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 ...