About Babajob and Babalife

Babajob.com and babalife.com are a combined effort to provide the best social networking and job site in India and worldwide. Our effort is based on two simple ideas:

1. Everyone deserves to get a better job, no matter what their income or skill level, and
2. Technology can enhance our ability to both hire more efficiently, and better communicate with those we care about.

Most people find jobs through people they know – namely their extended social network – and most employers – particularly when hiring employees that work in the home - would like to hire a person who someone they trust can vouch for.  Babajob.com and babalife.com are an attempt to digitize this process to efficiently “get the word out” and importantly provide an incentive for the folks in between an employer and employee to connect people together.

Here's how we hope to achieve this:

First we have created the most compelling social-networking site for everyone in India – babalife.com – including folks who may not be interested in finding a new job or hiring anyone right. Babalife.com is available through both the web and a rich SMS UI, combines a blog, photo/video-sharing and social-networking site and is available in local Indian languages.  We hope you’ll be able to connect in richer ways with the people you care about and find it fun too.

Second, on babajob.com, we aim to connect employers and employees - especially those in the informal sector - by leveraging when possible their social relations from babalife.com.  Perhaps most interestingly, we also provide a real incentive – in the form of mobile phone credits or a check when monthly earnings exceed 300R (~$7) – to help others get jobs or simply be a person who socially connects employers and employees.

Here’s an example: Let’s say Rajesh is looking for a cook. He creates a posting on babajob.com and adds a few people he knows on babalife.com.  Now let’s assume that he ultimately decides to hire his uncle’s driver’s sister. Assuming all these folks are on babalife.com, then both Rajesh’s uncle and his driver, will earn 100R (~$2.5).

We also know that many of the people who might be hired through babajob may not have access to a computer or phone, and so their accounts can be managed by a friend, relative, NGO or even a cyber-café operator – called a mentor. Again, whenever someone is hired, their mentor also earns 100R.

We hope that by offering the most compelling social network and a set of cash based incentives, we can build a solution that leverages technology to help more people get better jobs and meaningfully connect to each other.  It's an experiment and in the end, we hope it works.

The Why of Babajob and Babalife.

What inspired this project?

While at Microsoft Research India in 2005, our CEO, Sean co-ran the Advanced Development and Prototyping Team and worked very closely with the Technology for Emerging Markets research group, whose aim was to study and invent new ways that technology could be used to positively impact the social and economic development of the world’s poorest 4 billion people. While there, a colleague Aishwarya Ratan presented a study (http://www.pubpol.duke.edu/krishna/documents/Krishna_Rajasthan_poverty.pdf, Escaping Poverty and Becoming Poor: Who Gains, Who Loses, and Why?, ANIRUDH KRISHNA, 2003) that sought to explain why families in India get in and out of poverty. In short, the answers were relatively simple: 

• Poor families everywhere often fall into poverty when major health calamities occur – if a father and primary income earner is a day laborer and loses a hand, his family may often fall destitute (It should be noted that the solution to sudden calamity found in many developed nations is also simple – insurance).
• On the positive side, the study showed that poor families often left the poverty trap through income diversification i.e. they got other jobs. If a farmer started fixing tractors on the side or a young son got a better paying job in the city, eventually that extra income really did raise the real economic status of the family. How were these jobs obtained?  Well, the employee knew someone who knew someone.

Sean’s first thought was “Great – all they need is the village version LinkedIn.com!” but obviously in order to make such a system work, one has to overcome the problem that most low-income workers of the world may not be literate, nor own a mobile phone and rarely own or have ready access to an Internet-connected PC.

Thus, babajob and babalife are really an attempt to bridge a social networking and job site – allowing people to hire people that someone that they know can vouch – but importantly provide a direct financial incentive for those people who connect people in a trustworthy manner across classes AND who would be willing to help job seekers represent themselves online, in return for compensation whenever such a job seeker is hired. It is an experiment – a possible solution to provide all levels of job seekers more with job opportunities while efficiently helping employers find suitable employees in their social network.  We don’t know if this will work, but we do collectively believe that the idea is interesting enough, that we simply had to quit our day jobs to give it shot.

So why then are there 2 sites, babajob.com and babalife.com?

We know this is a little confusing on first blush, but it’s our hope that this will make more sense over time. Babajob is obviously a job site, but in order to capture and keep the attention of everyone, we have simultaneously built babalife.com to be the best of breed Indian social networking site. Why?  Because of a belief that in order to correctly model social relationships in a community and keep the attention of those people that are not hiring nor need a better job, a system should be – or at least leverage – the communication medium of its users (That’s why start-ups like friendster.com seek to mine the Outlook-contacts).  Also, would a teenager really want their homepage to be http://babajob.com/princessyamini/ ?  And yet, we really want that teenager as a socially connected user of our system, because it is quite likely that her parents may want to hire someone such as her best friend's maid's sister.

Why do you pay people in your system, just for being socially “in between” an employee and employer?

Given that we know that many jobs are filled through known references, we figured it is important to get those known references working on our behalf. The simplest and most useful incentive we could think of was money. Obviously, a money distribution network is difficult and expensive to create and maintain and thus, we pay in the form of mobile minutes for payments under 300R (about $6) and for greater amounts, we pay via a State Bank of India check – which can be cashed by any Indian with a voter registration or ration card. As mobile payment systems become more widespread in India, we certainly plan to leverage them and believe that these systems will hopefully enable lots of new innovative businesses like babajob.com, once people and businesses can easily move money using only a mobile number as an identifier.

Why do you feature maps so prominently?

