This would become, in effect, the front for the Hotmail idea. So in August 1995, Sabeer began shopping around a business plan for a Net-based personal database called JavaSoft. He was afraid even to make a single photocopy of the plan he had printed out, lest a stray page find its way into the recycling bin and then into someone else's gaze. He stayed up all night writing the business plan, which he brought to his day job the next morning to show to Jack, looking so haggard that his boss stopped him and said, "You've got to cut out the partying, Sabeer," and Sabeer - afraid the idea might pop out of his mouth if he opened it at all - just nodded.
It was so powerful that sleep that night was impossible for Sabeer Bhatia, with the idea now in his head, exploding, autocatalytic, a bonfire of the mind. It was so powerful an idea that when Jack Smith did call Sabeer back 15 minutes later, their minds melded as they talked, completely in sync, leaping from one ramification to the next as simultaneously as the steps of two soldiers marching side by side. The idea was so powerful that when his friend and coworker Jack Smith, who was driving home to Livermore, called Sabeer on his car phone to brainstorm the pregnant thought that had just occurred to him, Sabeer heard one sentence of it and said, "Oh my! Hang up that cellular and call me back on a secure line when you get to your house! We don't want anyone to overhear!" So, is he lucky, or great? _įrom the first moment I met him, Sabeer Bhatia has given credit to the power of the idea. _ Sabeer Bhatia started his company on $300,000 and sold it two years later for $400 million.