And the other...
And the other lessons are you’ve got to own the customer and make sure
there is a full loop between your product and that it has the least amount of
resistance before you get to your end customer. Do partnerships; what Google
did with partnerships was phenomenal—giving the search away to other companies
to help them make their so-called portals. But in the end, Google got the
customer because they got the branding.
Livingston: You were a programmer. How did you learn how to write a business
plan? Tell me about the one you wrote for Hotmail.
Bhatia: There are some things that, even though you go to school for a certain
reason and you gain skills, are just natural talents that people have. One of the
natural talents that I believe I have is the ability to communicate. A business
plan is nothing more than your own communication to a person not sitting in
front of you—an imaginary person who will read it. Try to answer every possible
question that that person could raise. That’s the description of a business plan,
really.
I didn’t take any formal lessons. I just sat down and I wrote about the problem
we were trying to solve, and in two paragraphs I described the World Wide
Web and how it had grown and what its future potential could be. I said, this is
the problem today that we are trying to address, this is how we hope to address
it, with this idea. This is how we hope to monetize it and this is what page
impressions are able to fetch you in the print world. If you translate it into the
online world, this is how it will happen. And that’s it, that was the core of our
business plan.
I wrote it in one night, and the next day I went to work looking really sleepy
and tired. My boss said, “Another one of those days of late-night partying?” I’m
like, “Yeah, something like that.” He said, “Alright, you’ll be productive only in
the afternoon. Take the morning off.” Little did he know that I was actually up
all night writing a business plan, not partying.
Sabeer Bhatia 29
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