Source : INDIA TODAY NEWS
Before the startup boom made entrepreneurship a national buzzword, Ajit Balakrishnan, an IIM Calcutta alumnus who had already built a successful advertising agency, was taking a bet on a technology that had barely arrived in India.
The dot-com boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s was, at the time, what artificial intelligence is today: a new technology drawing enormous attention and optimism, particularly in the West. Balakrishnan moved early, securing a leased internet line from VSNL at a time when very few in India were asking for one, and launched Rediff.com.
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What followed was an astounding journey: Rediffmail became the digital identity of an entire generation of Indians in the 2000s, while Rediff went on to become a Nasdaq-listed internet company before Gmail even existed.
Yet the company that arrived early, built some of India’s first major consumer internet services and briefly looked like the country’s Yahoo eventually lost its lead, including to Google, which entered the Indian market later.
FROM REDIFFUSION TO REDDIT
Balakrishnan co-founded advertising agency Rediffusion with Arun Nanda and Mohammed Khan when he was 22.
The agency, according to IIM Calcutta, rose rapidly in the 1970s and became one of India’s prominent advertising firms. — introduce your first subhead before this.
In a recent podcast conversation with Reddif, Balakrishnan recalled that his interest in technology went back much further. Growing up in Kannur, Kerala, in a family with doctors, he said he was surrounded by science from an early age.
His grandfather would read Bertrand Russell to him and discuss scientific ideas. That early curiosity, he suggested, eventually shaped his interest in technology and innovation.
In the mid-1980s, he moved into personal computers and helped establish PSI Data Systems with two engineers who had returned from Stanford.
Balakrishnan described it as an attempt to build an Indian PC business at a time when personal computers were still largely confined to government offices and institutions.
That venture eventually ran into a familiar problem in India’s technology history: policy and competition changed faster than the business could adapt.
As import duties on computers fell, imported machines became cheaper and PSI struggled to compete. Balakrishnan eventually exited the business.
Then came the internet.
THE Rediff BET
In 1995, Balakrishnan began building Rediff.com. Rediff’s own corporate history says the company was incorporated in January 1996, while Balakrishnan has described the website’s origins in 1995.
The timing was extraordinary. Commercial internet services had only recently arrived in India. There were few users, limited infrastructure and little understanding of what the web could become.
Balakrishnan recalled in the podcast that his office near the Bombay Stock Exchange was connected to the internet through a cable linked to VSNL infrastructure.
He said the setup was rudimentary: a small office, limited equipment and, initially, very few people who could write the code required to build the service.
He ended up writing much of the code himself.
Rediff began as a portal carrying news and information, but its ambitions quickly expanded. By 1998, the company was offering free email, news, homepages, jobs and e-commerce services.
A 1998 Financial Times report described Rediff as India’s most visited website at the time, with more than 650,000 visitors a month.
Its e-commerce ambitions were equally early. Rediff launched online shopping services when internet payments were still unfamiliar to most Indians. Its offerings included books, music, gifts, travel and hotel bookings. A 1998 Rediff report described its e-commerce operation as one of India’s first.
Then there was Rediffmail.
For an entire generation of early internet users, an email address ending in @rediffmail.com was often their first digital identity.
The service was designed for the realities of Indian internet access, where slow connections and limited bandwidth were common.
Rediff also invested in local-language services. By the mid-2000s, its email service was available in 11 Indian languages.
Rediff was not simply an Indian website following Silicon Valley. It was trying to build an internet ecosystem for a country that was still learning how to use the internet.
THE DOT-COM MOMENT
The company reached the height of the dot-com boom in 2000, when Rediff raised about $57.3 million through an American Depositary Share offering and listed on Nasdaq. It was among the earliest Indian internet companies to access the US public markets.
At the time, Google was still a young company. Gmail did not yet exist.
Rediff, meanwhile, was trying to build an all-in-one internet destination: email, news, cricket, shopping, jobs, entertainment and community services.
But the internet changed.
When Google entered the Indian market and Gmail later arrived with a radically larger storage allowance, fast search and a growing ecosystem of products, the competitive landscape began shifting.
Rediff remained an important internet brand, but the portal model that had once looked like the future gradually lost ground to specialised platforms, search engines, social networks and mobile-first services.
Rediff eventually raised its free email storage to 1 GB in 2004, matching Gmail’s headline storage proposition soon after Gmail’s launch.
But the larger battle was no longer simply about storage.
WHAT WENT WRONG?
Looking back, Balakrishnan is unusually candid.
In the podcast, he said that, with hindsight, he might have been more focused on building personal wealth and accumulating capital. More capital, he argued, could have allowed the company to acquire other businesses and compete differently.
He also acknowledged that Rediff was operating ahead of the market in several areas. Its early e-commerce experiment, for instance, ran into India’s weak payment and delivery infrastructure. The company was trying to build online commerce in an India of cash transactions, limited credit-card use and octroi barriers.
Rediff eventually delisted from Nasdaq in 2016, citing the costs associated with maintaining the listing amid its financial condition.
Today, Balakrishnan’s interest has moved beyond Rediff to a larger question: how societies respond to technological change.
In the recent podcast, he said he spends four to five hours a day writing code and experimenting with AI. But he remains sceptical of the idea that AI is the final technological revolution.
For the entrepreneur who once tried to build India’s internet before India was ready for it, that may be the most enduring lesson of the Rediff story. Being first can create history. But staying relevant requires understanding what comes next.
– Ends
SOURCE :- TIMES OF INDIA
