SANTA CLARA (California), NOV 6: On a freezing cold New Year's eve in 1997, while much of the world was roistering over a variety of spirits, a young Indian entrepreneur was aglow with a different concoction altogether: money and success, the kind of which few of his ilk had seen. Sabeer Bhatia is now the poster boy for desi accomplishment. The storied tale of his success, consecrated into Silicon Valley legend, is so inspiring that it has forever changed the image of Indians in the United States.Bhatia himself was a representative of the old school when he first came to study in the US in 1988 with $250 in his pocket. A brilliant student from a modest Bangalore background - Dad in the public sector, Mom in a bank - they all thought he was made for life when after college he landed a job in Apple. Then he was touched by an idea. This itself, is not surprising in Silicon Valley. The difference was how he parlayed the idea into $400 million and folklore status.In two years, his Hotmail, the world'sforemost e-mail service, built a user base faster than any company in history, including CNN and America Online. With 25 million active accounts and 125,000 newbies each day, it was enough for even the giant Microsoft to come sniffing. And at first when the world's most fearsome tech company came offering a callow Indian $50 million for an enterprise that wasn't making a cent, he rejected it.The bid went up to $100 million, $200 million, $250 million but Bhatia held out. When he rejected $350 million, his colleagues and backers alternately sweated bricks and wept blood, as they say in these parts. ``Saying no to that offer was the scariest thing I ever did,'' Bhatia recalled later in the book The Nudist on the Late Shift that avidly captured the drama.On New Year's Eve 1997, Microsoft finally coughed up $400 million. The Sabeer Bhatia saga has inspired so many young Indian wannabes in the Valley that it's not unusual for twenty somethings to now sneer a mere millions.Schmoozing around at atechnie conference last month, Munish Jain and Kalpak Shah are prospecting capital for their brand new e-commerce idea. The cover name for their venture is iDurbar, and they will speak sparingly about it. Essentially, the idea revolves around online shopping with the haggling option. Which means, unlike on auction sites like eBay and uBid, or bidding sites like Priceline.Com or Accompany.Com, you can bargain. ``Somewhat like in an Indian bazaar,'' says Jain with a grin. ``Real time dynamic pricing,'' adds Shah.The great thing about the Valley is that there is no shortage of money to back a good idea. Jain and Shah know that if they kickstart their venture modestly with their own seed money and make it a reasonable success, someone will come along and buy them out for a few millions. They are not interested. Their argot is typical valleyspeak. They want to stay ahead of the curve. They want Big. They want to do it in one-year Internet time. Says Jain, ``Venture Capitalists are not interested any more inmillion-dollar start-ups. Anything less than half a billion or a billion is a waste of time.''For Indians, Think Big is no more just a poster they saw in Khan Market or MG Road. They do. They also take extraordinary risks, the kind they would not even dream of in India. ``In the Valley, failure is not a stigma,'' says Shah, knowing fully well that the iDurbar of today can be the iDreamt or iFlopped of tomorrow. There is a sense of restlessness and adventure among techie Indians here that is truly unique.Take Desh Deshpande from the first story in this series. He cranked out three start-ups, including a failed debut, before flowering Sycamore. Earlier this year, 27-year old Nirav Tolia of Yahoo! and 24-year old Naval Ravikant of @Home and 34-year old Ramanathan Guha of Netscape left million dollar jobs to start Epinions.Com, an e-commerce start up. Hundreds of Indians are now routinely leaving their $100,000-a-year jobs to give tech startups a shot.Even those who have made it are still trying to makeit all over again. Indians may never win an athletic Gold in Olympics in our lifetime but in the tech field they could easily adopt the Olympian slogan of Citius Altius Fortius. Faster Higher Stronger. Only months after merging with Microsoft, Bhatia is at it again with another online venture called Arzoo! Not satisfied with the $7 billion Cerent, Vinod Khosla looks for something bigger and better and come up with Juniper. Indians seems particularly adept at e-commerce ventures: Four IIT-ians pioneered online comparison shopping with Junglee.com; an Indian kicked off the first online mortage service called Xpede; another bunch was involved in the women's site IVillage. And now two Indians have started a site called ethnicgrocer.com.``I guess it goes with our dukandari (shopkeeper) mentality,'' jokes Prakash Bhalerao, CEO of Ambit Designs and one of the Indian tech gurus in the Valley. That merchandiser mindset is extravagantly represented by Naveen Jain, a brash young entrepreneur, originally fromGhaziabad, whose company Infospace is one of the most-talked about ventures in the chaotic field of e-commerce. Jain pre-dates Sabeer Bhatia as a Bill Gates acolyte before quitting Microsoft and launching Infospace. ``My defining moment was when I left Microsoft. Being in MS you become unemployable, you become so damn arrogant you cannot work for anybody else,'' recalls Jain. ``If you can't work for anyone else you have to start a company. And if you start a company, it has to be a success because failure is not an option.''Jain's Infospace now has a market cap of over $2 billion and is one of the brighter rising stars in the burgeoning dotcom world. Among the Indian community, he is already a senior statesman of techdom. ``Everything we do in our life is driven by fear, greed or hormones,'' says Jain, dispensing his own brand of dotcom wisdom to desi wannabes at a networking event last month. If he is right, then let it be said that Indians are intrepid, ambitious and testosterony.(Next in SiliconValley Saga Part IV - Femme Fettle: Indian women show their mettle too)
