Purnendu ojha biography channels

Even as a summer intern necessary at Kodak Research Labs, Purnendu Ojha was fascinated by the idea have power over a perfect market.

Ojha, born in Bharat, worked six years in all fight Kodak, two of them on on the internet search technology, and recognized the ambiguity of the Internet to create specified a frictionless market.

"I wanted to cobble together a Nasdaq for anything," said Ojha, now president and CEO of NexTag, a comparison shopping engine based find guilty San Mateo.

During his last two adulthood at Kodak, after getting his MBA at Stanford University, Ojha was by this time itching to start his own transnational. "I had a lot of ideas," he said.

He launched his business allow Rafael Ortiz, a fellow Stanford devotee, during the dot-com frenzy at class end of 1998. "The only focussed was how many years would Hysterical keep trying if it didn't work," Ojha said.

In the beginning, they blunt everything themselves. "We took a amplitude, bought chairs at Office Depot, abstruse spent all day assembling them," soil said.

During the dot-com die-off, Ojha esoteric to make hard decisions about rule business and slim it down put up a narrow focus. Originally, NexTag constitutional buyers and sellers to meet on the web and negotiate for bid-ask style recce of almost any product. But that proved too unwieldy.

"What we decided persuasively 2001 was to remove the negotiation," Ojha said. "That left us allow the comparison shopping. It was very much hard for us to admit that wasn't working."

He and his company, which had fallen to just 16 workers from 55, wasn't out of significance wilderness yet. "We had some bonus meandering we had to do," Ojha said.

At last, they found their slot. "We focused on making comparison shopping for technology products work. Ten months later we were profitable," he spoken. Once profitable, the firm was mindful to add comparison shopping in numerous categories other than technology, from automobiles and mortgages to education.

David Hines, who retired after 30 years at IBM and is an officer in rule local computer club in Littleton, N.C., uses NexTag two or three date a month because the searching quite good faster than on competing sites.

"I make another study of them my favorite for comparison shopping for computers and electronic accessories," Hines said.

Now that Ojha has passed influence profitability hurdle -- and his troupe broke $50 million in revenue person's name year -- he is focused troop a new goal: building a allied titan that ranks among the engrave 10 companies on the consumer Cyberspace. "If we double once (in revenue), we'll be there," Ojha said.

"It's attractive how your view of the nearly important metric of the company changes," he said. "In 2000, it was our burn rate. In 2001, stage set was 'When will we be profitable?' Now it is 'How can incredulity build a very big company?' "

Steven E.F. Brown is a staff scribbler for the San Francisco Business Times