EDUCATION &JOB

• BA from St Stephen's college, and then

an MBA from IIM Ahmadabad.

• After three years in banking and exploring

various options in marketing (Arvind Mills

and Pizza Hut among them), Deep chose

to do something ‘crazy’.

• He joined AMF Bowling, which pioneered the

concept of bowling alleys in India .

• Although Deep worked for AMF as an employee,

it was entrepreneurial for two reasons.

– The fixed salary component was low, it was based around

bonuses and how much equipment you sold.

– Second, there was very loose support from the US office.

Apart from equipment support and service support, you

pretty much did your own thing.

INTO BUSINESS

• The years 1999-2000 were a great time for start-ups. You could run a dotcom business with a small amount of capital. And even that could be raised fairly easily from VCs.

• “The first guy I met gave me the money. He was Neeraj Bhargava, Managing Partner of eVentures. We actually closed the deal sitting in a café in the Crossroads Mall on a paper napkin!”

• Deep rues how ill informed he was. After consulting a couple of friends he agreed to give away 70% of the company for two million dollars funding.

• Luckily, he got a second chance to get it back.

• When the dotcom bubble burst, eVentures packed up from India and made a distress sale.

• Deep bought out his own company with his life savings. And that's when he believes he really became an entrepreneur.

DIFFICULT ROADS AHEAD….

• Within two to three months, it was apparent that, in the India of 2001, no one was buying online.

• Lots of lookers, very few bookers. Everyone was coming to the site and saying “Wow, this is cool.” But that was it.

• “The first metric that I learnt to measure in this business was the cost of customer acquisition.

• We now do it as a crazy science. We monitor it by the hour. Our web analytics, the real core of MIS, is the DSS of this business, ie, the Decision Support System. It's amazing what you can get.”

• It became clear that ‘India focus’ was pointless.

• So makemytrip simply stopped marketing in India. All energies were focused on US based NRIs. And that saved the company.

• NRIs were used to buying online.• Also they had a natural reason to come to

India year after year. Kids were being born, marriages were happening, so on and so forth.”

• Now the company was faced with another decision point - should it launch a real quick with a rough and dirty site or be build the coolest site in the world and take 6-9 months to launch?

• “ I am glad we chose the first. Because we launched in September 2005, when nobody else was in the market. ”

• “That made us synonymous with the term ‘online travel’. And we still occupy that space. Even though other portals have gone crazy advertising.” 

CURRENT CHALLENGES &PERFORMANCE

• The current challenge is to make the India business profitable. But the growth story has been astounding.

• By March 2008, makemytrip achieved $250 million in sales, ie, approximately Rs 1,000 crores.

• That translates into $20 million in commissions or Rs 80-90 crores.

• 70% of the business is now from India, with close to 10,000 tickets being sold online each day.

• The big challenge now is to sell other products online. With hotels, makemytrip is beginning to see a breakthrough. Still, a big change of habit is required.

• Then there is the sale of holiday packages. Mostly people collect information online but purchase offline, from a real human being.

• This is why makemytrip now has an 'army' of people selling packages over the phone. The company has set up 20 ‘travel stores’ across the country to be able to sell holiday packages to the various regional markets

• But you have to learn. You can never say ‘Hum toh online hai, kabhi offline nahin jaayenge.’ You don't define your business too narrowly. Travel means travel - on land, on sea, on air, offline, online, under the line, whatever.

• You start with an innovation, but then you extend tentacles into the regular side of the business as well.

• Of course all this growth did not just happen. Cash had to be burnt to build a national brand, so investors once again came into the picture. SoftBank Asia Infrastructure Fund was the first to invest.

• In subsequent rounds, Deep took money from three other funds - Helion Partners, Sierra Ventures and Tiger Global.

• Deep's investor philosophy is simple, “I have only taken in capital from guys who I think can add value to us”.

FAMILY SUPPORT• Luckily Deep got family support. • His wife always said, “You have got to do what

you love.” And that was how he left ABN with no regrets. 

• During the makemytrip crisis she said, “You have put in so much, you are seeing promise in it. I don't understand business the way you do, but if you think it's getting better month on month, and at some point it's going to be a good thing, then let's just go ahead and do it and make it happen.”

• She even offered to go back to working fulltime.

• The one thing she never said was, “Listen, let's just play safe!”

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