Hotmail: Email has made our way of communication very easy. Today most of us use Google’s Gmail. Apart from this, Yahoo and Outlook.com have also been big players in this sector. Outlook.com was earlier known as Hotmail and its creator was an Indian named Sabeer Bhatia. The story of this Hotmail and Sabeer Bhatia is very interesting. Sabeer Bhatia and his partner Jack Smith created Hotmail in 1996 and it was bought by a giant company like Microsoft in 1997 for $ 400 million just 18 months later. This deal was like a dream come true for Sabeer Bhatia.
The offer was for $140 million, the deal was done for $400 million
Sabeer Bhatia recently shared interesting stories related to Hotmail during a podcast. He said that we were a small company. It was a big deal for us to get an offer from a company like Microsoft so soon. We had set up the company by raising capital from here and there. We knew that this work would become big in the future but, at that time we were not able to make money from Hotmail. If we had refused Microsoft at that time, it would have been a big problem. Microsoft could have made a similar product itself. He told that Microsoft’s first offer was only 140 million dollars. After several months of negotiations, the deal was finally done for 400 million dollars.
Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith launched Hotmail in 1996
Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith started Hotmail on July 4, 1996. At the same time, a service called Rocketmail was also launched. It later became Yahoo! Mail. At that time, the free storage limit was only 2 MB. It received initial funding from venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. By December 1997, 85 lakh people had joined Hotmail. Before starting Hotmail, Sabeer Bhatia had worked with Apple Computers for some time.
Many companies were created but none could replicate the success of Hotmail
After Microsoft acquired Hotmail, he worked there for about a year. After this, he left Microsoft and started the e-commerce company Arzoo Inc. Apart from this, he also founded JaxtrSMS. However, he could not repeat the success of Hotmail. On the other hand, Hotmail’s other founder Jack Smith has been the CEO of the software company Proximex since 2007.
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