India's Online Shopping Spree

In 1999, Alok Mittal joined the thousands of Indian entrepreneurs scrambling to take part in the global dotcom boom. His Delhi-based business, JobsAhead, which launched as a two-man gig with $500,000 from friends and family, aimed to connect Indian employers with local job seekers. By 2004, Mittal had grown the business into a 150-employee shop that was sold to online-job-search giant Monster for $8.8 million. Mittal was one of the lucky ones. Practically every other Internet start-up in India went bust during the dotcom crash of 2000 as rich Western investors pulled their venture capital out of emerging markets to concentrate...