Satya Prabhakar: Portal tycoon

ICE PEOPLE

Satya Prabhakar

Satya Prabhakar, founder and CEO of Sulekha.com, prefers to describe his web site as an anti-portal. Says he: "My web site does not offer email, search or e-commerce. We offer an intermediate platform for people to connect and network."

In the late 1990s, during the dotcom boom, when everyone was setting up a web site for e-commerce, Prabhakar and his wife Sangeeta Kshettry set up a website called Sulekha.com. This published articles by Indians around the world. He chose not to set up the service in India because he felt that India was still inhospitable for the internet.

But at the same time, he realised that a significant percentage of the Indians in the US need to be connected within the US and with India. So Sulekha.com began offering services such as bulletin boards, discussion forums and news about local events.

Despite its conservative financial management, the company did not escape the dot com bust unscathed. Prabhakar did what many may not do "� he took a 50 per cent pay cut. In June 2003, the company posted its first profit. Since then, there has been no looking back.

Today, he thinks it is profitable to invest in India and so the company employs 75 people in India and eight people in the US.

According to him, the internet is the only interactive medium, apart from the mobile phone, which has still not been tapped effectively by companies worldwide. But he is happy that while it took companies 25 years to advertise on television, it has taken them only six years to advertise on the internet.

Sulekha.com has become a recognisable brand in the US and Indians there rely on the web site for classified ads and local events.

Prabhakar recently assured Yash Raj Productions that 180,000 tickets to current movie "Veer Zara" would be sold in the US. In the first week alone, the web site sold 5,000 tickets across the US.

Prabhakar believes that the future lies in city-based portals, with attention spans getting shorter. The Rs 18 crore Sulekha.com has a network of 60 city portals worldwide and has tie ups with Yahoo and MSN to provide city-based information.

The local need has been extended to the print medium too "� Sulekha.com has area-based newspapers in cities like Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, New York and the San Francisco Bay Area.