My Letter: Babajob Acquired by Quikr
I’m happy to announce that Babajob is being acquired by Quikr, the largest cross-category classified site in India. This will combine the two largest Indian aspiring job players — Babajob and QuikrJobs — into one entity, a tool to help everyone in India get a better job.
The Babajob Board, Vir and I decided that joining forces with Quikr represented our best option for scaling Babajob’s mission — providing better jobs for everyone by helping employers digitally hire aspiring workers. Quikr has raised $350m from a stable of top global investors and with its vertical focus, QuikrJobs has achieved profitability and a leadership position in India’s blue collar jobs market. The combined entity will create by far the largest marketplace for aspiring labor in India.
I’m very proud of what Babajob achieved since Vir Kashyap, Ira Weise and I founded it a decade ago. 8.5 million verified job seekers applied for better jobs on Babajob.com and over half a million employers across India used us to hire. We built an incredibly talented, dedicated and mission-driven team and received support from great investors including our friends and family, angel investors, SEEK, Gray Ghost Ventures, Khosla Impact and USAID. We innovated and scaled telephony, chat and mobile solutions to connect multilingual job seekers and employers. We defined a category and perhaps most importantly, showed the market that there was a need and business opportunity to build a job site for everyone, even those with little education, knowledge of computers or command of English.
With this deal, Babajob will merge with one of the largest players in the Indian Internet space and I’m excited that our vision and purpose — to digitally connect aspiring job seekers to better livelihoods — will reach an even wider audience of millions more. Vir and I will retain advisory roles with Quikr but after ten years of building Babajob, we’ve decided to pursue other opportunities. Speaking for myself, I’m traveling for the summer to hang out with my son Vyom’s family in the States and then will return to India in September to help my wife, Archana Prasad, stage a digital arts festival in December for Jaaga.in. I’ll then start a new gig full time in 2018. I know that finding another job that gives me the incredible sense of purpose that Babajob did is going to be tough but the world has tons of worthwhile problems that need our attention.
I’m reminded of the Albert Pike quote that our former Head of Engineering, Shashi Singh, liked to quote:
“What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us; what we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal.”
We wish the entire Quikr family, Pranay and Amit all the best and I hope all of us keep shipping stuff that make us immortal.
Cheers,
Sean Blagsvedt
CEO and Founder
Babajob.com
