4.25 billion dollars in October.the value of the Zomato and Policybazaar holdings had transformed the balance sheet

Early life, parents and family

Sanjeev Bikhchandani was born in 1963 in Delhi into a Sindhi family.^[1] He grew up in the city and went to school there, finishing at St. Columba's School in 1981, and his family home in the eastern part of Delhi became the first office of his first company.^[1][2] His brother Sushil, who was living in the United States, paid for the server that hosted the first version of Naukri.com in 1997, which is the detail that makes the founding story a family one rather than a solo one.^[3][2]

His father's garage is where the business started. Bikhchandani set up a searchable trademark database there in 1990, before the internet was available to him, and the office was a converted space in a residential house in a part of Delhi he has described as unfashionable.^[2] The garage has since become the standard shorthand for the company's origins, and it is a fair description: there was no outside money for the first ten years, and he was working a second job for much of that time.^[2]

His wife, Surbhi, carried the household through the early years. Bikhchandani has said plainly that he lived off her salary for the first three years of the business, while he taught at management institutes and coached MBA candidates and worked at a newspaper to bring in the rest.^[2] By 2007 the couple had children, whom he mentioned in a profile that year when describing how they would take his car and leave him with the office vehicle, but he has never named them publicly and this page does not.^[2]

Education

Bikhchandani finished school at St. Columba's School in Delhi in 1981, took a bachelor's degree in economics from St. Stephen's College at Delhi University in 1984, and completed his MBA at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad in 1989.^[1] The three institutions gave him an unusually strong network in the Delhi professional class, and the IIM Ahmedabad batch of that period later produced a number of the people who built Indian internet businesses.^[1]

The business school mattered to the story in a way that he has described with some honesty. A decade after graduating he was, by his own account, probably the worst off financially in his batch, working out of his father's garage while his classmates were in corporate jobs, and it was the discomfort of that comparison that kept him going.^[2] The economics degree mattered less directly. What he took from his corporate years was an observation about behaviour rather than a technique: at Hindustan Milkfood Manufacturers he noticed that his colleagues read the last pages of business magazines, where the recruitment advertisements were, and he remembered it when he started a job site.^[2]

He has said the transformation in his own personality came from teaching. He describes himself as introverted until he began teaching at management institutes and MBA coaching classes in the early years of the business, which he did for the money and which ended up making him the public face of Info Edge.^[2]

Career before Info Edge

After his MBA, Bikhchandani joined Hindustan Milkfood Manufacturers, the company behind Horlicks that later became part of GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare in India, and worked in marketing.^[1] He left in 1990 to start his own business, which means his corporate career lasted a year.^[1]

The first venture was a database rather than a website. He and a partner built a searchable trademark service, sold salary reports and ran two businesses side by side, with the partner handling a pharmaceutical distribution company called Indmark.^[2][3] In 1991 the Department of Telecom advertised for videotex services, Info Edge submitted a business plan and was shortlisted, and the department then cancelled the pilot for reasons that were never disclosed.^[2][3] The cancellation cost the company its plan and the partnership its patience: the two men went their separate ways in 1993, the partner took Indmark and Bikhchandani was left with Info Edge.^[3][1]

The years that followed are the least glamorous part of the story and the most instructive. Between 1993 and 1997 he sold salary reports for between about 5,000 and 10,000 rupees each, ran the operation from a servant's quarter at his house, and worked a second job at The Pioneer newspaper, where he helped Chandan Mitra after Mitra took over as editor, doing both managerial and editorial work.^[2][3] He has said the newspaper job built his public relations skills, and Mitra's own account is that Bikhchandani took ownership of his roles at a time when the paper often could not pay him.^[2]

Business career and companies

Info Edge was formally incorporated as a private limited company on 1 May 1995, by which time the trademark database and the salary reports were already running.^[3] The company's model in that period was to sell data to employers: salary reports by category, and later access to a resume database, which is why the business did not need venture money at the start.^[2] In 1996 a recession hit and the company ran at a loss, and it was during that year that Bikhchandani brought in two people who would shape the company.^[2][3]

