Internet is taking off in India, says Avnish Bajaj
Avnish Bajaj, co-founder and MD, Matrix partners India, has an interesting interview in Outlook Business. A few interesting excerpts from the interview:
Q: What did the successful guys (Internet companies) get right?
A: Well to begin with, focus. If you just go through the players and see who has done extremely well versus those who have not, you’ll see the difference. The ones who stuck to what they did best and didn’t try to do too many at that time, have worked.
Q: What are you seeing as other promising emerging businesses?
A: One would be online real estate classifieds sites.The other one which will emerge is, and we have also invested in that segment, local classifieds.The other opportunity where something has to work is the consumer side of the auto sector.
Q: As investor, what areas specifically are you actively looking at?
I think the Internet is finally beginning to take off in India. It starts with access and we’ve seen massive broadband rollouts in the last few years. Once access is in place, applications follow. We are actively looking for good gaming type of companies. I actually believe there is some opportunity still in financial products. Overall, if we believe that a product or service has even a 50% chance of succeeding, we’ll look at it.
So, if you’re an entrepreneur with an idea related to gaming and looking to raise funds, you know whom to contact first 
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May 29th, 2008 at 12:32 am
what’s consumer side of the auto sector all about?
May 29th, 2008 at 7:30 am
Consumer side of the auto sector is something like an Auto Zone. Something on which you can buy new/used vehicles or auto parts.
May 29th, 2008 at 5:38 pm
@shabbir,
I can only surmise what Avnish meant, but probably something like auto classifieds, carfax, carsdirect etc. ? might fall into the consumer side of auto sector…
May 30th, 2008 at 1:03 am
From the outset of it, seems like specialized classifieds, which is not major deal. However there has to be something lucrative about it, cause i have heard of it many a times from entrepreneurs etc …
Thank you Pranav and Kunal.
June 6th, 2008 at 6:39 am
Let’s suppose if India touches 100 million internet lovers in next 5 years then internet could be a good platform for advertisers to promote their products/services in to the eyes of Indian viewers. I think to do the same above Indian government support would be necessary to expand broadband connections in rural/semi urban areas. Also it is required to have online presence of all the major corporate in to Indian internet media by launching of new portals/services so that this activities might connect Indian consumers to internet for spending more time on it.