Anupam Mittal : The Online Matchmaker Of India !

Anupam Mittal, 40, is the Founder and CEO of People Group, which owns businesses such as Shaadi.com, Makaan.com, Mauj Mobile and People Pictures.

Anupam Mittal laughs at any suggestion that he is the worst advertisement for his company. At 39, he is founder and CEO of shaadi.com, the world’s “oldest and most successful” online matrimonial service. (Shaadi means wedding in Hindi.) Mittal himself is a bachelor. A self-confessed “explorer, entrepreneur and eternal optimist,” Mittal started the company under the People Group umbrella with the simple mission of providing “a superior matchmaking experience by expanding the opportunities available to meet potential life partners.” The website, which recently celebrated its 15th anniversary, has matched more than 2 million people. By Mittal’s estimates, the site controls 40% of the US$1 billion Indian match-making business.

Mittal is candid about the many problems he has yet to solve. “I’ll get married when I solve those problems,” he jokes. In an interview with India Knowledge@Wharton, Mittal discusses his journey, the trials and his dream of matching 1,000 people every day.

He was living in the U.S. in the mid-1990s. He was studying there and then joined a company called Micro-Strategy, a business intelligence software firm. This was the time when the Internet was starting to boom in the U.S. Some people just had the IPO for Netscape in 1991-1992. The Internet was this incredible phenomenon that was going to change the world. He used to come back to India once a year, during which time he was not doing much. When he was in INDIA in 1997, he started doing some web development work for other companies. While sitting in his father’s office, he met one of those traditional matchmakers. He came in, posed as a friend of his father’s, and tried to “suss him out” to match him off. He wised up five minutes into the conversation. But while he was thinking about how to get [rid of] him out, it suddenly struck him that we could put all this on the Internet, take away all the inefficiencies and address the geographical and spatial limitations. And that’s what they did.

In 1997, they launched the first version called sagaai.com. [Sagaai means engagement in Hindi.] It was an experiment. Their focus was more on the web development piece because that was what was earning the money. They put all that money in this business. In 2001, He quit his job in the U.S. and moved back [to India], and they changed the name to shaadi.com.