Story of the youngest billionaires of India: Turakhia brothers

The secret of the Turakhia brothers' success lies in the fact that they got interested in computers very early in their life. That they got their vision and acted upon it very soon. 

Turakhia brothers have started from domain registration business and pivoted it to advertisement business. The beginning of the internet is a domain name and, its end is an advertisement. What more is the internet other than domain registration and advertisement? Nothing.

YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, even Google, are all domain names. You sell or resell them, you make a commission. 

The time was when the internet was very new. The Turakhia brothers took ICANN permission/license to sell domain names. Bhavin was 18 and Divyank was 15 years old when they started Directi.

When other students of Bhavin's age were hoping for good grades in exams, Bhavin has dropped out of college and started his first multi-million dollar company.

Turakhia brothers did not stop there. They started another company, just like Google. The company is based on displaying advertisements on the publishers' content. Media.net.

Divyank was only 25 years old when he started the billion-dollar company, Media.net. The advertisement based company was later sold to Yahoo for $900 million.

What went right for them was that they aimed high enough. They aimed for stars. The 2 pillars of the internet, domain registration and advertisement.

Let us look at their stories in detail.

Bhavin was born on 21 December 1979 and, Divyank was born on January 29, 1982, in Mumbai. They used to cherish books since their childhood. Their father used to maintain a library at the home. 

Once, when Bhavin was 10 years old, their father, Shri Mahendra Turakhia came and asked them whether they would like to get a video game. Without a second thought, the children agreed. 

Another day when their father saw the kids struggling to win a game, he suggested to them that if they want to win, they should learn the gaming codes and win every time. The advice hit the boys. They started showing their interest in coding.

Initially, they started by coding the games. Later, they would spend hours and hours coding. 

The brothers even started giving consultancy to companies stuck with computers. The brothers were prodigies.

Left Bhavin | Right Divyank

 

 

At the advent of the internet in India, Bhavin was 16 years old. He saw growth in the job-seeking community. Therefore, he started a job website.

 

Now, Bhavin started dreaming of something big. He wished to enter into the website registration business. So, he founded Directi at the raw age of 17 with the investment of $300 from their father.

 

Later he expanded Directi into 5 businesses namely, webhosting.info, logicboxes.com, bigrock.com, Resellersclub and Radix. The former 4 companies were sold to the Endurence group in 2014 for $160 million. 

 

Bhavin did not stop there. He bootstrapped this money to raise 2 more businesses. Flock and Zeta. Flock is a messaging and communication company, Zeta provides payment solutions for big companies.

Bhavin Turakhia education

After matriculation, Bhavin chose an engineering college. Looking at the syllabus of computer science, he decided to drop out. It was too easy for him. There was nothing new for him. 

He instead chose commerce and completed his B.Com. from Sydenham college.

Rise of Divyank

While Bhavin was busy building the domain registration and hosting business, Divyank started to think about the bigger picture. He started Skenzo in 2005. Skenzo was an advertisement company that would help advertisers to place ads on the parked domains.

Seed of the next Google: Media.net

While developing Skenzo, Divyank got an idea to build a business like Google. Google started making revenue in 2003 by ads. Shortly after this, Divyank also thought of doing something similar to Google. He developed Media.net in 2010.

The Revenue model of Media.net

The revenue of Media.net comes from advertisement. When a visitor to a website clicks on the ad presented by Media.net, both publisher and Media.net make money. 

Where does the money come from? It comes from the pockets of advertisers.

Difficulties while pitching the idea to Yahoo!

The brothers presented the idea to Yahoo. Initially, Yahoo agreed to buy Media.net. Later, much has changed. The CEO then, who promised to buy Media.net had resigned. 

 

But, the brothers kept persistent. Finally the historical deal of acquiring Media.net happened. Yahoo bought Media.net for $900 million in 2016.

 

Initially, Forbes, MSN, CNN stepped up as publishers. Yahoo's revenue raised from 20% to 400% after acquiring Media.net.

 

Turakhia brothers were billionaires in their mid-30s. They rank on 95th position in the richest people in India list as of 2020.

Turakhia brothers' rules for success

1. Find your passion. The earlier the better.
   
2. Align your passion with vision
3. Keep learning about the target
   
4. Work hard for a prolonged period. It will take anywhere between 5-20 years to develop a business
   
5. Be persistent. Initially, you will suck. But, the first 10 steps are more difficult than the next 500 steps.
6. Learn from the experiences of yourself and the others
7. Test customers before launching your product into the market. Ask them how much are they willing to pay for your product
8. Hire the smarter people than you are yourself
   
9. Each of us should make an equivalent impact on society, as per our potential