In today’s episode of Founder Thesis, host Akshay Datt is in conversation with Dinesh Agarwal, the founder, and CEO of IndiaMART. IndiaMART is India’s largest B2B marketplace for small & medium enterprises (SMEs), large enterprises, and individuals.
Before starting IndiaMART, Dinesh worked at HCL technologies in Silicon Valley as a software engineer and gained early exposure to the internet and the power of technology.
In this candid conversation, he talks about overcoming loneliness and other challenges of living in a foreign country. However, the two things close to his heart that kept him going were India and computers. The urge to come back to India and start his business kept growing stronger with each passing day. He was so fascinated by the Internet that he made his mind leverage its potential and create something massive out of it. Rest, as they say, is history.
Well, what started in the early internet era as an idea, is now a platform that has more than 10 crores registered users on it. And of course, it continues to grow even though it's been almost 25 years since it started.
He recalls IndiaMART’s early years when his wife would answer queries from buyers outside India and he would use a simple hack of going to trade fares to build his dataset and generate leads.
Tune in to this exclusive chat with Dinesh Agarwal and listen to him talk about everything Internet and ECommerce.
What you must not miss from the episode?
- Cultural challenges of living in a foreign economy.
- The ups and downs of establishing an internet company in India.
- The dot-com boom from someone who saw it happen!
- How did IndiaMART get their first client paid order and how did they generate leads.
