'The watershed moment for BookMyShow was in 2002 when the dotcom bust happened'

The dot-com bust which started in 2000 in the US, hit the Indian shores in 2002. It was a bloodbath and every investor had pulled out.

Internet was a bad word and those were the days of B2B and B2C which were actually 'Back to Banking' and 'Back to Consultancy'. Everyone was running back to banking and consultancy jobs which were steady.

The investments had dried up, so much so that, BookMyShow had gone down from 150 employees to 6, including an office helper. We moved from a 2,500-sq-ft office to a 130-sq-ft apartment with bare facilities. We didn't even have an STD line to afford a monthly bill of ?150. That was a very harsh time.

It was a global meltdown then unlike today, where the markets for internet are far more mature with a pipeline of angel, seed and earlystage funds, venture capital ecosystem, etc. There was nothing like that back then.

Today it seems like a stupid decision if we had decided to shut down and taken up jobs, but back then, sticking along and continuing this business felt like a stupid decision.

We took a longer-term view and decided to invest in building the infrastructure around entertainment first.

We decided to install ticketing softwares into cinemas and venues, run customer care services, internet white label services for brands at movie theatres and studios, automate theatre and event venues with their problems.

This meant that once consumer penetration would be ready and mobile picks up, then there would be an opportunity for us to build a consumer brand on top of that.

So it was really about building the infrastructure first and then focus on the consumer. That process alone took 5 years and we launched the consumer brand in 2007.

(As told to Supraja Srinivasan)