Managing Risk: MetricStream Chairman Gunjan Sinha (Part 3)

Sramana: What were some of the highlights of the eGain story?

Gunjan Sinha: Ashu and I had built WhoWhere?, which grew to be amazingly popular. We had web-based email, White Pages, and Yellow Pages. We had a lot of traffic and a lot of emails. That is where we had an idea that perhaps other sites were having a problem with the flood of email. We found it difficult to handle and manage all the email we were dealing with at WhoWhere?.

In 1998 we started building the software to allow people to manage email. It was a much more significant problem than we had initially envisioned. The overall volume of email was rising. It required more intelligence. We had to parse and dissect the emails in order to route them. It slowly became a full-blown online customer service company.

We started off with the very simple problem of email management. That was the problem that retailers and large financial institutions were experiencing at the time. One thing led to another, and soon we had a full suite of offerings.

Sramana: In terms of figuring out what problem to work on, would it be fair to say that when determining what businesses to start, you did it by working on problems you encountered yourself?

Gunjan Sinha: Definitely. When we were at WhoWhere? we felt overwhelmed with the management tasks. At WhoWhere? we were just trying to connect people. It was not a social network, but it was a precursor to it. We imagined what became social networks in web 2.0. We focused on helping people find and connect to other people. All of that led to a lot of email traffic and high volumes that led to eGain.

eGain grew very rapidly and did very well. After 9/11, the world came to a standstill. Travel stopped. I realized that risk in the world had changed. It affected me personally. It affected eGain personally. The trajectory of that office had to be changed. We had to eliminate some of our 18 global offices and do a massive restructuring. The recession that came lasted for three years. The essence of that experience produced MetricStream. It was a reaction to the fundamental change in risk in our world.

Sramana: How did you design a solution for that fundamental change in global risk?

Gunjan Sinha: There was a company called Zaplet that already had interesting technology in that space. They had also raised a lot of money and had gone through $90 million of capital. It was backed by great investors. Through various conversations I had with key players and investors, I realized there was a potential play involving applying that technology to risk. Their technology was developed to enable widespread collaboration using email and Zaplets. We felt we could apply that to the world of risk. We took that technology and merged it with MetricStream in 2004.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Managing Risk: MetricStream Chairman Gunjan Sinha
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