For now, resu.me is enjoying the success of its initial launch with nearly 100,000 users after six months. LinkedIn has 10 million users in India and 100 million after 8 years in operation.
Started by three Indians from Stanford,Karthik Manimaran, Jyotibasu Chandrabasu and Niveditha Arumugam -- all in the mid to late twenties -- the site plans to start India operations by this year. Users here would be able to search for jobs across Indeed.com, Simplyhired.com and Careerbuilder.com on the site.
"Karthik and I have studied and worked together and ever since college, we wanted to do something on our own and we thought it was time to start it and we wanted to use our knowledge to solve some real problems like recruitment," said the 29-year-old Jyotibasu Chandrabasu who will quit his job atBank of America and relocate to India permanently to set up the company's India office later this year. Having graduated from in engineering from Chennai, both Manimaran and Chandrabasu worked at IT services giantInfosys for three years before starting resu.me few months ago. After Infosys, both of them moved to QuinStreet, an online marketing firm and then to Bank of America.
"We want to have a very big presence in India and at some point, we all might look at moving back permanently," said Manimaran who quit his job with Bank of America in the beginning of the year to start the new company. "The Valley offers a lot of inspiration for starting something. Every nook and corner has a CEO of a company who is discussing plans of starting something," he said.
"We had LinkedIn as a reference point of our business but they are quite slow in rolling out changes. We would like to be the LinkedIn killer and want to be the Facebook for professional networking," Manimaran added. Resu.me depends on its semantic web technology that links users' resumes with their other online activities to deliver a more intelligent matchmaking. The semantic web technology allows computers, or software programs run by companies such as resu.me make sense of thousands of pages of information on the web by linking relevant data.
Experts in the valley predict tough times for the startup. "Competition is pretty tough here in Silicon Valley. For example for every LinkedIn clone or "killer" in another country, there are probably 10 more in the Valley, so it would be important for a company like resu.me to tackle the US market early on and compete with other similar companies here.
