Show Notes
In this episode of SparX, Mukesh Bansal sits down with Sanjeev Bikhchandani, founder of Info Edge (Naukri.com), the man who quietly built the foundation of India’s internet economy. From bootstrapping Naukri for 10 years without a salary to backing iconic startups like Zomato and Policybazaar, Sanjeev’s story is a masterclass in patience, conviction, and timing. He reflects on his early dreams of entrepreneurship in the 1970s, quitting his stable job in the 80s for independence, surviving the dot-com bubble, and helping shape India’s startup ecosystem. They talk about: How Naukri was born before the internet arrived in India.
The 7 years Sanjeev lived without a salary and how he made it work.
Missing early investments in Flipkart, Ola, and Lenskart and what he learned.
The mental models around luck, timing, and persistence.
Why India still hasn’t built trillion-dollar tech companies and how that could change.
His hopes for India’s next wave of startups in AI, deep tech, and IP creation.
Sanjeev also opens up about his personal evolution from a restless 25-year-old marketer selling Horlicks to one of India’s most respected entrepreneurs and investors. If you want to understand the real DNA of Indian entrepreneurship, this conversation is a rare glimpse into the mind of the man who started it all.
Chapters: 00:00 – 01:18 Introduction 01:19 – 03:38 Missing Flipkart, Myntra & Ola 03:39 – 10:10 The JRD Tata Moment 10:11 – 17:36 Early Career & Struggles 17:37 – 24:08 First Startup Experiments 24:09 – 30:09 How Naukri Was Born 30:10 – 41:44 Dotcom boom & crazy valuations 41:45 – 44:14 The Role of Luck 44:15 – 51:27 Betting Early on India’s Unicorns 51:28 – 54:09 What He Seeks in Founders 54:10 – 1:03:03 Can India Build Trillion-Dollar Tech Giants? 1:03:04 – 1:10:22 Career Advice from Sanjeev
More from SparX by Mukesh Bansal
AI is getting better at answering questions. But what happens when it starts asking and solving the questions scientists haven’t answered yet?In this episode of SparX, Mukesh Bansal sits down with Paras Chopra, founder of Wingify and Lossfunk, to explore AI research, scientific discovery, consciousness, and India’s place in the global AI race.
AI is getting better at answering questions. But what happens when it starts asking and solving the questions scientists haven’t answered yet?In this episode of SparX, Mukesh Bansal sits down with Paras Chopra, founder of Wingify and Lossfunk, to explore AI research, scientific discovery, consciousness, and India’s place in the global AI race.
What will it take to build robots that can truly operate in the real world? 🤖
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Description- Is superintelligence a few years away, and would we even notice if the systems we built started to matter morally?- Nick Bostrom is the philosopher who put superintelligence on the map. His 2014 book defined the field, and his recent Deep Utopia asks the harder question: what is life for once machines can do everything better than us?- In this episode of Sparks, he tells [Host] that we don't have superintelligence yet but are seeing limited forms of AGI, that frontier labs using AI to accelerate their own research could trigger recursive self-improvement, and that he can no longer rule out timelines of just a few years. He argues the outcome is likely to be either very good or very bad, walks through the three ways it fails, and explains why he now works on problems that only matter over the next 6 to 18 months — philosophy, as he puts it, with a deadline.-We also get into full unemployment as a destination rather than a disaster, what an education system looks like when it isn't producing workers, why suppressing deception in a model makes it more likely to claim consciousness, and why building trust with AI systems now may be a safety measure rather than sentiment.