Eheadphones Inc.

nobody saw it coming. nobody wanted to. it was, after all, the summer of 1999. the spirit of the times was heady and a thousand entrepreneurs had bloomed. fabmart and firstandsecond.com wanted to be the amazon — the giant book store — of india. rediff was selling knick-knacks on its e-commerce channel. sify too had joined the bandwagon. apnaloan was promising to ‘sell’ loans online. shaadi.com wanted to find your dream “other”. and then on april 4, 2000, nasdaq crashed. k. vaitheeswaran, the ceo of indiaplaza, remembers the moment vividly. many venture funds of that vintage perished. entrepreneurs were worse off. “there were almost 1,000 e-commerce businesses in india at that time. all of them closed down,” says vaitheeswaran. in the space of six months, ‘dotcom’ had gone from meaning ‘hip, cool; inheritors’ to ‘naïve, paper tigers; lambs to the slaughter’. hell had frozen over. but so much chaos, so much life had been unleashed. could something have survived — spirit, derring-do — the