The first was his friend Anil Lall, who was given about 7 per cent of the company, and the second was V N Saroja, who took over operations and was given about 9 per cent.^[2][3] Both stakes were given rather than sold, which is what equity looked like when there was no cash to pay salaries.^[3] The company also hired the people who would run it for the next two decades: Hitesh Oberoi, who became chief operating officer and later managing director and chief executive, and Ambarish Raghuvanshi, who became chief financial officer.^[2] Bikhchandani describes himself as the ideas man and the public face of the company, with Oberoi running the daily operations.^[2]

The decision that defined Info Edge was to keep building new classifieds businesses next to the job portal rather than diversifying into something unrelated. It acquired Jeevansathi.com for matrimony in 2004, launched 99acres.com for real estate in 2005, and launched Shiksha.com for education in 2008, along with Naukrigulf.com for the Gulf market in 2006 and FirstNaukri.com for campus recruitment in 2009.^[2][3][5] By 2018 more than 70 per cent of the company's revenue still came from Naukri.com, which is both the strength and the exposure of the model.^[5]

The company also made the investment decisions that turned it into something other than a classifieds business. It backed Policybazaar around 2008 before the insurance site had launched, and it backed FoodieBay, later Zomato, from 2010.^[5] By September 2020 it held minority stakes in 23 internet companies, including two unicorns.^[5]

Naukri.com: the founding years

Naukri.com was launched on 27 March 1997 and went commercial in October of that year.^[3] The idea came from a stall at an information technology fair at Pragati Maidan in Delhi, where Bikhchandani first understood what the world wide web could do, and the practical execution was improvised: his brother in the United States hired a server for about 25 dollars a month, and the first version of the site was a text page carrying about 1,000 jobs collected from 29 newspapers.^[3]

The early product was closer to a bulletin board than to the search engine it became, and it was free for jobseekers from the beginning, with recruiters paying for listings.^[3] Traffic grew through word of mouth and coverage in business magazines rather than through advertising, and the company's timing was fortunate: the internet was arriving in Indian offices at exactly the moment white collar hiring was opening up.^[3]

The graphical version of the site, when it came, had a bright yellow background that Bikhchandani could not see from his own connection at the time, which is why the company received complaints about the layout from users in the United States that he could not reproduce for himself.^[2] He tells that as a joke, but it describes the constraints of the period accurately: the founders were building for a network they could not fully use.^[2]

The business model that settled in place was heavily business to business. About 90 per cent of the revenue came from recruiters buying access to resumes and job postings, and about 10 per cent came from services sold to jobseekers.^[3] That ratio is why the company was profitable early and why it was exposed later to any slowdown in technology hiring.^[2][3]

The funding years and the dotcom crash

Between 1997 and 2000 Info Edge took no outside funding at all, and Bikhchandani turned down offers in 1999 because he wanted a better deal and, as he has joked, because he liked the newspaper job enough not to want to work full time on the website.^[2] The competition changed his mind. Jobsahead.com started in 1999 and, by the admission of his own executives, was better than Naukri in every respect, which is what pushed him to accept money from ICICI Venture in April 2000.^[2]

The investment was about 7 crore rupees, and it arrived one month before the dotcom market collapsed.^[2] Bikhchandani's account of the period that followed is that the company simply hunkered down and prepared to last the downturn out, and the numbers support it: ICICI Venture held its stake through the worst years and finally divested the last of its 10 per cent in 2006, when its investment had grown about 28.5 times over six years.^[2]

The other piece of luck was competitive. Jobsahead.com sold itself to Monster.com in 2004, and the integration of the two businesses did not go smoothly, which gave Naukri the room to consolidate its position as the largest job site in the country.^[2] By 2005 Naukri.com was reported as India's largest web based employment site, and the company had the cash flow that made the classifieds launches of the following years possible.^[1][2]

