Ram Shriram

In the U.S.A., technical innovations come out of universities and the research produced by Ph.D. students. We don't have that happening in India.

I remember when AOL was small and they were growing like mad. Consumers were coming on in droves because they made it easy to connect to the Internet. That was the single biggest innovation of AOL; when grandmas were signing up, AOL had arrived.

I guess the most seminal moment going early way back was my father died when I was 3 years old. I was raised by my grandparents, and my mother went back and got a degree.

You learn that different people are made differently, and they have different ways to reach to their goals. Some people reach their limits of what they can produce and create, and that doesn't necessarily make them bad. It is just that they may not be right for that role in that instance.

There's almost too much venture capital in India - there are issues with seed capital, but for venture capital, there's a lot money chasing deals here.

I've trained my people in mentoring entrepreneurs and made myself obsolete.

When you've dealt with real-life issues, dealing with business issues is not that hard.

You want to do a few things really well because you want to come out with a product that is fully baked, even though it may be lacking in a few features or whatever, rather than the one that's all-achieving but not doing anything too well.

I have lived the life of the entrepreneur, and so I know the pain they are feeling. I know the daily ups and downs they go through. You know, they have their highs and lows sometimes within a matter of hours in a day.

Life is fleeting, and permanence in this world is something we all strive for. The best way to achieve permanence is through philanthropy.

My mother has been my mentor in my life. The number one attribute was discipline. To be on time to school, never miss a day at school, and then checking out homework and making sure I was doing it correctly and signing me up for lots of activities, extra tests and classes.

Zoomin is a hybrid model. The management and founding team is the one with half.com.