difference, but I...
difference, but I just think that hardware designers would be pretty good software
designers as well.
Livingston:Were you at all worried about intellectual property issues when you
left the company to start Hotmail?
Bhatia: No, they were totally different. We were designing chips, which had
nothing to do with the Internet.
Livingston: So you now have $300,000 and you’re working full-time on
Hotmail. What happened in the 6 months before you launched?
Bhatia: We got funded on February 14, 1996, and the site launched on the
Fourth of July. We had 100,000 subscribers in the first 3 months and we were
growing very rapidly from then on. We were literally getting 1,000, 2,000, 5,000
sign-ups every day.
Livingston: How?
Bhatia: It all spread by word of mouth. We launched a massive PR campaign
with a PR firm and started talking to different journalists. We did a West Coast
and East Coast press tour, and it just took off from there.
Sabeer Bhatia 21
Livingston: You had a tagline in the body of the email encouraging email recipients
to set up their own free Hotmail accounts. How did you come up with
this?
Bhatia: It was actually Jack’s idea to do that. We ran it by our VCs just to make
sure it was OK. When you alter somebody’s email, you’ve got to be very careful.
You’re sending an email to a friend of yours, and we are kind of violating the
sanctity of that email by putting in a tagline at the end of it that says “This message
has been sent from Hotmail. Get your free email at hotmail.com.”
So we asked Tim if it was OK that we did this. We said, “We don’t want to be
perceived as the evil company by altering their email.” And he said, “Absolutely,
you should do it.”
And the next thing we know, he claims that this idea was his. He’s given a
number of interviews literally claiming that he was the father of web-based
email—without him it would not have happened. I can’t believe he’s just taken
credit for everything—including the tagline (which later became known as the
classic example of viral marketing). He blatantly claims this at conferences,
which I don’t think is right.
Livingston: He claimed that web-based email was his idea?
Bhatia: That it was our idea, but without them, it would not have happened and
that we would have done JavaSoft. Their version is that “we told them to do
web-based email at that [first] meeting.” Why would they tell us to do webbased
email?
Livingston: You grew Hotmail’s user base faster than any other company in history
at that time. Do you believe it was more because you had a great product
| ← round. | or you had → |