The listing and life as a public company

Info Edge went public in 2006 under the ticker NAUKRI and became the only listed dotcom company in India at the time.^[2][5] The listing made Bikhchandani a rupee multi billionaire on paper and, more importantly for the company, gave it a currency and a profile that competitors without a listing did not have.^[2] Newspaper coverage of the IPO framed it as the moment the Indian internet generation of 1997 arrived in the capital markets, and he was worth about 1,800 crore rupees on the strength of his stake within a year of it.^[2]

Listed life changed what the company had to explain to its owners. The market capitalisation was over 4,200 crore rupees in 2007 with an earnings multiple above 80, which meant investors were pricing in years of growth from a business that had one dominant product.^[2] The company's answer was to launch new classifieds and to hold on to its investments in Zomato and Policybazaar, which eventually became the assets that justified the valuation when the job market slowed.^[5]

Public reporting also exposed the business to an accusation that has followed it: that its financial results depend on how its investment portfolio is marked. When Zomato was consolidated the losses of the food delivery business showed up in Info Edge's own numbers, and when Zomato ceased to be a subsidiary in September 2015 the stake became an investment whose value moved with the private market rather than with the operating company.^[5] For a shareholder that is a meaningful distinction, because the operating business and the portfolio are two different things moving at different speeds.^[5]

Zomato, Policybazaar and the investment arm

Info Edge backed Policybazaar around 2008, before the insurance comparison site had launched, and it backed FoodieBay in 2010, a restaurant listing site which was renamed Zomato and which became the most valuable asset on the company's books.^[5] Between 2010 and 2013 it invested a total of about 86 crore rupees in Zomato across four rounds and became the controlling shareholder, at a time when the food delivery and restaurant discovery market in India was barely a market at all.^[5]

Zomato ceased to be a subsidiary of Info Edge in September 2015, and the company stayed invested for years afterwards.^[5] The other holdings followed a similar pattern: by September 2020 the company had minority stakes in 23 online businesses, including two unicorns, and its stakes in Zomato and Policybazaar were worth multiples of the original cheques by the time both companies listed.^[5]

In 2020 the company turned those instincts into a formal business by setting up Info Edge Ventures, with the Info Edge Venture Fund for early stage technology startups.^[5] By 2022 there were three investment vehicles, Info Edge Venture Fund, Info Edge Capital and Capital 2B, and the portfolio had grown beyond the consumer internet into areas such as education software, where the company invested in NoPaperForms, now called Meritto, between 2017 and 2018.^[5] For Bikhchandani this is the part of the business that most resembles his public persona, which is that of an investor and mentor rather than an operator.^[2][5]

Net worth, wealth and holdings

The public record of Bikhchandani's wealth begins with the listing. In 2007, a year after Info Edge went public, his 43 per cent stake in the company was reported to be worth about 1,800 crore rupees, at a time when the company's market capitalisation was a little over 4,200 crore rupees.^[2] That single figure is the cleanest measure of the early years, because it ties the wealth directly to the operating business rather than to a portfolio.^[2]

Forbes has tracked the later figure. In 2020 the India rich list placed Bikhchandani and family 68th with a net worth of about 2.1 billion dollars, and in October 2024 the same list ranked them 75th with about 4.25 billion dollars.^[1][9] The change between those two entries is mostly the value of Info Edge's holdings in Zomato and Policybazaar rather than a change in the job portal's earnings, which is why a page like this one lists the two figures with their dates instead of a single number.^[5][9]

His own attitude to the wealth is documented. He has said he gets upset when money becomes the subject of the conversation, that the company not only created wealth but also built an institution, and in the years when he was already a rupee multi billionaire he drove an old Opel Astra before upgrading to a Honda Accord.^[2] That is a set of anecdotes rather than a strategy, but it is consistent with the way he has used his public profile since: on education and on mentoring rather than on consumption.^[2][6]

