Top 8 Indian Internet Entrepreneurs

You will be surprised at a few names and their daring acts in entrepreneurship to achieve what seemed impossible.  This is why I believe that this list can be the most inspiring and motivating thing you have read in a long time.

Here are the top 8 Indian internet entrepreneurs in 2010-

Rashmi Sinha: Rashmi is the founder-CEO of Slide Share. She is an Indian internet entrepreneur.  SlideShare is the world’s largest community for individuals and organization to share their presentations. Today, SlideShare receives more than 32 million unique visits in a month.

Rashmi Sinha

Rashmi is a graduate student from the Brown University. She is also the founder of Uzanto consulting. Recently, she was interviewed by Andrew Warner from Mixergy, where she talks about her venture online and how she took her internet business from 0 to 32 million unique visits per month.

Sanjeev Bikhchandani

Sanjeev Bikhchandani: Sanjeev is the founder of Naukri.com – an Indian job portal. He has an amazing story as an internet entrepreneur. Sanjeev possesses a BA in Economics from Delhi University, he studied there although he had qualified for IIT. After working a year, he qualified for IIM. He is a management graduate from IIM-Ahmedabad.

In 1997, Bikhchandani left his cushy MNC job that paid Rupees 80,000 a month to set up Naukri.com, jobs portal on a server in the United States. By 2005, he was selected as a finalist for “Ernst and Young – Entrepreneur of the Year” award.

Ajit Balakrishnan: He is the founder-CEO of Rediff.com. In 1971, he graduated from IIM-Calcutta. Till age 15, he was brought up in Kannur, Kerala and wanted to be a football player. It was not until his dad showed him an old man sitting on the street and then pointed out, that the man was a football player earlier. It was at that moment that Ajit cam back to senses.

Ajit Balakrishnan

After he graduated from IIM, he worked for few years. He claims he was technically sound and could read codes like articles. Ajit started Rediff.com in 1995, when he was 42. He wrote cheques for Rs two crores (for VC) and had zero revenue for three years.

VSS Mani: His internet company is perhaps something that is attached to all our lives. VSS Mani is an stunning example of courage as an internet entrepreneur. He is the founder of JustDial.com. JustDial.com offers services to customers by providing all informations on yellow pages through the phone. He started his company in 1996 with Rs. 50,000 as his venture capital. With that 50K, entrepreneur VSS Mani today runs a company with 100 crore turnover.VSS Mani claims it was only passion and the ability to dream big that saw him achieve so much with almost nil venture capital.

Alok Kejriwal

Alok Kejriwal: This Indian internet entrepreneur foundedContests2win (c2w) in 1998. C2W was the world’s first customized brands promotions website which held contests for users on the internet. He started off with a shoestring budget of close to Rs 5000. Believe it or not.

Today his companies such as Contests2win, Media2win, Games2win have together recorded a turnover close to Rs 30 crores. His serial venture Mobile2win which was launched in China was brought by Walt Disney in September 2007. The power of dreaming big!And he had left his family Marwari business at 28 to follow his own passions.

He still runs Games2win, Media2win under his brand name. Kejriwal is an M.Com from Sydenham College in Mumbai.

Suhas Gopinath: Suhas Gopinath is the youngest internet entrepreneur in the world. He incorporated his first company at the age of 14, Global Inc. in San Jose, California. Because Indian laws did not permit a minor to do so. By incorporating his company, he became the world’s youngest CEO at age 14. His firm, consisted of 60-members, all of them in the age bracket of 16-22 from all around the world. Suhas is from Bangalore, Karnataka in India.

Suhas Gopinath With Former Indian President

Suhas Gopinath is recognized as the world’s youngest internet entrepreneur. He is resource person for IIM and Advisor at the Entrepreneurship Cell in IIT-Mumbai. Recently, he was nominated as one of the “Young Global Leaders” for 2008-2009 by the prestigious World Economic Forum, Davos. The others nominated alongside him were Indian music composer A.R. Rehman, Hollywood Actor Leonardo DiCaprio, Prince of Brunei.

Ram Shriram

Ram Shriram: This internet entrepreneur is very well-known because he is the director for Google Inc. Ram is a founding board member of Google. He is also on the advisory board of Naukri.com (run by Sanjeev Bikhchandani). He is named as one of the richest men in America now, due to his huge sharehold in Google. He is also the founder of Sherpalo– which is basically a company that helps founding members of early stage ventures.

Ram is a Charter Member of TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs). The likes of Guy Kawasaki are charter members of TiE.

Amit Agarwal: This person is phrased as the “man who bought blogging revolution to India”. This statement is very true because his hugely successful blog – labnol.org was an inspiration to many other bloggers who are currently successful in India.

Amit Agarwal

Amit Agarwal is an IIT graduate and in 2004, Amit quit his job to become India’s first and only Professional Blogger. Since then he has been making a full-time income from the internet. He has been featured in various national televisions. Amit also writes a weekly personal technology column for The Hindustan Times. The Straits Times of Singapore included him in their list of Asia’s Blog Stars alongside Chinese actress Xu Jinglei and Japanese Ambassador Naoto Amaki.

I will confess that there was a lot of research that went into creating this top 8 list of Indian internet entrepreneurs. I really really hope you found it inspiring and insightful at the same time. The guys in the above list are really successful internet entrepreneurs.

As always, wishing you all success in your ventures online.