Here's a former national long jumper (represented Maharashtra) who has leaped across many pits to find himself at Yahoo! India as its director and country general manager besides being the chairman of the Internet and Mobile Association of India. The man, Neville Taraporewalla, says that right from his school days at Campion, Mumbai, he was always "a go-getter, looking out for what to do".
After completing his administrative management course, he was looking for a "suitable opportunity" when he ran into Marzban Patel (then editor of Mediascope) who "introduced him to the world of advertising and media".
"I was successfully selling advertisement space in foreign publications at a time when advertisers were not ready to spend big bucks," he says. Taraporewala then moved to the The Times of India where he "really got interested in marketing".
He then joined Khaleej Times. He terms this "my first real break since it was about to change my life". While he (then just 26 years of age) was supposed to sell advertisment space for the paper in the UAE, he ended up sell advertisements for the paper in Central Europe and Scandinavia, almost eight months in a year "� all this even as he was just married. "International travel changed me. I got to understand international markets in those three-and-a-half years," says Taraporewala.
It was at this juncture that TOI made him an offer again to "set up an office in Dubai from scratch". "This was my first connect with the Internet. I could see the potential. However, I adopted a wait-and-watch attitude," he says.
Meanwhile, the Internet boom happened. Taraporewala "was clear this was a bubble", yet he "took a risk" and joined Mid-Day Multimedia as director sales, after which he joined Yahoo!Web Services India (The company which runs Yahoo! India) in his current capacity.
However, the Internet wave was losing steam around that time. Yahoo! India wanted to reduce manpower and yet make the operations profitable. Taraporewala rose to the "challenge" and has got the workforce to 100 from a mere nine employees in December 2002.
"I feel I'm a people's man." What's ahead? "I would take up anything that's a challenge. It's not necessarily in the Internet space. For now, though, Yahoo! India offers enough of it," he says.
