Reading Space Episode | Sneak Peek Part 1

Reading Space Episode | Big Billion Startup - Excerpt

One morning in August 2004, a few days ahead of his twenty-first birthday, Ajay Bhutani was woken up by a persistent knock on the door. It was 7 a.m. and Ajay was lying exhausted in his small hostel room at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi.

Ajay had dropped into bed only two hours ago, after a gruelling night at the computer laboratory on campus. He was in the penultimate semester of his four-year programme in computer science. Campus recruitment – the reason IIT students had put carefree college life on hold – was just days away. Ajay, a Punjabi boy from Faridabad, had been preparing for recruitment season for the last three years. He needed to sleep to be awake for it. But the knocking wouldn't stop. Outside, one of his hostel mates called out, 'Abey, uth ja, ek company aayi hai.' Hey, wake up, a company's here.

Ajay rubbed his eyes. 'Kaun si?' Which one?

'Amazon.'

'Amazon?'

'Kitaabe bechti hai online.' Th ey sell books online.

'Usse kya hota hai?' What's the use of that?

'Paise bahut de rahi hai.' They're offering high salaries.

'Achha? Chalo.' Really? I'm coming.

Amazon, the American online retail pioneer, had opened its India offices in the southern city of Bangalore the previous month. In the early 2000s, dozens of dotcoms – as internet companies were then known – had gone bankrupt. Amazon, which had been one of the prominent faces of the

technology boom and bust, had managed to emerge from this gloom, albeit with a diminished reputation and stock price.

In August 2004, the young search engine Google listed its shares, fetching a valuation that was far higher than that of Amazon. EBay, an online marketplace and auctions site and Amazon's rival, earned higher profits and was considered a better-run company.

This may not have bothered Amazon's founder Jeff Bezos, who coincidentally was an early investor in Google. Bezos was known to mainly be obsessed with keeping Amazon's customers happy rather than worry about rivals or stock-market valuations. But there was one other goal that kept him occupied – he wanted to transform Amazon, a hawker of books, toys and electronics, into an all-purpose technology company. Yet, all Amazon seemed to be doing was selling books, toys and electronics. It was time the company started experimenting and venturing onto new avenues. One of these initial experiments happened to be a search engine called A9. Introduced in September 2004, A9 set out to be a more advanced version of Google.

Bezos put Udi Manber, an accomplished Israeli technologist he had lured away from Yahoo, in charge of A9. In turn, Udi persuaded Bharat Vijay, one of Yahoo's early employees and a brilliant engineer, to join the A9 team in 2004. Aft er working at Yahoo's headquarters in San Francisco for nearly five years, Bharat had moved back to his country in 2000 to set up Yahoo's India office in his home city of Bangalore. Four years on, Bharat's mandate now was to launch Amazon's India office. He had to assemble and lead a team that could make image searches on the internet easier, an area in which Google wasn't exactly breaking new ground.

Bangalore seemed like a good place to hire engineers for A9. Some of the smartest employees at technology companies in the US were Indians, many of whom were graduates of the Indian Institutes of Technology, a chain of government-subsidized engineering colleges that Jawaharlal Nehru had established in the 1950s. Amazon had arrived armed with the knowledge that IIT-educated engineers could become real assets to a company. After all, it was a group of IIT engineers who had started Junglee – a website that allowed people to compare product prices across shopping sites which Amazon had acquired in the late 1990s. Determined to recruit the exceptionally talented, Amazon was keen to open its doors to more such inventive engineers.