Viswanathan K's Thoughts

The second Big Billion Day went off far better than the first one, writes Mihir Dalal in The Big Billion Startup . But sales could have been even higher if not for Sachin’s decision to close the website and support only the app. Fixel, the biggest investor, forced Sachin to step down as CEO - he wanted someone who would care about the present. Binny Bansal became the new CEO.   Amazon announced it would invest $3 billion in India, on top of the $2 billion already spent. Having lost China, Amazon seemed determined to win India. They launched their famed Prime membership in India. This was war. A worried Fixel insisted on bringing Kalyan back – Flipkart, he felt, needed a “professional CEO”. They need a war chest to fight Amazon. And so they sought and got $1.4 billion from Microsoft, Tencent and eBay; and another $2.5 billion from Softbank.   While Flipkart could fight Amazon, Fixel was not sure if/when Flipkart would ever be profitable at this rate. Which meant investo...

In 2011, Flipkart introduced another inspired move: customers could return a product within 30 days. Until then reluctant folks came to Flipkart in great numbers driving sales even further, writes Mihir Dalal in The Big Billion Startup .   In further rounds of investments, new investors didn’t feel the accounts were clear. The company had grown too fast to track such things clearly. It was a very dangerous time for Flipkart. Worse, Amazon had (re)entered India. Fixel, the biggest investor in Flipkart, was in a bind. If others weren’t willing to invest, his investment would go down the drain. And so he sent in his man, Kalyan Krishnamurthy, as interim CFO (Chief Financial Officer).   Remember that shady arrangement Flipkart had come up with to stock up on items to follow the letter but not the spirit of the law? The government started an inquiry into it. Sachin was sucked into that matter, and Kalyan started stepping into the vacuum thus created.   Under Sachin...

Soon Flipkart needed money, writes Mihir Dalal in The Big Billion Startup . Banks, of course, were out of the question. There weren’t many venture capitalists back then; and they didn’t invest easily. It was a different era. Would e-commerce even work in India? How many people even had an Internet connection? Or a credit card? What did two engineers even know about running logistics? And so the nay-sayers list went on and on. In frustration, the Bansals considered selling off Flipkart to Infibeam. The deal fell through at the last minute. It would prove to be like that time when Yahoo almost bought Google.   And then in 2009, Accel agreed to invest $1 million, but in batches. A desperate Flipkart agreed. As Flipkart began to grow with this new money, they caught the attention of Lee Fixel, an American venture capitalist. Within forty days, his fund, Tiger Global, agreed to invest $9 million. At one shot. Sachin and Binny were ecstatic – from dangerously close to running out of...

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 ...