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If you’re Gen-Z, look away.
For the rest of us, 27 years ago, on July 4, 1996, Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith launched ‘Hotmail’ — the first email service available to the public. For many of us, it was our initiation into the internet. It changed the way we communicated in the shape of free email for the entire world.
But now, it’s the era of WhatsApp, ChatGPT, Bitcoin, Teams, Zoom, Metaverse and VR. Bhatia, who created a ubiquitous tech brand, then sold it at a massive price, tells us that he doesn’t celebrate Hotmail’s milestones anymore. But it’s there, “at the back of my mind”.
Bhatia is currently the co-founder of ShowReel, a video conversation and analytics company that encourages entrepreneurship through short-form video content.
Make the decision
Speaking from his home in Los Altos Hills, California, Bhatia says that revolutionising email, and the internet in a way, is a gratifying feeling. “It’s my small contribution to the development of not just a new medium of communication, but everything today,” he tells Brand Equity.
With the email service’s popularity skyrocketing in the mid-late 90s, Microsoft took notice and Hotmail was eventually acquired for $450 million — the largest all-cash Internet startup transaction of its day.
“Selling a big brand is a combination of what the circumstances are, what the forces are at the point in time and what your thought process is,” Bhatia says, adding that while you cannot predict the future, you need to use your imagination. “In our case, the choice was quite simple. If we had not sold, Microsoft would have gone ahead and developed its own version. We were not a cash generating kind of company. Like how WhatsApp is today, we had a huge amount of subscribers but it wasn’t cash rich. A few years after we sold, there was a downturn in the market too,” he adds.
Looking back
Hindsight is always 20/20. “If I had kept Hotmail — given how the internet has really exploded and how it is being used, how many different players there are and what kind of interactions — we would have had probably a couple of billion users on the platform. And that has tremendous value obviously,” Bhatia reasons.
While he still has his Hotmail address, like the rest of us, he’s now moved on to Gmail. “Gmail has done a great job and it came around when Hotmail was limiting storage. Kudos to Google. Younger people will use Gmail and more power to them,” Bhatia says.
Bhatia laughs and recounts, “Someone sent me a clip of a movie the other day — The Man from Toronto — where Woody Harrelson says, ‘Hotmail.com? Who the hell still uses Hotmail.com?’ I’m like: Yeah, that shows how old you are.”
May the best tech win
“We’ve come a long way since,” says Bhatia. At the NASSCOM Technology & Leadership Forum 2023, he talked about the future of communication and technology, saying that we shouldn’t “reinvent the wheel, but build upon it”. And he’s a fan of one of the newest tech changing the landscape of software — AI. “I started experimenting with the newest form of AI products, Lumen5. I was able to make incredibly powerful presentations in half-an-hour. There is a different world we will be living in soon.”
Bhatia feels that the best tech is one that solves a problem and creates a positive disruption. Google, Amazon and Uber get his vote. “It has to be a good idea. It has to solve some problems that people have. It has to make the world a better place. If those three questions are answered, there is room for brand creation in a relatively short period of time,” he says.
Does his track record mean there is more pressure on him to create “good tech”? Bhatia is quick to dismiss the word ‘pressure’. “I would say it enhanced my critical thinking,” says Bhatia. Money no longer impresses him (“I’ve been there and done that a long time ago”). Today he is driven by ideas that can make the world a better place. “Deep down, the guiding philosophy for me is — I read it at my kids’ elementary school — it’s not enough to change the world, you must make it better.”
Two weeks ago, in a voluntary move ahead of the long-expected white paper, English Premier League football clubs said they would phase out gambling sponsorship on the front of players’ shirts over the next three seasons. The problem of addiction has grown far more acute since smartphones and apps brought gambling within easy reach of millions, and advertising during televised matches offers minute-by-minute odds.
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