When a business man gets covered repeatedly by the media, their biopics begin to fit a stereotype: the Big Shot. Each mention of the Big Shot is accompanied by the Big Credits: the couple of notable companies or wins that define a big shot's status. Ajit Balakrishnan has his big credits: founder and CEO of Rediff.com and co-founder and director of Rediffusion-Dentsu, Young & Rubicam -- one of India's largest ad agencies.

Ajit Balakrishnan. Rediff. Rediffusion. And people stopped looking. Balakrishnan says too few people remember that he also ran PSI Data Systems, one of India's earliest IT companies. It proves that before the software services boom took off, Balakrishnan was already there, testing out a hunch, exposing himself to the industry.

When the Internet became popular, Balakrishnan was at a crossroads. By combining his experience at Rediffusion and PSI, he could create an Internet media company. With Rediff, he created a name as a business man who knew his technology and would use it for competitive advantage. Balakrishan keeps on top of cutting-edge technologies and is involved in projects that adopt new technologies. He is also striving to take the wonders of IT and the Internet closer to one billion Indians.

CIO: In 1995, Rediff broke new ground. Was it worth it financially?

Ajit Balakrishnan: Though people find it hard to believe, my goal in 1995 wasn't really to make money. Even today it isn't. It is more intellectual curiosity. I wanted to know where this new technology (the Internet) was going. In 1995, the answer may well have been nowhere. Back then, it was not clear that the Internet was a media. But my instinct told me that it would be.

The inspiration to start Rediff came from a business course I took at Harvard Business School in 1989-90. We were asked to study Compuserve, an information services company before the era of the Internet. It used a proprietary networking protocol and one had to use a command-line interface to log on to a time-sharing computer.

It had news, chat and practically everything the Internet is known for. The missing link was Windows, which had not yet been created. So, the user interface was a black screen with blue text. The commands were quite complex and required a lot of keystrokes, dots and slashes. One needed to be half-a-programmer to use it.

With the introduction of TCP/IP, and the disaggregating in the computer industry, I guessed that it was time to start a new business, which was based loosely on Compuserve, but with newer protocols and technologies.

What were the risks?

Around that time, there was a great amount of debate over which network protocol would take center stage. The two contenders were X400 and TCP/IP. As late as 1989, there was absolutely no assurance of which was going to win. TCP/IP did, and Compuserve eventually died because they did not move to TCP/IP.

With the new protocol, networks were much cheaper to build; with Compuserve-type protocol it was almost like the old landline switches. The connection needed to be kept alive. If you had 10,000 users online then you needed to keep 10,000 connections alive.

While at Harvard, we also saw the first multimedia-supporting browser put on Compuserve. It was platform-independent. It was unlike Windows, which was tightly tied to Compuserve's backend. Every piece of technology became independent.

E-commerce didn't take off in India like it was envisaged. Do you agree? What's it like now?

Absolutely, I agree. We launched our shopping site in 1998. Those were the early days of e-commerce and it never took off as expected. There are a couple of reasons. One, credit card penetration is low in India. Today, there are only nine million active credit card users in India.

And, debit cards have not yet been enabled to be used on the Internet. In the absence of this, all of us largely depended on a cash-on-delivery model, which is an