Biography & Early Wealth Journey
Image via Aviefern/Wikimedia Commons
Once Directi took off it just kept growing. By the time Div was 23, the company had $10 million in revenue. Div and his brother mostly invested their earnings back into the business – after making some splurge type purchases such as a car for themselves and an SUV for their dad. A few years later, Div bought his $220,000 Porsche Boxster S. By that time, he was worth tens of millions, which was a drastic contrast to how he'd grown up.
Div's family moved to Mumbai when he was a small child. His family briefly lived with his uncle in a small one bedroom apartment. Eight people in a one bedroom apartment.
Primary Income Streams & Multi-Million Contracts
Bhavin is the CEO of Directi, which the brother's co-own and invest in tech startups. Div had taken off on his own to launch ideas more than once. In 2005, Div launched Skenzo, a company that buys unused web domains. That company became part of Media.net when he founded it in 2010. He founded Media.net to get a foot in the door of the $270 billion digital ad market. He modeled the company off Google's AdSense. He was able to convince Yahoo, who he had a relationship with through Directi, to sign an exclusive deal with Media.net. Yahoo even pursued buying Div's company a number of times, but Yahoo's struggling search engine business made that impossible. Media.net kept growing and in 2015, a year before China's Beijing Miteno shelled out nearly a billion dollars for the company, Media.net had $232 million in annual revenue.
Div still runs Media.net as a subsidiary of Beijing Miteno. He does not yet know what his next move will be. He does know that he doesn't know what he'd do if he wasn't working non-stop. He's been working for 22 years every single day including weekends, 10 to 14 hours a day. In a profile of him in Wired, he said:
"There's no work-life balance until after you succeed, and even after that. If you look at my hours, they're crazy right now. But at some point in time, everybody normalizes, hopefully. Am I happy? Yeah, absolutely. I wasn't happy I wouldn't do it. I don't need money."