Flipkart #1: Origins

When Sachin Bansal, was in his second year at IIT-Delhi, the college installed Internet connections in the hostels. Some of the better off students then bought their own computers. Sachin went on to create a file-sharing software. This being college, it inevitably became the way to share porn. Equally inevitably, the administrators shut it down. In America, this would have been the seed from which a massive file sharing company would have grown. Not in India. At least not 2 decades back.

 

Instead, Sachin would almost flunk, lose a year, but eventually graduate and join a software company in Bangalore. He briefly worked at Amazon, India but then Amazon dropped its India plans – it had just got burnt in China. This was a pivotal moment – a vacuum that would lead to multiple Indian e-commerce startups, from India Plaza to Infibeam to yes, the company Sachin would co-found with his IIT batchmate, Binny Bansal (no relative) – Flipkart, writes Mihir Dalal in his excellent biography of the company, The Big Billion Startup.

 

Flipkart might have had 3 co-founders. But the third guy, Varun Sharma dropped out even before the company got started because his parents went ballistic at the idea of their son quitting a well-paying job for some startup. Who does that? Are you crazy? The book is a good reminder of how much things have changed, and how big a role Flipkart has played in that mindset change wrt startups in India.

 

The author points out that coming from a business family, however small, was almost necessary back then. Else, you had no clue how to run a business, where to get money, or how to register a company. An e-commerce site like Flipkart needed a digital payment gateway, but no bank or major financial entity would touch an unknown entity. Sachin’s father, a businessman, used his contacts to get that elusive payment gateway set up.

 

Flipkart started like Amazon – by selling books. They’d wait for an order, then scramble to buy it somewhere, and then ship it. Later, they managed to persuade a few distributors to sell via Flipkart. Sachin learnt the tricks needed to ensure Flipkart showed at/near the top of Google results – any lower and the web surfer wouldn’t even come to know of Flipkart’s existence. By trial and error, the two founders found their niches – Sachin for vision, attracting buyers and sellers, and designing the website; Binny for managing operations.

 

Flipkart had gotten started.