Ice People: Anand Rajaraman

The internet man

Anand Rajaraman

When Anand Rajaraman was doing his Ph D in computer science from Stanford University, the internet was just about taking shape. At that time just about two companies existed that had anything to do with the internet: Yahoo! and Netscape, which had just gone public.

Rajaraman felt that the internet would be the dominant source of information. He was researching at that time "information integeration" or the ability to take different sources of information and integerate them into one big source of information. That's when he was struck with the idea of taking the idea of a virtual database and applying it to the internet.

And so was born Junglee.com, a company set up to provide internet services. Money was not easy to come by. Stanford University and the San Fransico Bay area fostered entrepreneurial activity, but investments were primarily made in software and semiconductors and chips.

Explains Rajaraman, co-founder and chief technology officer of Junglee: "The concept of the internet and of internet services was new. Yahoo! was the only one internet company and no one knew how it was going to make money, Netscape at that time was still selling software. So we found it difficult to explain this concept."

The seed funding finally came from Japanese and Taiwanese investors who were friends of one of the co-founders of the company. After that, there was no looking back.

But venture capitalists started funding Junglee's competitors. Junglee too by then managed to raise another round of funding, including from The Washington Post.

Says Rajaraman: "They had a belief in the transformative power of what we were doing. and the first product we developed was one for searching for jobs on the internet. This fitted well as classifieds were evolving on the internet. And they deployed our service on their website."

In 1998, Amazon.com took over Junglee and Rajaraman became director of technology for the company. Amazon, he says, was a great learning experience (he spent two years there).

The biggest lesson learned was that merchandising mattered "� this was what Amazon did best, right from merchandising products to mining customer data and using this to customise data for every user based on his buying pattern.

But by 2000, the start-up bug bit Rajaraman again and he set up Cambrian Ventures, a technology focused venture capital firm, along with other partners. He

declines to divulge the names of investors, citing confidentiality agreements, but says that the list includes the founders of companies like Yahoo!, Netscape and executives in companies like Compaq.

"The amount raised was not huge but we had no trouble doing it because of our background. So far, we have invested in 6-7 companies."

He thinks that while the internet is a dominant means of communications in the US and services will be built around it, the future in India lies in services built around mobile phones and delivered through them.