Spouse, children and the family

Bikhchandani is married to Surbhi, and the marriage is part of the business story rather than separate from it.^[2] He has said that he lived off her salary for the first three years of the venture, while he was building the trademark database and the salary reports and teaching to bring in extra cash, which means the household financed the company at the point when no investor would.^[2] He describes that as the first piece of luck in the whole story.^[2]

The couple have children. A 2007 profile mentioned them in passing, describing how they would take his car and leave him with the old office vehicle, but neither their names nor their number beyond that description appear in the public record, and this page does not speculate about them.^[2] His public statements about family have been limited to that period; the later interviews are about the company, the investments and the university.^[2][6]

What is documented about his personal approach is his reluctance to talk about money inside the family as well as outside it. The profile that recorded his stake and his car also recorded his discomfort with the subject, and his own framing was institutional: the company created wealth, but what he was proudest of was that it had also built an organisation that outlasted its first decade.^[2]

Personal life and habits

By his own account, Bikhchandani was introverted until he became an entrepreneur, and teaching in the early years is what changed it.^[2] He taught at management institutes and coaching classes to add to his income, discovered he was good at speaking in front of a room, and by the time Info Edge was listed he had become the public face of the company while Hitesh Oberoi ran operations.^[2] The arrangement has lasted: Oberoi became managing director and chief executive, and Bikhchandani is founder and executive vice chairman.^[1][5]

He is the ideas person in that pairing, and the description comes from his own team as well as from him. His colleagues at Info Edge have said the three founding figures argue about direction and then find a compromise, and his peers in the industry describe him as someone with both a high level view and the detail.^[2] Deep Kalra of MakeMyTrip, who knew him from the first generation of Indian internet founders, called him a friend, philosopher and guide, and said the striking thing about him was that he had not changed with the money.^[2]

The habits that follow from that are the habits of a mentor. He speaks at entrepreneur gatherings, he is a member of the Vision Circle of the Foundation for Young Innovators, an initiative that works with high school students on social entrepreneurship, and the advice he gives is usually about staying power rather than about funding.^[1][2]

House and property

The property that matters in this story is the family house in east Delhi, where the first version of Info Edge operated out of a garage and later out of a servant's quarter, at a time when the office was wherever he could put a desk and a telephone line.^[2][3] The company has since been headquartered in Noida, and the biographical records place him in Delhi and the National Capital Region rather than in Mumbai.^[1][5]

There is no public record of Bikhchandani's personal property holdings. Unlike the families whose assets sit inside listed holding companies and are disclosed in filings, his wealth is concentrated in a stake in Info Edge and in the company's own investment portfolio, and neither of those documents his houses.^[5] This page therefore lists what the record supports and does not attempt a portfolio.^[1][5]

Ashoka University and education work

Bikhchandani is one of the co-founders of Ashoka University, the liberal arts university in Sonipat in Haryana that admitted its first undergraduate class in 2016, and he sits on its governing body.^[1][10] The plan for a college of his own goes back much further: in 2007, before the internet businesses had produced their exits, he and a group of friends had already decided to build an institution, arguing that educational excellence rather than what he called the mediocrity of the existing system was what would carry the country forward.^[2]

The university's name itself has a Delhi business story attached to it. Bikhchandani has said he was uneasy with the name Ashoka because of the association with the emperor and hesitated over it, and the anecdote has been reported as an example of how carefully the founders treated the brand of a university that was meant to outlive them.^[7]

His education work outside Ashoka is smaller but of the same kind. He is a member of the Vision Circle of the Foundation for Young Innovators, which supports social entrepreneurship among high school students, and his public interventions on education have generally been about building institutions rather than about funding students one at a time.^[1][2]

Philanthropy

Bikhchandani's giving is concentrated in education and in mentoring, and he describes it as an extension of the same instinct that made him keep the business alive through the 1990s rather than an act of charity after the wealth arrived.^[2][6] The clearest example is Ashoka University, where he is a founder and a member of the governing body rather than a donor whose name is on a building.^[10][1]

