At the unveiling of DCODE, a digital marketing playbook developed by the DS Group, Sanjeev Bikhchandani, co-founder of Info Edge, took the stage for a fireside chat moderated by Amin Lakhani, President, Client Solutions, WPP South Asia. What followed quickly turned into a masterclass on entrepreneurship, resilience, and the role of luck in building businesses.

Bikhchandani opened with a story from his early corporate days. In his office cafeteria, employees had to line up at a file folder to access restaurant menus before placing orders. It was inconvenient and time consuming. One colleague decided to scan all the menus and put them online on the office intranet. Within days, 95 percent of internal traffic was going to that single page. The lesson was unmistakable: aggregation solves problems. If people found value in menus being aggregated in one place, then surely the same logic could apply to jobs or restaurants. That insight eventually laid the foundation for Naukri.com and also shaped his conviction when he invested in Foodiebay, which later became Zomato. At that time, many argued restaurants had no app budgets and the opportunity was limited. Yet an investment of ₹4.7 crore eventually turned into ₹500 crore, proving that conviction often requires going against conventional wisdom.

But not every idea turned into a win. In the early 2000s, when online advertising revenues were still minuscule and survival looked bleak, Bikhchandani made what he later admitted was a mistake: launching a print edition of his venture. At that time, the print advertising market was far larger than online. Logic suggested following the money. But while the print experiment floundered, it was the digital business that began scaling. “Print was yesterday’s technology. Online was tomorrow’s technology,” he reflected. The lesson was clear: survival requires investing in the future, not clinging to the past.

Guided by probing questions from Amin Lakhani, the conversation then moved to artificial intelligence and whether it would displace jobs. Bikhchandani acknowledged that some roles will inevitably be lost but pointed out that new ones are also being created. The challenge is that they are not the same roles, and not the same people. He urged individuals to adapt by learning AI tools themselves. At Info Edge, internal teams have already begun creating ads with AI, work that would previously have taken months and cost lakhs is now possible in days at a fraction of the cost. A Father’s Day campaign for Jeevansathi, for instance, was produced in just two days for ₹80,000. “These films would never have been made otherwise. The market is expanding, not shrinking. As individuals, your job is to learn the tools. Do not panic, adapt,” he said.

Asked whether luck had played a role in his journey, Bikhchandani did not hesitate. “Huge, huge, huge,” he said, recounting moments where chance made all the difference. In 1996, a casual visit to an IT exhibition introduced him to the internet. That single encounter set him on the path of launching one of India’s first job portals. Later, in 2000, he narrowly secured funding just weeks before the dot-com bubble burst, a stroke of fortune that ensured his company’s survival. His view of luck, however, is practical: if you put yourself in enough places often enough, sooner or later you will be in the right place at the right time. Persistence, he believes, is what multiplies luck.

That persistence defined his own story. For seven years, while his company struggled without profits, he supported himself by teaching at business schools on weekends, earning just enough to survive while keeping the venture alive. “If you keep trying, luck will find you,” he told the audience.

The fireside chat left the audience with a simple yet powerful message: observe customers closely, learn from failures, embrace new technology, and stay the course long enough for luck to catch up with effort. For India’s marketers and entrepreneurs gathered at DCODE, it was a reminder that the real playbook for success lies not in strategy decks, but in resilience, conviction, and adaptability.