Getting It Right, Time After Time

Serial entrepreneurs and internet services barons, brothers Bhavin and Divyank Turakhia, have managed to replicate their success with every new business they have built

- Ruchika Shah

What is common between MotoGP champion Valentino Rossi and Formula 1 legend Michael Schumacher? Both were introduced to racing at an early age, and went on to become world champions. Rossi was five when he drove his first kart before shifting gears to motorcycles. Schumacher was greeted to his first kart at four. The early-age mantra has been a part of so many champions’ stories that it can easily be called a ‘recipe for success’ in the world of racing.

It also appears to apply to coding. It’s not a cakewalk to build a million dollar business in the first outing. And the odds are stacked even higher when the business is in a nascent industry with only about 100,000 takers in the country.

But Directi founder—brothers Bhavin, 38, and Divyank Turakhia, 36— beat all odds with their web-hosting and domain name registry business that they set up in 1998, when the internet was relatively new in India. The brothers were 16 and 14 then. And while building a company may have been a first for the duo, computer tech was not new to them. Their chartered accountant father bought them their first coding book when they were eight. They devoured programming books like candy since then.

EARLY SUCCESS

Directi became the fastest growing domain registrar in Asia three years after it was started, they claim, and one of the fastest growing in the world at the time. It closed its first fiscal (FY1999) with $5,000 in revenues. The first million was made within five years of operations—in FY03, it posted $2 million in revenues. It rose 5x to $10 million in the next two years.

The brothers had made their first million before they were 20; they were worth $300 million in their mid-20s, and are billionaires before turning 40.