Showcasing Entrepreneurship | Vijay Shekhar Sharma

A lot of people often wonder why we are called One97 and how did we pick this niche to operate in? What makes Vijay take the decisions does? Why has he taken One97 on this journey …. etc etc …. Attempting to find answers to these questions I spent a lot of time searching through the archives. It gave me a feeler of what has been said and written about One97 and the man behind it. It was an interesting journery and I thought about sharing the same with others. Its remarkable how different people with different styles of writing have managed to capture the spirit of the organisation and Vijay’s thoughts about the same.  The first of the articles posted here is about a year old from a section in Financial Express called ” Showcasing Entrepreneurship”  and the headline reads “Cashing in on Cellphone Content” will give you an insight on how and why Vijay started the company  and tracks ome of the earlier stages of evolution of the company ( and Vijay too!!).  Link to the article http://www.financialexpress.com/news/Cashing-in-on-cellphone-content/234964/

Value-added service (VAS) provider Vijay Shekhar Sharma, managing director, One97 Communications (P) Ltd, is one those gifted individuals who has always been a bit ahead of time—be it at school, college or in the tough world of start-ups.

Sharma was 14 years of age when he passed class 12 and had to get special permission from the vice-chancellor of Delhi University to appear for the Delhi College of Engineering (DCE) exams when he was 15 years of age as he was under-age. He was not allowed to take the exam at 14, so had to wait out a year. He entered DCE in 1994 and successfully passed out in 1998. What was indeed remarkable was that he studied in Hindi medium in school and switched to English in college.

“I spent the gap year between class 12 and the first-year college reading English newspapers. In fact, I used to bunk most of my classes in DCE and I could not comprehend what was going on. I knew most of the computer terms in Hindi.” Meanwhile, while in DCE, he spent the time away from classes in the college computer centre and he and his batchmate Harinder Pal Singh together started a company while in third-year college called Xs! Corporations, that functioned both as a web portal, and as a search engine. It also offered web guides services including web directories. “A New Mexico-based venture capital fund called Individual Angel Investor invested in us. It gave us seed-money worth Rs 20,000.” The college allowed their start-up to function in campus—the computer centre, to be precise—as they managed the college website and email services for free.

The company’s web portal was then sold in 1999 to Living Media India Ltd (India Today group). In lieu of cash, the group gave them a barter arrangement. Sharma, therefore, got more business from that group, which included web maintenance and managing live coverage of elections for TV Today that was beamed during those days on Doordarshan. “Between February 1999 and May 1999, our turnover was Rs 50 lakh. We had brought on board two more persons who were my batch mates in DCE as partners,” says Sharma.

The rest of the business that included over a period of time, back-end operations management for Agencyfaqs!, a B2B website on advertising, media and marketing and Jobs Ahead.com a website where you can post your resume for jobs, as also the staff of four persons that worked for them in the premises that India Today allowed them to work in as part of the barter arrangement were sold to Lotus Interworks headquartered in New Jersey, USA in end-1999 for half-a-million dollars. The monies earned were split between the four partners.

Lotus Interworks, in the meantime, acquired two other companies in India—Origin Technologies and MindsEye Information Systems and set up Intersolutions India Pvt Ltd in 1999, a subsidiary of Lotus Interworks. The company was headquartered in Noida, UP. Sharma was asked to come on board as a programmer and he was paid a huge packet—Rs 1,00,000 per month. However, he soon tired of the job as it did not give him the freedom of functioning that he craved for.

Sharma quit at the end of 2000 and in 2001, co-founded One97 Communications (P) Ltd with Rajiv Shukla, a former colleague to provide web-based and value-added services in the telecom domain, with Rs 2 lakh of his savings as seed money. However, the company went into loss with the dotcom bust in 2000-2001. Shukla soon left him and Sharma was on his own again. He found that he had to earn a living through alternate means. He became a consultant, and earned Rs 70,000 a month at Startec Global Communications that had its headquarters in the US. However, the entrepreneurial drive never really left him. He, then, borrowed Rs 8 lakh to start all over again—from his parents and sister. He says, “The way forward was the telecom sector which was opening up. Although I was working for Startec’s Internet technology division, I knew that they had a separate dial-in service division in the US where a consumer could dial in to hear news, music and other content.” The crucial lesson that he learnt in the company was “monetisation of content”. He says, “In the telecom sector you earn from day one unlike the Internet where you have to invest heavily in servers and other equipment before you can begin earning.”

The dial-in model for phone systems interested him. While he was waiting for a break, Sharma got a call from a friend, who told him that Bharti Airtel Ltd was interested in creating “live astrology” call centres. “I rented premises in Delhi in March 2001, and hired the services of seven panditjis who were astrologers and started making money out of astrology phone-ins.” In April 2001, he earned a revenue of Rs 33,000 from the project—quite a far fry from the fat cat that he was earlier. He then started monitoring at the time of the day when the maximum calls come in—it turned out to be in the evenings when people return from work. He began really focusing on the job at hand rather than worrying that he was made for better things in life. By September 2001, he began earning a monthly revenue of Rs 3,40,000. “If Airtel was charging Rs 4 pher minute, then we would get Rs 2 per minute. It was a revenue-sharing model.”

Dame Luck, finally, smiled upon him big time. When Bharti Airtel Ltd was starting its services in Punjab, its value-added services and marketing team contacted him as the company needed someone to set up the necessary technology base required for phone services involving dial-in and messaging music and cricket scores. The automated service that involves instant messaging, involves plenty of “technology inputs” such as voice-based, value-added services for which programmers are required, points out Sharma. The business plan with Airtel was based on a revenue-share model—if Sharma managed to generate business after setting up the dial in and instant messaging systems, then Airtel would share 50% of the revenue with One97. The model worked after initial hiccups—in 2001-02 fiscal year, One97 suffered a revenue loss of Rs 11 lakh. After that, however, Sharma worked hard to turn things around and soon, it was a straight road to success. In 2002-03, One97’s revenue shot up to Rs 70 lakh per annum; in 2003-04, it was Rs 3.5 crore. “We actually tried content monetisation on virgin territory and it worked,” says Sharma.

In 2004-2005, his revenue was Rs 7 crore per annum. In 2005-06, he earned Rs 11 crore and in 2006-07, he acquired Positive Consol, a data services company in NOIDA for an undisclosed amount. In 2007-08 fiscal year, Sharma expects his revenue to jump to $15 million. He currently employs 280 people and has offices in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Calcutta, Jaipur, Chennai and Lucknow among other places. Sharma, 29, says his success mantra is: “Persistence and patience.” He adds in jest, “There is a Gem in ‘I’,” referring to his zodiac sign Gemini. He was born on June 7, 1978.

Fact File

Name: Vijay Shekhar Sharma

Education: BE Electronics & Communication, Delhi College of Engineering

Business: Providing value-added services for mobile phones including dial-in and instant messaging services

Started in: 1996-97

Revenue: $15 million for 2007-08 (expected)

Manpower: 280 employees

Expansion: Moved from creating web portals and search engines to providing back-end operations for B2B services and expanding to ‘content monetisation’ via dial-in phone services and instant messaging services

Success Mantra: Persistence and patience

| Category: Press, Media & Events, Vss |