(The Weekend Insight) - The Forgotten Coders of India’s First Dotcom Wave

In today’s deep-dive, we will go back to a time before India had “startups,” before venture capital meant anything, and before engineers thought of themselves as entrepreneurs. We will look at a generation of coders who built India’s first internet companies between 1999 and 2005 - not as founders, but as problem-solvers working inside portals, ISPs, and media houses. Their names are largely forgotten. But their engineering culture still runs through Flipkart, Paytm, Swiggy, and InMobi today.

In 1999, being a software engineer in India did not mean shipping apps. It meant keeping the internet alive.

Bandwidth was scarce. A 128 kbps leased line cost more than a small office’s rent. Servers crashed during election results. Databases ran out of space. There was no cloud, no StackOverflow, no GitHub, no open-source playbooks.

At Rediff, engineers building Rediff Mail were not working on features. They were solving physics problems disguised as software: how do you store gigabytes of mail when storage is expensive and bandwidth unreliable? How do you stop the site from collapsing when traffic spikes?

At Naukri, database engineers were inventing resume search from scratch. There was no concept of “data engineering.” Matching jobs to resumes meant building indexing systems manually on SQL databases that were never designed for that load.

At Sify, network engineers ran internet cafés and corporate networks simultaneously - managing routers, leased lines, DNS, and uptime in an era when a cable cut could take a city offline.

And at Indiatimes, CMS developers built publishing systems before WordPress existed - solving content workflows, version control, and ad placement entirely in-house.

These were not product teams. They were survival teams.

India’s first startup schools (without knowing it)

Rediff, Naukri, Sify, and Indiatimes accidentally became India’s first startup universities.

Rediff built everything itself: news, email, chat, shopping. The mail engineers learned scaling before India had scale. The shopping team learned e-commerce before India had payments.

Naukri’s engineers learned that databases are moats. Their work on resume indexing and job alerts became one of India’s earliest examples of data-driven business advantage.

Sify taught engineers that software and physical infrastructure are inseparable. Many of its NOC engineers later became cloud and network entrepreneurs.

Indiatimes built India’s first ad-tech stack - impression tracking, click attribution, billing - long before “ad-tech” was a category.

None of these companies thought they were training founders. They thought they were hiring programmers.

But what they really did was train:

• Infrastructure obsessives

• Database optimizers

• Failure-tolerant builders

• Engineers who understood cost

That culture never went away.

The stack nobody brags about

This generation built on tools no one romanticizes:

Perl. PHP. ColdFusion.

Oracle. MySQL. Sybase.

Manual load balancers.

Manual failover.

Rediff engineers had to restart servers by hand during traffic surges. Naukri engineers learned to shave milliseconds off queries. Sify engineers learned to design networks that broke gracefully.

These weren’t bad tools. They were exposed tools.

When something failed, you saw it fail.

This created a culture of:

• Efficiency over elegance

• Reliability over novelty

• Cost awareness over scale fantasies

Which is exactly the culture that later defined Flipkart’s early tech stack.

Why none of them became famous founders

Three reasons explain their disappearance from history.

1. No venture capital culture

There were no seed rounds. No angels. No startup accelerators. Rediff and Naukri raised capital through IPOs and private investors, not VC rounds. Engineers had no financial upside story to attach themselves to.

2. Founders came from media and corporate

Ajit Balakrishnan (Rediff) came from advertising.

Sanjeev Bikhchandani (Naukri) from corporate roles.

These were business founders, not engineer-founders.

Engineers implemented visions. They didn’t define them.

3. Cultural invisibility

There was no LinkedIn. No TechCrunch India. No founder podcasts. No culture of celebrating technical achievement.

When Rediff went public, the story was: “India’s internet company lists on Nasdaq.”

Not: “Here are the engineers who built the system.”

India never had its Marc Andreessen moment.

The dotcom crash: India’s first startup trauma

Between 2000 and 2002, portals shut down. Salaries fell. ESOPs became worthless.

Sify downsized. Rediff stagnated. MantraOnline closed.

Engineers learned their first brutal lesson: failure has no ceremony in India.

Many fled to Infosys, TCS, IBM, Cisco. Some started quiet businesses: payroll software, hosting, ERP tools. A few later joined Flipkart, MakeMyTrip, and InMobi.

This migration didn’t kill entrepreneurship. It delayed it.

The talent went into services and enterprise. Not into startups.

The invisible lineage

Here is the part India rarely connects:

Rediff → Flipkart’s infrastructure thinking

Naukri → India’s data-driven marketplaces

Indiatimes → InMobi’s ad-tech DNA

Sify → cloud and data center startups

Flipkart’s obsession with database performance looks suspiciously like Naukri’s.

Paytm’s backend reliability echoes Rediff’s mail stack.

InMobi’s ad systems mirror Indiatimes’ ad servers.

Not because people moved directly, but because engineering culture survived people. Constraint thinking became Indian thinking.

What India lost by skipping them

India lost:

• A technical founder myth

• An early open-source culture

• An engineering hero narrative

Instead, India learned to see engineers as service workers, not innovators.

The IIT-founder myth arrived later - with Flipkart and Paytm. But by then, the first generation was invisible.

They had built:

• India’s first mail at scale

• First job databases

• First monetization engines

• First ad servers

• First internet networks

They just didn’t get credit.

Counterfactual history: what could have been

If Rediff had VC money, it could have become India’s Amazon.

If Naukri had APIs, it could have become India’s LinkedIn.

If Sify had cloud ambition, it could have been India’s AWS.

If Indiatimes had mobile capital, it could have been BuzzFeed for India.

The engineers were capable. The ecosystem was not.

Mini-biographies: what happened to them

The Rediff Mail engineer is now a SaaS CTO.

The Naukri database engineer is now a VP at a unicorn.

The Sify NOC engineer runs cloud infra today.

The Indiatimes CMS developer builds media tools.

Their skill transferred. Their story didn’t.

Why this generation matters more than we admit

They:

• Built first user traffic

• Built first monetization

• Built first infrastructure

• Trained the next generation

They mattered not because they founded unicorns, but because they made unicorns possible.

Lessons for today’s engineers

Visibility matters.

Ownership matters.

Narrative matters.

Engineers who don’t tell their stories get written out of history.

Conclusion: footnote or chapter?

India’s startup story usually begins in 2007 with Flipkart.

That is wrong.

It began in server rooms at Rediff. In SQL queries at Naukri. In routers at Sify. In CMS tools at Indiatimes.

They didn’t ring bells. They didn’t IPO. They didn’t podcast.

But they built the rails. And India’s startup train still runs on them.