JUNGLEE  comes home to inspire

by Anshuman Bapna _______________________________________________________________

On the 15th of Jan, 1999, the students of IITB came face to face with one of IITB's pride - Rakesh Mathur. And it wasn't difficult to see why he is one of the most successful netpreneurs in the world today. Fielding questions that ranged from how a virtual databank works to, well, what his grade card was at IITB, Mr. Mathur, the savvy "junglee" charmed the inquisitive audience with his repartees and incredible insights into the working of the retail market on the internet. He was speaking at the Prelude to Techfest'99, IIT Bombay's annual technology festival.

Presently, Vice President of Amazon.com - the company that bought Junglee.com at a whopping $240m - Mr. Mathur spoke at length about his brainchild as well as his present responsibility. Amazon was formed in mid '94 by Jeff Bezos and was launched in mid '95. Today it's valued at $900m and is the #1 global e-commerce brand. Rakesh Mathur described Amazon.com as 'the world's largest store with a personalised feel'. On the other hand, Junglee 'makes frictionless commerce possible by making every product from every supplier available for purchase by every customer. Thus together they help customers discover, find and buy every product for sale on the web. No wonder that Amazon has come up trumps, what with the reigning paradigm in internet business being "winner take all".

The story behind the birth of Junglee also makes interesting reading. Mathur and his co-founders - who were doing research in Stanford University - got together in May'96. Seed funding arrived in '96 June. The company landed Washington Post jobs in Jan '97 and Yahoo Shopping in Dec '97. Finally in August '98 Junglee.com merged with Amazon and the rest they say is history. Junglee's success did not go unnoticed. They bagged the ACM Database Paper of the Year Award in '96 and featured in a number of top 100 lists. Replying to a query about funding in the States, Mr. Mathur attributed the relatively easy financing for Junglee to his Venture Capital contacts from his Intel days. Between the four of them they owned 6.5 million shares of a total of 12 million. At 50 cents per share, it came to $3.25 million. The finance people had a buy back option for 48 months. So, they ensured that most of the ownership was with them.

Commenting on the fears that the exponential growth of the internet would soon plateau, Mr. Mathur remarked that the complexity of interaction between users of the internet depended on the nature of interconnectivity. For example, if a person is communicating with n others, the level of complexity is itself very large. The internet shall make it possible to connect simultaneously 100m users. The level of complexity if quantified, would be larger than the universe! Since we haven't even started approaching that level of connectivity, the future of the internet was limited by only one thing, our imagination. Explaining the working if an Internet Mall( as a bookstore in Amazon's case), Mr. Mathur pointed out three factors that made these online services good value for money: Accessibility, comfort and paranoid Customer Focus. He stressed that an online book retail business made more sense in terms of inventory and cash flows. After all, Barnes & Noble sells a book in 185days while it needs to make its payments to publishers in 30 days. On the other hand, an online store can afford plenty of cash surplus since it gets the order, sends shipments and receives the credit transaction within 3 days while the payments are still 27 days down the line.

Drawing from his own experiences as an entrepreneur, Mr. Mathur stressed on the importance of having like-minded partners, best hired hands and most importantly - customer focus. No wonder that everyone involve with Junglee.com is a millionaire. One can expect no less with such guiding principles that Rakesh Mathur lays down as "a new math 1+1>2".

Anshuman Bapna [bapna6ue[!]ccs.iitb.ac.in

Organiser, Techfest '99

Incidentally, it might interest people to know that the original utterer of the words 'Yahoo' and 'Junglee' the inimitable Shammi Kapoor is a total 'net' fan !

Prof. S.L.N. Murthy, Dean (RD)