There's at least one person out there among you who, sooner or later, is going to get the call every IT entrepreneur dreams of: "Hello, this is Bill Gates and I want to buy your company." When that happens, remember this advice; it comes straight from Sabeer Bhatia. Within 12 months of launching Hotmail, Bhatia apparently got an offer from Microsoft They flew him to Seattle and shut him in a conference room with a team of 12 negotiators. The offer they made him was $ 160 million. Bhatia refused. He demanded $ 700 million. (It was just a haggling game. As Bhatia puts it, "After all, in India we haggle for everything from onions onwards".) The Microsoft negotiators screamed at him, stormed out of the room, insulted him, and did everything short of physically roughing him up. Then, when he didn't budge, they called off the negotiations. Bhatia went back home. But everyone knew that Microsoft would be back. Even Bhatia's venture capitalists advised him that he shouldn't expect more than $ 200 million. But, finally, of course, Microsoft coughed up $ 400 million for Hotmail. There are 3 lessons in this story: 1. So much for venture capitalists' advice. 2. Nobody's going to offer it to you on a platter. Haggle, as if your whole life depended on it. (It does, after all.) . 3. Whatever the figure you have in mind, chances are that it's too low by a factor of up to 10 to 15 times. (Having sold at $ 400 million, Bhatia said, shortly afterwards, that if he'd waited a bit and gone in for an IPO, he'd have probably got $ 10 billion!) Anyway, here's looking at you, kid. Sensory Rape The big question in town these days seems to be, "Hey, have you seen The Matrix? " But maybe the hype is a little more than the delivery. The cinematography is terrific, yes (all those unusual, oh-wow camera-angles!) The production design is like a cross between Blade Runner and Alien. The script has some nice moments of menace written into it -- but mainly in the first half an hour or so, before it loses its way completely. The action sequences are pretty neat, too (I particularly enjoyed the helicopter attack on the skyscraper office, with the sudden thrill of the helicopter suddenly dipping into view through the plate-glass window. And as for the special effects -- well, I guess they're there (I mean, what else can you expect of a movie with special effects as its raison d'etre?) What made the film memorable, though, was one small, stunning detail: probably the tightest zoom-in ever seen in the history of cinema. The screen is filled with masses and masses of computer code; then the camera zooms in, closer and closer and closer, until the entire screen is filled by just one gigantic, glowing, green zero … and then, zoop, the camera disappears down the hole in the centre. Wow! ( OK, technically speaking, it probably wasn't a zoom, but an effect. But, regardless, it takes your breath away Ultimately, however, the film is ravishing, but sterile: it rapes the senses, without impregnating the mind. And as for some people I know who actually went to see the movie a second time, "just to figure out the twists in the script", ha, ha, ha, you'll never quite figure it out. Movies like this are like a conjurer; his entire stock-in-trade is that the hand is faster than the eye. The moment you spot him doing it, buddy, he's out of business. Doon School & the PM (Again!) With the election just around the corner, the BJP and the Congress have both gotten their ad agencies lined up. And the interesting thing is that the Doon School is playing a major role in the whole thing. No, not on behalf of the Congress party, but on behalf of the BJP this time: the great marketing guru, Shunu Sen is a former Doon School wallah. On the Congress side there's a group of 3 or 4 relatively low-key agencies -- one of which, interestingly enough, is a small Hyderabad-based agency, Live Wires. But coming back to the BJP, it's interesting to see who can get away with what. If a Rajiv Gandhi had roped in a bunch of high profile ad agency and MNC types, he would immediately have been jeered as being elitist and out-of-touch with the masses. But when Atal Bihari Vajpayee hires precisely the same kind of people (former Hindustan Lever marketing whiz Shunu Sen, former Coca-Cola executive Tara Sinha, and creative boutiques like Equus and Dhar & Hoon), he's immediately seen as being savvy, shrewd and very professional. It's almost never what you do; it's only what you are seen to be. Rediff Creative Director Anvarali Khan, temporarily based in Hyderabad, finds the Net connections in Cyber-city "criminally" bad.
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