These thirtysomethings rode the Internet wave, then discovered they’d hit the shallows
2000. Murli is looking for a job. And no, not a dotcom please, he'd prefer to return to the newspaper he quit. But what happened? The multinational consultancy decided to junk its big ideas programme and the venture capitalists (VCs) on whose door he went knocking had their own horror stories to tell.
Murli's dotcom dream is dead. And he is back in the rude, real world. Along with many other young dreamers and high-fliers whose mid-career romp has been cut short abruptly. The dotcom meltdown has seen valuations of Net companies nosediving, the flow of venture capital drying up, and pundits shaking their heads in "I-told-you-sos". But the most affected? Thousands of talented young professionals: no more seven-figure annual salaries, no extravagant perks, no stock option bubbles to chase.
"The last three months or so have seen a sort of panic set in. Now, I fear, overoptimism might lead to overpessimism. I am aware of CEOs of at least five dotcoms looking for a change," says Dony Kuriakose of the executive search firm, Edge. Adds Rajeev Thakur, CEO of Grassik Consultants, another headhunting firm: "It has become difficult to convince people to join a dotcom. It does not excite them any more."
A dotcom stint is not something they'd like to flaunt in their CVs. Pictures of chinos-clad thirtysomething executives lounging at home with a laptop in hand and talking trillions are a thing of the past. Chances are most of these guys have either shut shop or have quietly gone back to old-economy companies.
Says Sanjeev Bikchandani of job site naukri.com: "Fifteen to 20 per cent of all job applications today come from dotcoms." The most recent high-profile exit was that of Piyush Gupta, CEO of go4i.com. He is said to have quit to go back to Citibank, following which co-promoter Chase Capital withdrew. Needless to say, headhunters are expecting a few CVs from here too. For instance, a headhunter lists a few dotcoms which are at the risk of losing the maximum people: tiestofamily.com, broadcastindia.com, indiainfo.com, go4i.com, jaldi.com and indiabulls.com.
What is happening at go4i.com is reflective of an industry trend where change and uncertainty are the only constants. The average time a person spends in a dotcom job is three to six months. In most cases, the second round of VC funding has not come in. And those who have stable financial support are not expecting profits even in the medium term.For 30-year-old Aditya Tripathi, an IIM-A graduate who joined go4i.com in the early days, ESOPs were not the pull. He was working with The Hindustan Times and this was a natural shift, since his paper had a stake in the dotcom. But today he has quit, without the buffer of another job in hand. "It's true that there is too much uncertainty in the Internet space—when I came in I did not know what was going to happen from one day to another," says Tripathi, who is yet to find a job. And yes, dotcoms are last on his list of would-be employers.
Says Kuriakose: "Guys who are 30-plus and serious about their careers have to ‘show for flags' every single year. And dotcoms are no longer providing them with that opportunity. "Take the case of Suresh Goel (name changed) who spent just five months in one of the most well-known shopping portals and has gone back to a manufacturing company. His reasons for quitting: the site lacked any clear focus, it was running into money problems and the management was holding back conveyance bills. Goel says he is lucky to have got a break in a big company, attributing this largely to his five years' prior experience in the fmcg sector. "I will never again join a dotcom and I don't regard my stint with the portal as an achievement," says a bitter, chastened Goel.
One professional quit a B2C site because he found that the promoter was only interested in garnering eyeballs to eventually sell out and this made the employees very insecure. Another says that the concept of a flat organisation with no hierarchies, as most dotcoms are, works only on paper; in reality, it leads to chaos.
With all these people quitting or planning to quit, is the job market going haywire? The answer is yes and no. For one, if they are looking to go back to another dotcom, there are plenty of opportunities. Says Thakur: "For every dotcom that is shutting down, another is coming in."
But even though they are quitting, dotcom professionals, says Bikchandani, remain best suited to new-economy companies and dotcoms. "People are moving laterally, to what they perceive to be stable dotcoms." And by stable dotcoms they mean those with a brick-and-mortar presence and a sound revenue model other than only advertising bonanza.
IIM-C graduate Vikram Chopra quit learning portal egurucool.com to join Mantra Online. He had moved to his earlier job from hcl for the same reasons: "challenge and excitement". But 10 months after he had "had a fantastic learning experience", he found that his objectives did not match those of the organisation. His first option was to set up something on his own but he failed to find a responsive market or a keen VC. So he moved to Mantra because there was a great synergy between Mantra's dotcom and ISP businesses and such companies had a greater chance of succeeding.
Even Maneesh Sharma, who quit zipahead.com for "personal reasons", made a lateral shift to Usha Martin's division that is seeking opportunities in Europe in third-generation mobile networks. "Before I joined zipahead, I was in the cellular business and this was a perfect fit because we are talking about convergence and I had already got a peek into the Internet world."
So once a dotcommer always a dotcommer? "People realise that staying without a job is worse than joining another dotcom," says an HR consultant. The market so far has been very understanding. "They realise why people are moving back to the brick and mortar companies," says Thakur. Kuriakose agrees: "Even in a flop movie, a good performance gets noticed. I basically look at the track record of the person and what his learning curve has been. These guys deserve an interview without a stigma."
But all the headhunters agree that the person who quits a dotcom has to be flexible in negotiating pay packages. While nobody admits to a paycut, headhunters confirm that most of them have to take a 15-20 per cent cut in salaries. In fact, parity in the paycheque is the best they can hope for.
Headhunters maintain that much of the talk of huge dotcom salaries was just that. A large portion of it was promised in ESOPs. For example, a content editor at an education portal with six years' experience gets Rs 38,000 a month along with a 13-hour day.A financial analyst with five years' experience with a foreign insitutional investor got just Rs 20,000 when she joined a dotcom, though the rest was promised in ESOPs to come in three years later. Today, nobody discusses ESOPs. Says an HR consultant: "It's very difficult to give an average dotcom salary because there are no benchmarks. Five people with similar backgrounds would be getting five different salaries." "Good people will always get a job, but the massive hikes that some people got when they joined a dotcom becomes difficult to defend," feels Bikchandani.
The best thing about the ex-dotcommers is their educational background—most of them are from IIMs and IITs. So it is not difficult for them to fit back into traditional companies. As Tripathi says, "I don't want to look for a job in a company that does not appreciate my experience or gives me less money. It is not a desperate situation."
Others are not as lucky or confident. Perhaps rightly so, because what is still the beginning of a trend could grow bigger. Says an executive search consultant: "A trend always begins with shaky conversations at cocktail parties which, and before you know it, are converted into CVs in your databank." The dotcommers are faced with a shakeout they don't want to acknowledge but can hardly turn away from.