Sabeer Bhatia
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| Sabeer Bhatia | |
|---|---|
| Born | December 30, 1968 (age 43) Chandigarh, India |
| Occupation | Entrepreneur |
| Known for | co-founded Hotmail |
| Spouse | Tania(2008) |
Sabeer Bhatia (Punjabi: ਸਬੀਰ ਭਾਟੀਆ, Hindi: सबीर भाटिया; born December 30, 1968) is an Indian American entrepreneur who co-founded the Hotmail email service and Jaxtr.
[edit] Background
Sabeer Bhatia was born in Chandigarh in 1969. He grew up in Bangalore and had his early education at The Bishop's School in Pune, then St. Joseph's Boys' High School in Bangalore. For a short-time he was a student at the Birla Institute of Technology (BITS), Pilani and in 1988 he went to US on a Caltech Transfer scholarship to get a bachelor's degree at the California Institute of Technology. He earned a master's degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University.
After graduation, Sabeer briefly worked for Apple Computers as a hardware engineer and Firepower Systems Inc. While working there he was amazed at the fact that he could access any software on the internet via a web browser. He, along with his colleague Jack Smith, set up Hotmail on July 4th 1996.
Today, Hotmail remains the world's largest e-mail provider with over 369 million registered users. As President and CEO of, he guided Hotmail's rapid rise to industry leadership and its eventual acquisition by Microsoft in 1998. Bhatia worked at Microsoft for a little over a year after the Hotmail acquisition and in April 1999, he left Microsoft to start another venture, Arzoo Inc, an e-commerce firm.
Bhatia's success has earned him widespread acclaim; The venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson named him 'Entrepreneur of the Year 1997', MIT chose him as one of 100 young innovators who are expected to have the greatest impact on technology and awarded 'TR100', San Jose Mercury News and POV magazine selected him as one of the ten most successful entrepreneurs of 1998 and Upside magazine's list of top trend setters in the New Economy named him 'Elite 100'. Bhatia has recently started a free messaging service called JaxtrSMS. He said that JaxtrSMS, would do "to SMS what Hotmail did for e-mail". Claiming it to be a disruptive technology, he says that the operators will lose revenue on the reduction in number of SMS's on their network but will benefit from the data plan that the user has to buy.[1]
