"Frankly, the talent market is super hot right now. Every company is hiring. Every company has higher attrition than they had a year ago," says Info Edge MD & CEO.
Sanjeev Bikhchandani on Zomato: âKnew they would succeed but not that they would be this bigâ We knew that they would succeed however we did not know they would become this big. Nobody could have imagined this scale of success back in 2010 when we first invested, said Bikhchandani Investor Sanjeev Bikhchandani on Zomato s success Aabha Bakaya
Updated Aug 04, 2021, 4:21 PM IST
Long before Zomato became a billion-dollar public company, it was spotted by lone investor and founder of Info Edge, Sanjeev Bikhchandani. One could very well say that the ârest is historyâ but it is one of perseverance and of taking chances. From taking off as a fledgling startup called Foodiebay and facing existential crisis to transforming the fortunes of its investors, Zomato has grown by leaps and bounds. Early investor Bikhchandani speaks to Business Todayâs Aabha Bakaya on Zomatoâs journey.
Infosys are trading at the upper end of the PE multiple?
We have spoken to a lot of CTOs of western companies over the last year or so and the picture they are giving us is that over the next four, five years, each of the top 1,000 western companies will have to digitise their own businesses. They want to take their old economy IT constructs where they had servers and server farms and so on and move to a new economic construct where the data is on the cloud, where they have data lakes and modern analytics and the whole business model gets reinvented around AI, around real time analytics to recreate supply chains which are more responsive to customer demand and to economic patterns.
ETtech
Sanjeev Bikhchandani, the founder and vice chairman of Info Edge, wrote
Zomato’s first cheque of Rs 4.7 crore in 2010 and was its sole investor in the first four funding rounds. Info Edge, which runs portals like
Naukri.com and 99 acres.com, has seen its investment value
zoom nearly 1,050 times after the food delivery app’s IPO. Bikhchandani, who has been closely associated with Zomato through all its crests and troughs, told ET’s Digbijay Mishra and Sneha Shah in an interview that it will hold on to the bulk of the shareholding (around 15%) as it sees tremendous growth potential in Zomato. Info Edge, he said, has seen an internal rate of return (IRR) of roughly 60% from the restaurant aggregator over the years, a record. Bikhchandani, a first-generation internet entrepreneur, also spoke about what the Zomato IPO means for the startup ecosystem and how exits will ensure more capital is ploughed back. Edited Excerpts: