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ShareMumbai: He didn't turn his nose up at the prospect of joining his family-run socks manufacturing company, he simply folded his sleeves. By the time he decided he was done with it, Hindustan Hosiery had gone from an export turnover of Rs4 lakh in 1994 to an impressive Rs8 crore in 1999. But that was just the beginning for Alok Kejriwal, the stint honing his skill in sniffing out opportunities most people miss. And he's made a career out of it.
It's what led him to cyberspace, the last outpost you'd ever expect to find a nice, traditional Marwari boy with a master's degree in commerce from Sydenham College -- and zero IT skills. "I was fascinated by the internet," says Alok, who started his first venture Contests2win with an investment of just Rs5,000 and a grudge against all those online contests he never won.
"It's so natural to pass on a good song amongst friends -- no one realises that this sharing is considered stealing by the music industry. But we'll all have to accept reality and formulate business models that work around this," he says. When his original gaming content was being stolen at will by hundreds of websites, his counter was a masterstroke.
"After the initial frustration, we realised at least it is of value, otherwise no one would be stealing the games. So we created a new software that played out ads whenever these games were played, on any website. So pirates kept stealing them and these 'inviziads' generated income for us -- they actually made us one of the top 20 gaming networks in the world. I can say piracy built my business -- we respect our pirates," laughs Alok.
With four commercial internet companies and angling for his fifth, Alok admits he'd "love to do a Sabeer Bhatia" (who created history in 1997 when sold his start-up Hotmail to Microsoft for $400 million on his 29th birthday), but he's not losing any sleep over it.
The Midas touch
Consider
it incongruous or brilliantly eclectic, but Alok's office walls at
Tardeo's Film Centre building are covered with dozens of original
posters of Bollywood classics. "I picked them up on an impulse. Today
they are worth almost 10 times what I invested," he says.
Not a traditional Marwari did we say?
