Sabeer Bhatia (born 30 December 1968) is an Indian businessman who co-founded the
webmail
Webmail (or web-based email) is an email service that can be accessed using a standard web browser. It contrasts with email service accessible through a specialised email client software. Examples of webmail providers are 1&1 Ionos, AOL Mail, G ...
company
Hotmail.com
Outlook.com is a webmail service that is part of the Microsoft 365 product family. It offers mail, Calendaring software, calendaring, Address book, contacts, and Task management, tasks services.
Founded in 1996 by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smit ...
.
Career
Bhatia briefly worked for
Apple Computer
Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company b ...
, as a
hardware engineer
Hardware may refer to:
Technology Computing and electronics
* Electronic hardware, interconnected electronic components which perform analog or logic operations
** Digital electronics, electronics that operate on digital signals
*** Computer hard ...
and Firepower Systems Inc. He, along with his colleague
Jack Smith, set up
Hotmail on 4 July 1996,
American Independence Day, symbolizing "freedom" from ISP-based e-mail and the ability to access a user's inbox from anywhere in the world.
As president and
CEO
A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a central executive officer (CEO), chief administrator officer (CAO) or just chief executive (CE), is one of a number of corporate executives charged with the management of an organization especially ...
, Bhatia led Hotmail until its eventual acquisition by
Microsoft in 1998 for an estimated $400 million. Bhatia worked at Microsoft for one year after the Hotmail acquisition and in April 1999, left Microsoft to start another venture, Arzoo Inc, an e-commerce firm with investment from Mohammed Asif, a top Indian-American banker at JP Morgan.
Bhatia started a free messaging service called
JaxtrSMS. He said that JaxtrSMS would do to
SMS
Short Message/Messaging Service, commonly abbreviated as SMS, is a text messaging service component of most telephone, Internet and mobile device systems. It uses standardized communication protocols that let mobile devices exchange short text ...
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 SMSes on their network but will benefit from the data plan that the user has to buy. To date, JaxtrSMS service has failed to replicate the success of Hotmail. Recently, he invested in email collaboration software, ccZen and another e-commerce technology provider E-junkie.
Personal life
Bhatia is of
Sindhi heritage.
His father, Baldev Bhatia, was a captain in the
Indian Army and his mother worked for the
Central Bank of India. He did his schooling from
Bishops School, Pune.
Bhatia married Tanya Sharma in 2008 and they have a daughter together. Later, they filed for divorce in January 2013 in a court in
San Francisco, citing "irreconcilable differences".
References
Further reading
*
*
Bronson, Po"HotMale: Sabeer Bhatia started his company on $300,000 and sold it two years later for $400 million. So, is he lucky, or great?" ''
Wired'', Issue 6.12, December 1999
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bhatia, Sabeer
1968 births
Living people
Businesspeople from Chandigarh
Indian emigrants to the United States
American computer scientists
American people of Indian descent
Apple Inc. employees
Indian company founders
American technology company founders
Hardware engineers
Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani alumni
California Institute of Technology alumni
Stanford University alumni
American chief executives
Microsoft employees
Indian Hindus
American people of Sindhi descent
20th-century Indian engineers
21st-century American inventors