Mashing Together A Job Search Engine: SimplyHired CEO Gautam Godhwani (Part 3)
SM: Your work at AtWeb concluded in 2000. What came next?
GG: At that time I really had a sense that I wanted to do something else. For me personally, and for a lot of the folks who had experienced the run-up of the internet, there was confusion about what to do at that time. It was great that I had a lot more flexibility with my time, but I just felt that I needed to get space and do something different. I felt some of the same things that I am sure many others have, so I took a year off.
SM: What did you do during the year off?
GG: I spent some of it in town but I realized very quickly that being in the Valley while not being engaged in a startup felt strange. It felt like I was in the game, but I wasn’t. I decided to start traveling. I spent about half the year traveling, and most of that travel was done in India where I went through a dozen states in India, 15 or 17 cities, and several villages. I gained a better sense of the country because I had not spent a lot of time there.
SM: What did you see?
GG: I am not big on sightseeing per-se. I care much more about getting a true sense of what is going on in the city. Typically I would arrive at a city and I would spend the first 3 or 4 hours getting the sightseeing over with, then I would spend the rest of the time chatting with people I met in cafes and other ad-hoc places. If the opportunity existed I would touch base with some distant connections. Sometimes the people I talked with were involved in areas I was interested in so we had good exchanges. I spent a lot of time walking through the city. Every day I would walk several miles.
SM: What cities did you see?
GG: I went through the entire western side of India. I started out in Dehli, Agra, Vadodara, Jodhpur, Bhopal, Ahmadabad, and Bombay. Then I went further south into Kerala where I visited Cochin, Shertallai, Kayankulam, Varkkallai, and just continued down the south of the country. I also went to some places in the east as well.
I was basically getting to know the country I had left at a very young age. It was more about connecting to the people. I took a subsequent trip as well. Between the two trips I talked with hundreds of people, individually as well as in groups. I learned about their lives. I learned a lot about the development sector. I visited 6 to 10 of the top NGOs around India and got a sense of what they were doing in some depth. My brother and his wife had also done some traveling, and we both returned about the same time.
Part 4 →
This segment is part 3 in a 10 part series
Jump to part: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
