A little more than a year after he sold his company Hotmail to
Bill Gates' Microsoft Corporation, 30-year old Sabeer Bhatia has said
goodbye to Gates to start yet another company.
There's no firm idea for a company yet, Bhatia says. He will only reveal this much: Along with a few friends from Stanford University, where he earned a masters degree in electrical engineering, he is working on a plan for an e-commerce company.
"There's a lot of potential and excitement in the e-commerce space," he says. "I've got a slew of raw ideas."
The
raw idea he had for a free email company led to the foundation of
Hotmail over four years ago. But soon he would stun the industry by
selling his start-up company, one of the most visible success stories
in America, to Bill Gates.
After
overseeing the merger of his company with Microsoft's online network
about a year ago, Bhatia became the new general manager of strategic
business development for MSN.com.
Right now he has just a "small office in Fremont (in California) and a scratch pad."
Not
that Bhatia is phoning up his friends or family for investment. At the
end of 1997, he sold his company for about $390 million in Microsoft
stock and kept more than $75 million of that. And since then Microsoft
stock more than doubled, his holdings are worth substantially more
today.
Microsoft has sought to
minimise the impact of Bhatia's departure, claiming the parting was
amicable. "People go elsewhere and we hate to see that, but we try very
hard to keep people challenged and keep them here," says Tom Pilla, a
Microsoft spokesman.
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