Making It Big

In a freewheeling chat about his life and passions beyond work, Bigbasket Co-founder and CEO Hari Menon tells us how he built, and runs, India’s largest online grocery

- Amit Ranjan Rai

In the late 1990s, the heyday of the dotcom boom, six friends — Hari Menon, VS Sudhakar, Vipul Parekh, Sundeep Thakran, K Vaitheeswaran and VS Ramesh — got together and launched India’s first online store: Fabmart. With much fanfare, the horizontal e-tailer, much like today’s Flipkart, rolled out multiple categories like music, books, computers, jewellery, toys, and so on. Funding wasn’t too much of an issue. Investors were throwing money at any and all companies with a "dot com" attached to their name. There was a lot of frenzy among investors and entrepreneurs alike. Nobody wanted to miss the bus in a world where the internet was about to change everything. Alas, that didn’t happen. By 2001, the great bubble popped and dotcoms started collapsing like a house of cards.

“The eco-system was just not ready for internet businesses,” says Hari  Menon, Fabmart’s co-founder. “We operated on dial-up lines. Customers were scared to use their credit card on the net. There weren't any robust online payment gateways. There was more hype than actual transactions by customers. As a result, in a short span of time, the internet economy collapsed and there was bloodbath all over,” he adds.