The second channel is time. He sits on the Vision Circle of the Foundation for Young Innovators, which works with high school students on social entrepreneurship, and he has been a regular presence at entrepreneur gatherings where the value of his participation is advice rather than capital.^[1][2] The pattern matches what his peers say about him, which is that his usefulness in the ecosystem is as a person who has seen a full cycle of an Indian internet business from a garage to a listing.^[2]

He is also the subject of industry recognition that frames his contribution this way. When the Padma Shri was announced in January 2020, it was for trade and industry, and the coverage grouped him with founders who had built institutions rather than with the wealthiest individuals on the list.^[8]

Awards and recognition

The largest award Bikhchandani has received is the Padma Shri, announced in January 2020 in the trade and industry category.^[8][1] He had won the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2008, while Info Edge was still a young listed company, and that remains the professional honour cited most often in his biographical entries.^[1]

He appears regularly on the Forbes India rich list, at 68th in 2020 with about 2.1 billion dollars and at 75th in October 2024 with about 4.25 billion dollars, and he is usually described in Indian business writing as one of the first dotcom founders of the 2000s.^[1][9] The framing is not just flattering: he and his contemporaries at MakeMyTrip, Shaadi.com and the early portals were building consumer internet businesses in India years before the market that later made them valuable existed.^[2][1]

Controversies and criticism

The most persistent criticism of the business is its dependence on one product and one industry. As of 2018, more than 70 per cent of Info Edge's revenue came from Naukri.com, and a large share of that came from technology recruitment, which leaves the company exposed to hiring cycles in software and outsourcing.^[5] Bikhchandani identified the risk himself as early as 2007 and responded by taking Naukri into the Gulf market and by launching the other classifieds, but the concentration has remained.^[2][5]

The second area of friction is around the job portal market itself. Naukri.com has fought a long series of domain disputes with competitors who registered names close to its own, and in one case the World Intellectual Property Organization ordered a company called Abs IT Solutions to hand over the domain naukarie.com to Info Edge.^[3] The disputes are ordinary for a dominant portal, but they indicate how much of the business rests on brand recall.^[3]

There is also a criticism that attaches to the way his own biography has been written. His Wikipedia entry has carried a conflict of interest notice since 2016, a flag used when an article appears to have been edited by people connected to its subject, which means some of the detail circulating about him comes from sources close to the company.^[1] It is not a finding of wrongdoing, and it is worth stating plainly on a page like this one, because a directory that repeats promotional material without saying where it came from is not doing its job.^[1]

The final criticism is about the value of the investment portfolio to ordinary shareholders. Because Info Edge's reported profit swings with the valuation of its stakes in companies like Zomato and Policybazaar, the company's earnings have sometimes described the private market rather than the job portal, and analysts have had to separate the two to see the operating business.^[5] That structure made the company's shareholders wealthy, but it also made the shares harder to value than a pure operating business.^[5]

How Info Edge makes its money

Info Edge is a holding company that runs internet classifieds and invests in internet businesses.^[5] Its own operations are the job portal Naukri.com, the matrimonial site Jeevansathi.com, the real estate site 99acres.com and the education site Shiksha.com, and of those four, Naukri.com is the one that pays for the group.^[5]

The job portal's economics are subscription based. Recruiters buy access to a resume database, to job postings and to advertising, and they account for about 90 per cent of the revenue, with services sold to jobseekers making up the remaining tenth.^[3] That model produces cash in advance of the service and scales with the number of employers hiring rather than with the number of applicants, which is why the company survived the 1996 recession and the dotcom crash while better funded competitors did not.^[2][3]

The investment side works differently. Info Edge has taken stakes in 23 internet businesses, some of which became worth many times the original investment, and it formalised that activity in 2020 with Info Edge Ventures and three separate funds.^[5] For a reader trying to understand the company, the useful distinction is between the operating business, which is a profitable subscription service with a dominant market position, and the portfolio, which is a venture capital book whose value is realised when its companies list or get sold.^[5]

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