Big Billion Startup: The Untold Flipkart Story

environment, a crucial formative influence on internet entrepreneurship in India was that of Amazon.
By helping establish Bangalore as India’s tech city, IT companies led by Infosys and Wipro had provided a foundation for new internet startups. But in the aesthetic sense, Infosys and Wipro weren’t purely technology companies. Students at top engineering colleges such as the IITs had little regard for IT companies – they didn’t fancy work associated with terms such as ‘body shopping’, ‘BPO’, ‘call centre’ and ‘labour arbitrage’. And the narrative of these companies’ founders who had built staid, stable businesses through many years of toil held little appeal in an India that was thirsting for instant success and wealth. This immediacy was still linked to getting a job at an international organization. A different and fresher corporate environment was needed to change this mindset, to attract the youth to participate in entrepreneurship in the new India.
The first generation of internet companies in India had collapsed in the early 2000s and never recovered. There were exceptions: Infoedge, a conglomerate of digital businesses, and the online travel company MakeMyTrip. But the glamorous aspect of the startup myth – rookie engineers creating extraordinary products or websites from their garages and becoming rich and famous overnight – that inspires entrepreneurs, was perhaps missing from these companies. Their respective founders, Sanjeev Bikhchandani and Deep Kalra, were outstanding businessmen, but their old-fashioned outlooks and staid personalities were in the Infosys mould. They were also based in Delhi. In the internet business, location is paramount in an ecosystem’s early days – the desire to start one’s own company is a physical sensation that spreads like a fever from people who take the plunge to their colleagues, friends, acquaintances. Unlike Bangalore, Delhi did not yet have a large enough network of skilled engineers itching to quit their jobs to code up their own websites. (A few years later, however, Gurgaon would emerge in its own fashion as a rival startup centre to Bangalore.)
So it was that the American internet companies, despite the big bust of year 2000, brought fresh inspiration to India’s would-be entrepreneurs. Synonymous with instant wealth, fame and the glamour of innovation, these companies wielded irresistible powers of seduction. They were at the frontiers of economic and social transformation, the new messiahs in the age of globalization. And they seemed to be saying that the rewards they had enjoyed were within one’s grasp; all one had to do was take the leap into entrepreneurship. Out of these companies, it was Amazon that became the breeding ground for the first consequential batch of internet voyagers, providing them not with the skills and knowledge necessary for entrepreneurship, but with something more fundamental and important: confidence, the belief that you could do it. Most of those who took the plunge from Amazon and ventured into entrepreneurship didn’t succeed in creating big companies. Instead, what mattered was that they went on to start something when few in India believed in such a thing as an internet business.
In 2005, Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani found global fame after the New York Times writer Thomas Friedman published his bestselling book The World Is Flat. Friedman had derived the phrase from a similar statement – ‘... the playing field is being levelled’ – that Nilekani had expressed to him in an interview.10 By this time, however, Infosys had almost completely lost its appeal in the elite tech colleges – few engineers wished to join their ranks, the work seemed boring, the pay meagre. As if to prove Nilekani’s theory about the world supposedly flattened by globalization, it was Amazon, not Infosys, that came to inspire the next generation of tech and internet entrepreneurs in his home town of Bangalore. A reverse outsourcing, as it were.
AMAZON GOT OFF to a slow start in India. Bharat Vijay, tasked with setting up Amazon’s India office, started at the company in July 2004. He asked a family friend, Anand Rao, to join him. Anand, an upcoming sales manager used to dealing with uber-formal corporates, turned up for his interview in a suit, only to bemuse his interviewer, who had spent the past eight years in the outlandishly casual setting of Yahoo, dressed in shorts, T-shirt and flip-flops. That day, Anand gave up formal attire for the rest of his life.
Soon began the groundwork for the launch of Amazon’s retail business in India. Following its trajectory in the US, Amazon planned to launch itself here, too, as a retailer of books. Anand studied the market, met books suppliers, distributors, logistics companies and drew up a strategy to launch operations. A part of his mandate was to look for potential acquisitions – Amazon had just entered another Asian market, China, by buying the online retail company Joyo for $75 million.11
But it was A9, Bharat’s search engine project, that formed the centrepiece of the India office. A team of Amazon leaders from the company’s headquarters in Seattle visited India towards the end of July to supervise the launch. They were in town also to institute Amazon’s singular corporate culture, particularly its recruitment process. That Amazon was serious about its India operations became evident from Rick Dalzell being part of the delegation – he was a deputy of Jeff Bezos and one of the most well-respected officials at the company.
Amazon’s first office in Bangalore was located in Divyashree Chambers, a three-storied building in an area known as Langford Town, which forms part of Bangalore’s colonial district. Apart from hosting Amazon, the building, packed with engineers, also housed an IT services firm called e4e Labs.
Amazon had found its India office; now it needed people. Bharat, Anand and a few of their colleagues spent July and August visiting engineering colleges and research institutes while also soliciting candidates from other technology companies.
Each candidate was put through many rounds of interviews. Aspirants were judged on their academic and professional record, intellect, skills and temperament. Amazon only hired people it considered truly elite engineers who would also unquestioningly adapt to the company’s distinct