Ajit
Balakrishnan is quietly experimenting with the new and fascinating technologies
of the Internet in 1995 when the dot-com fever grips the world. Venture
capitalists, investment bankers and lawyers pound at the doors of his tiny
office in a low-rent area of Mumbai, urging him to take his company public on New York ’s NASDAQ stock
market. Balakrishnan sets out on this enterprise, a path that takes him through
the world’s financial centres of London , Hamburg , New York , Boston and San
Francisco .
This story recounts how he battles adversaries many times
his size; fends off avaricious lawyers who try to extort money through class
action suits in the tough courts of lower Manhattan; rebuffs investment bankers
who try to engineer the sale of his company; and tries to make sense of a world
where technology and business models change every few months.
He steers his company through the financial crashes of 2000
and 2008; watches in awe as terrorists bring down New York’s World Trade Centre
towers; puzzles over the decline of once famous names such as AOL and Netscape
and the rise of new behemoths like Facebook and Google; wrestles with India’s
legal system; and pushes to bring Rediff into the new world of the Internet.
Gradually, he realizes that the battles he is part of are not just business
battles – they signal the dawn of the Information Age.
This story recounts how he battles adversaries many times
his size; fends off avaricious lawyers who try to extort money through class
action suits in the tough courts of lower Manhattan; rebuffs investment bankers
who try to engineer the sale of his company; and tries to make sense of a world
where technology and business models change every few months.
He steers his company through the financial crashes of 2000
and 2008; watches in awe as terrorists bring down New York’s World Trade Centre
towers; puzzles over the decline of once famous names such as AOL and Netscape
and the rise of new behemoths like Facebook and Google; wrestles with India’s
legal system; and pushes to bring Rediff into the new world of the Internet.
Gradually, he realizes that the battles he is part of are not just business
battles – they signal the dawn of the Information Age.
