Sabeer Bhatia
Sabeer Bhatia was born in India in 1969. Sabeer Bhatia is one of the poster boys of Indian success story at Silicon Valley. He is better known as the man who co-founded Hotmail. He later sold it to Microsoft for $400 million and today Hotmail is the world’s largest e-mail provider, with over 50 million registered users. Bhatia’s success has earned him widespread acclaim. Launched blogeveywhere.com with co-founders Shiraz Kanga and Viraf Zack . His latest passion is to build a new city in Haryana, India called Nano city which aims to replicate the vibrance and eco-system of innovation found in Silicon Valley.
Birth of a computer wizard
Sabeer Bhatia was born in Chandigarh in the year 1969. He comes from a humble background. His father was an army officer and his mother worked with the Central Bank of India.He grew up in Bangalore and had his early education at Bishops Cotton’s School in Pune, then St. Joseph’s College in Bangalore. For a short-time he was a student at the Birla Institute of Technology (BITS), Pilani and in 1988 he went to US on a Cal Tech Transfer scholarship to get a bachelor’s degree at the California Institute of Technology. He earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University. At Stanford, he worked on Ultra Low Power VLSI Design.
It was at Stanford, that he was bitten by the "entrepreneurship" bug. He attended many a brown bag lunch to hear entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs and Scott McNealy. These lunches inspired him to become one himself.
Professional Life
After graduation, Sabeer briefly worked for Apple Computers as a hardware engineer and Firepower Systems Inc. While working there he was amazed at the fact that he could access any software on the internet via a web browser. His success graph took off exponentially when he, along with his colleague Jack Smith, set up Hotmail on 4th July 1996. Today, Hotmail remains the world’s largest e-mail provider with over 50 million registered users. On December 30th, 1997, they sold Hotmail to Microsoft for a reported sum of $400M. Sabeer Bhatia worked for Microsoft for a year until March of 1999, and then in the middle of 1999 he founded Arzoo.com
Arzoo.com was supposed to be a real-time marketplace for technology related solutions and support. It was envisaged as a platform that would enable engineers, developers and scientists from around the world to monetise their expertise on the one hand, and enable corporations to improve the productivity of their employees on the other. Sabeer Bhatia’s vision was to make Arzoo.com, the world’s largest human network of intellectual capital. But Arzoo.com failed with the burst of dot-com bubble. In 2006 Sabeer Bhatia relaunched Arzoo as a travel portal. Sabeer Bhatia has also started a new venture called BlogEverywhere, http://www.blogeverywhere.com with co-founders Shiraz Kanga and Viraf Zack.
Latest Project : Bhatia planning to build a new city in Haryana, India called Nano city at http://www.nanocity.in . Sabeer Bhatia’s Nano City will consist of both residential and commercial buildings, with high-rise buildings occupying most of the residential space. The project of building Nano City will be a joint venture between Bhatia and the state government of Haryana,
Awards
1. "Entrepreneur of the Year," Awarded by the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson (1997)
2. Named to the "Elite 100," Upside magazine’s list of top trendsetters in the New Economy
3. Recipient of the "TR100" award, presented by MIT to 100 young innovators who are expected to have the greatest impact on technology in the next few years
4. Selected by the San Jose Mercury News and POV magazine as one of the ten most successful entrepreneurs of (1998)
5. Named by TIME as one of the "People to Watch" in International Business (2002)
A young man only with a few dollars in his wallet when he left India created software history. By all odds, Sabeer Bhatia is an icon for the young and aspiring software professionals.
Latest - Sabeer Bhatia plans to build an 11,000-acre development called Nano City in the north India state of Haryana.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
If you are having writing skills and would like to be a part of IndianCitizens Portal, you can register for free and submit your articles. You get paid 50% of the revenue generated from your page. More Info
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment