Chasing a Dream and Letting Go

While I am still on the productivity talk, I am going to tell you another interesting experience of abandonment strategy (or was it Hobson’s choice for these companies?).

Sabeer Bhatia flies to California with $200 in his pockets and two pairs of blue jeans to have a bite of the great American dream. Now, he wasn’t the only one who went about it in such a bold manner, but he definitely made big bucks and huge headlines. He was a poster boy of the Indian success story at Silicon Valley.

He and buddy Jack Smith from Apple Computer, where he was working, joined hands to develop a software program that could fetch them the dream they had nurtured. The software was called Javasoft.

So, each day they would exchange floppy disks with updates of the codes they had written and sharing information. Well, that wasn’t working very well for them since they were always giving the wrong disks.

One day Sabeer tells Jack, “You know it would be so nice to for everybody to have a personalized email account to carry on their daily work.” And to this Jack said, “Yes. And it would be nicer if it was free.” They felt HTML actually spelled Hotmail and founded the company Hotmail Corporation. That was only the start.

Now for some nitty-gritty’s. They could raise only about $300,000 to get Hotmail off the ground. They were 30 days away from going live and had about 30 employees they had to pay. Sabeer needed money like the next breath. That’s when there was a knock on the door. “Sabeer, if you put some of your programmers on the old software that you were working on (Javasoft), we can raise another couple of hundred thousand dollars.” Wow, what a relief.

But he said “no”. He gave his employees shares instead and launched Hotmail. He never completed the other project. He was dedicated to what he was doing, and he was going to do well. He gave up his immediate need for cash and held on to the project.

Years later he sold Hotmail to Microsoft for a whopping $440 million. He held on to the shares till it reached a billion and cashed out.

That’s what the most productive companies across the world have done. They have let go of some things that may not work for them.