Big Billion Startup: The Untold Flipkart Story

role of his partners.3 In telling the story of how he met Binny, Sachin certainly has no such intention. His purpose is simply to tell a good story. It’s the inventive details in his account that make it intriguing.
In 2015, during the Walk the Talk interview, Shekhar Gupta asked Sachin and Binny how they had met. Sachin’s version went thus:
‘[It was during] one of the summers in IIT Delhi. In [the] IITs, what happens is that when your project is unfinished during a semester, your professor asks you to stay over for a summer project to finish that project. And I had an unfinished project during one of my semesters. And Binny also accidentally had an unfinished project. Our professors asked us to stay back. We were alone. I actually did not expect anyone to be in the college at that time and I was surprised to see Binny in the lab. I think for the first few days we just maybe thought the other person would go away and they’re just there for a few days. But then we started talking and we actually realized that we’re from the same city.’4
Sachin’s ‘unfinished project’ was a euphemism for the classes he had failed at IIT Delhi. After most of his classmates graduated in 2004, Sachin had to stay back and retake some of the mandatory courses so he could achieve a minimum score of 190 points. He also needed to submit a mandatory research project. This is what would lead to Sachin finally getting his degree in 2005, nearly one year after most of his classmates had graduated.5 Despite idolizing Jobs, Sachin was clearly embarrassed by his failure at college. Not only Jobs, many famous entrepreneurs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg included, have spoken openly about dropping out to become entrepreneurs. Indeed, this was one of the essential ingredients that went into the making of their very own creation myths. But the IITs have such strong significance for the Indian middle class that even the country’s most radical internet entrepreneur who otherwise embraced Silicon Valley values wholesale, couldn’t find it in himself to admit to relative failure at the hallowed institution.
The other loophole in Sachin’s account had revealed itself previously, in 2010, at a startup event called UnPluggd, in Bangalore. While delivering a talk about Flipkart, he had said, ‘We were batchmates from IIT Delhi – 2005 batch ...’ Faltering noticeably, he continued, ‘Uh ... right, so this is how we started.’6 Sachin’s unease with public speaking is sympathetically evident. It is clear he is not comfortable in the limelight, speaks without affectation, and is ultimately a passionate champion of his company. One feels willing to excuse him for saying that his co-founder was also his classmate.
It is a known fact that Sachin came to IIT Delhi in 2000, and Binny in 2001. By all accounts, the Bansals didn’t know each other in Chandigarh. So, where did they actually meet?
It is clear that even if they had met in the IIT Delhi computer lab in 2005, this meeting had no bearing on their later friendship and partnership, both of which developed only in Bangalore.
THE BANSALS TRULY got to know each other at the NGV complex in late 2005 after Sachin moved to Bangalore to work at Techspan. They cultivated an easy friendship without becoming particularly close, as is often the case in a large group. Sachin and Binny had become part of a group of eight IIT graduates of similar age. The friends would meet often, go out for movies, dinner and drinks. Some of them, including Sachin, owned cars, which they would take on long drives around or away from Bangalore. A favourite destination was Hampi, an ancient town in Karnataka known for its temple ruins and hippie scene. The sports enthusiasts of the group, which included Binny, played squash and football together. Geeks like Sachin took up hobbies such as coding challenges and puzzle-solving which one commonly faced at job interviews. Sachin also resumed gaming, although not with the obsessiveness of his IIT days.
After graduating from IIT, Binny had taken a job as a programmer at Sarnoff Corporation, an American technology hardware-maker. His stint there lasted eighteen months. Towards the end of 2006, he applied for a job at Google – which had just set up shop in India – and a few other tech companies. Google rejected Binny.7 Around the same time, Sachin referred him to Amazon. If Binny made the cut, Sachin would earn a small referral bonus.
Binny was almost rejected by Amazon, too. Another Sachin, a Sachin Dalal, was one of the several Amazon employees who had interviewed Binny. Binny was so nervous that he trembled while writing the code that had been asked of him. Sachin Dalal had to leave the room so Binny could feel at ease. He describes Binny’s candidature as ‘borderline’. A few positives, such as Binny’s IIT degree, ultimately worked in his favour. In late 2006, Amazon gave Binny a job offer.
Right from the start, Binny came across as shy to his colleagues, addressing his superiors as ‘sir’ even though they were barely older than him. There was no doubt, however, that his technical proficiency was impressive. Sachin Dalal could see that Binny was a highly skilled engineer, better than even Sachin Bansal.
By the time Binny started at Amazon in January 2007, the Indian outpost had evolved vastly from a year ago when Sachin had joined the ranks. Work on the search engine A9, and the payments product Flexible Payment Service, had crept along. Amazon leaders in Seattle had initially found that the India team had done a stellar job with FPS. But there were procedural gaps as certain technical processes were impermissible given that payments was a tightly regulated space. The FPS team was asked to plug these gaps and make a few other changes. FPS was finally launched to a few merchants in the US in 2007 but Amazon didn’t promote it enthusiastically. The search engine project was