In short, traffic. In any urban city in India and much of the developing world, there is a growing middle class that is purchasing cars and motorbikes like mad. This has caused huge congestion and commute times that routinely go beyond 90 minutes. For those that use public transportation, the bus systems are often incredibly slow and thus, finding employment near one’s residence is often an acute priority.   Given that India and many developing countries often lack systems with well formed addresses, we believe that points on a map will work better when comparing and searching across locations than addresses. We also think it’s just cool to see all your friends on a map and in the future, we may integrate these features with our SMS services to enable people to update their location via SMS.

Why are you only available in Bangalore?

When we look to other websites that we like such as craigslist and myspace, we’ve found that they all started with small, vibrant communities that were actually geo-located together. Thus, we’ve decided to focus first on Bangalore, determine if our model works and then grow to other India cities, all of India and then other non-Indian cities with time.

Our team

Sean Blagsvedt, CEO

Prior to founding Babajob, Sean spent 8 years at Microsoft, interning in 1996 and 1997 and joining full-time in 1999 in the Office group in Redmond as a Program Manager, owning features such as Messenger integration, speech recognition and what was to later become the Vista sidebar. In 2002, Sean moved to the Windows Vista User Experience team, designing the Messenger experience in Vista and how the OS represents people. Finally, in fall 2004, Sean moved to Bangalore as the 3rd founding member of the Microsoft Research India (http://research.microsoft.com/india), heading the Program Management and Advanced Prototyping team, focusing on novel approaches to technology in emerging markets and new strategies in the mobile phone space. Prior to his years at Microsoft, Sean also worked at the White House with the Internet Policy czar, Ira Magaziner and in Boston with the Lotus Corporation (IBM).  Sean holds dual bachelor degrees in Computer Science and Public Policy from Brown University (1998).  He's really likes having fun too.

Ira Weise, Managing Director

Ira has founded a variety of companies as an experienced entrepreneur over the last 25 years. In 1983, he and a fellow law school friend started 800-Software, one of the US's first mail order software companies, and the first to offer free technical support, toll free order lines, and shipment from an existing inventory.  When it was sold to Digital Equipment 10 years later, it was one of the nation's five largest software retailers, with offices throughout the US and annual sales of $180 million. Following 800-Software, Ira was president of Software Sciences in Eugene, Oregon which created and sold software for the residential real estate industry until his retirement in 1996. Prior to starting 800 Software he taught elementary school in California and Jakarta, Indonesia, practiced law in San Jose, California, worked as an adjunct faculty member at the USF School of Law and started a real estate foreclosure company. Ira holds a JD degree from USF, a Masters in Educational Administration from California State University at San Francisco and a bachelor's degree from University of California at Santa Cruz. 

Vibhore Goyal, CTO

Prior to Babajob.com, Vibhore worked as a developer for Microsoft Research India on a variety of projects including Virtual India (virtualindia.msresearch.in) and the MSRIndia SMS Server (www.codeplex.com/smstoolkit). Before joining MSR, he was the founding member of several other companies including ROS, which built Linux based OSs for mobile phones. Vibhore's areas of interest include Security & Networking and he holds a B. Tech. + M. Tech. in Electrical Engg. from IIT Bombay.

Anita Mithra, Director of Marketing

Prior to joining Babajob, Anita worked in the retail sector as Relationship Manager with Idiom, India's largest Design Consultancy.  At Idiom she was the point person for all Pantaloon Retail projects in food, leisure , clothing and health.

Anita has also worked overseas with Trendwest Resorts and Exhibit Exhibitions. In India, Anita set up one of the first Direct Marketing agencies in the country. At Catalyst, she was involved in the  launch of Standard Chartered Bank credit card, loyalty programmes for Britannia Cheese and setting up initial operations for Fabmall. She also ran Direct Home Shopping, a multinational mail order company through Catalyst. In 1999, Anita launched Motifs, India's first ready to wear range of clothing for expectant mothers and plus sized women . Anita has always been a bit of a diva at heart. She has over 15 years of experience in the performance arts and has worked in film and theatre production, in over 15 ad films and two major feature films. Anita holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree with a Post Graduate degree in Mass Communication.

Datta Kulkarni, Associate Managing Director

Datta worked with Infosys Technologies for close to 10 years in various roles. In his last role as Engagement Manager, Datta was based in London and was responsible for business development and account management at British Petroleum – a large integrated oil and gas company. Prior to that Datta ran a PMO of a large business transformational program at Southern California Edison – one of the largest public utility company in the United States. Before that he managed various Business Intelligence / Data warehousing projects spanning across different business segments – Sales, Operations, Retail, Web, Reseller Management, Warranty/After Sale, etc at Apple Computers and worked in different geographies – Singapore, USA and UK. Prior to joining Babajob, Datta was on sabbatical from work for 9 months and travelled across India.

Datta has a Bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from Karnataka Regional Engineering College and has spent a year in construction industry as a site engineer.

Deepak Gulati, Architect

Having spent over 9 years in the IT industry, Deepak joins Babajob.com from Microsoft where he spent the last 5 years in diverse roles. He began as a Communities Specialist, where he ran the Microsoft MVP program and established user groups across India. He then moved to the Developer Evangelism group, and worked for 2 years with Independent Software Vendors to ensure a steady pipeline of products on .NET Framework 2.0 and SQL Server 2005. He was last working at Microsoft Technology Center, helping customers architect products on WPF, Silverlight and helping them build world-ready solutions. He's interested in software localization and UX design. He also loves traveling, reading and photography.