A proud and nostalgic look at 10 years

Moneycontrol's tenth anniversary opens such a bin of memories for me. I remember we were a one-channel, Rs 15 crore company at that time (can you imagine what a journey it's been since Moneycontrol.com was born? Today our revenues are a hundred times larger - Moneycontrol sure was born under auspicious stars!). Those were the days of the dotcom boom. Traditional media companies were being lionised as 'emerging tech companies' simply because they had the potential to leverage their content on the internet. Media analysts were falling over each other to give fantastic market valuations to anybody with a credible 'internet story'. But I must hasten to add that stratospheric valuations were only a collateral benefit - at TV18, we were convinced that the future of business news and information had to be on the web. If we had ignored the internet at that time, our shareholders would have never forgiven the inevitable destruction of value that would have occurred in a matter of years.
 
Moneycontrol was supposed to be called 'Rupeemaker.com' at one stage. Frankly, I was born and brought up under the gaze of print, radio and television - my understanding of the internet was, at best, rather suspect. While putting together an ace television channel came naturally to me, the internet bit was fuzzy. So we were struggling to come up with a viable architecture of an 'accompanying portal for the television channel'. Since our own credentials were rather thin, we had appointed a Bangalore-based agency to design the website. There was enormous pressure from investment analysts to 'embellish' our market-leading TV channel with a credible internet strategy - that would have given them the fodder they were looking for to put an even stronger buy recommendation on our stock. It was a lovely little merry-go-round that 'internet entrepreneurs' and 'media analysts' were playing with each other in those days of incredibly (and foolishly) booming markets.
 
We took a power-point presentation of Rupeemaker.com to one of the leading venture capitalists of that time. Within two days, he had faxed across a term sheet, valuing the non-existent portal higher than CNBC-TV18. Alas, the dotcom bubble burst, and all flights of fantasy (and market valuations) crashed. The term sheet was no longer worth the paper it was printed on. Mercifully, Haresh (Chawla) took over as CEO during that time, and quashed our Rupeemaker misadventure (the Bangalore chaps were clueless about the design or features of the portal). Haresh had (and continues to have) one of the keenest internet minds that I have engaged with. He bought the fledgling Moneycontrol from its original owner, and scaled it up with several unique attributes. He put together a fabulous team, which leads it to this day. Even as the internet became a bad word with singed investment bankers, we continued to invest in Moneycontrol.com. Dozens of internet companies and websites were crashing all around us - but Moneycontrol continued to thrive and grow through the crisis years. It is, like TV18, a child of adversity. Which is why it rules in its space, an unquestioned leader, the envy of its competitors. But it cannot - and shall not - rest on its laurels. I am convinced that ten years later, on its twentieth anniversary, we would be celebrating a portal which is a hundred times stronger, deeper and more successful than it is today.

The author, Raghav Bahl is the Managing Director of Network18.