Sabeer Bhatia is the Founder of Hotmail. Why he walked away from MSN?

tonnet — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 22:36:00 GMT

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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Sabeer Bhatia is the Founder of Hotmail. Why he walked away from MSN?