Webyantra is my personal blog and I write it to share my experiences as a startup entrepreneur.
Origin of the name Webyantra – The name Webyantra is derived from the amalgamation of “web” and the Sanskrit word ‘yantra’, which refers to ‘a device (or a product)’. So Webyantra (in a broad sense) refers to products and services, that use the web to deliver solutions to human needs & wants.
Webyantra’s history – Webyantra is now my personal blog, but it had a different past. I started writing Webyantra in early 2006 to showcase Indian internet & Web2.0 products. Regarded as the “Ground Zero for Indian Web2.0“, it was a trendsetting blog that profiled innovative Indian web companies and highlighted the ones that were making a difference. It became one of the most widely read tech/internet blogs on Indian Web 2.0. While I sometimes covered Indian tech news, the core idea behind Webyantra was not news, but to shine a light on something that India lacked – innovative products built grounds up from first principles, rather than cost/labour/geographical arbitrage based replicas of Western models.
Webyantra was growing in readership and influence, but I had to abandon it in 2007. While I wrote the blog as a side project, my day job as a startup entrepreneur saw the launch of SlideShare in 2006. SlideShare’s fast growth sucked me in and for a while, I tried doing both – run SlideShare during the day and write Webyantra at night. But doing justice to both was challenging, and soon it was clear I had to choose between the two. SlideShare it was, and unfortunately I had to deep-freeze Webyantra. It was a hard choice for me to make.
Cut out to 2015 – I’m writing Webyantra once again… but in the avataar of a personal blog. This is after a gap of 7 years (and explains why you’ll find lots of old blogposts, like a time warp!) Something else that has changed meanwhile is Webyantra’s URL – earlier it was on www.webyantra.net, but now its shifted to www.webyantra.com (the .net redirects to .com).
<-------------- Some links from the WayBackMachine internet archives below————->
- This post announced the launch of Webyantra (on my then personal blog).
- The first post on Webyantra.
- I wrote this to explain my motivations for starting the blog.
- The logo
- And how it looked previously
