Big Billion Startup: The Untold Flipkart Story

ethos. Its recruitment process was especially rigorous in the US and it would be no different in India. Even though India was known to have hordes of cheap engineers, Amazon’s primary purpose was to gather the smartest ones available. This limited its options as there were few Indian firms doing high-level technical work. The IT services champions, Infosys and Wipro, weren’t known for their technical proficiency. The reservoirs of India’s best engineers were to be found at two companies – Trilogy Software and Yahoo India, Bharat’s former employer. But Bharat, who knew the Yahoo founders Jerry Yang and David Filo personally, was reluctant to raid their troops. Besides, it was possible that Yahoo, already upset by Bharat’s defection, would go on to sue Amazon. So, in the months of July and August, it was Trilogy’s employees who received job offers from Amazon. Very few engineers were found to be suitably equipped, and those who were thought fit would need a month or two to move jobs. Amazon’s high recruitment standards had come at a price: delay. Bharat was eager to get started with A9 but there wasn’t enough of a workforce to build the search engine.
A solution was sought and found. From its Seattle headquarters, Amazon sent back a few of its many Indian-origin employees to Bangalore. These were highly skilled engineers, already schooled in the Amazon worldview. Chief amongst them were Vijay Subramanian, a tall, imposing Tamilian who, many would observe, had adopted the manner of a stereotypical south Indian film star; Vikas Gupta, who was considered a tech genius within the company; and Amit Agarwal, who had joined Amazon in 1999 after studying computer science at IIT Kanpur and then at Stanford University, the mecca of technology learning. Amit was considered part of a species that Amazon insiders called Jeff Bot. The term referred to employees who had so wholly internalized the ways of the company and its founder that they may as well have been robots programmed in the Bezos school of thought.
Sujayath Ali, who was hired by Amazon from the Indian School of Business in 2005 and worked for nearly seven years at the company, recalls how Amit was ‘a true Amazonian’. In fact, he isn’t sure if Amit was any different even outside the office. There were quite a few people like Amit who measured everything in life by ‘Amazon values’. After leaving Amazon, Sujayath founded an online shopping site called Voonik in 2013.
Amit, Vijay and Vikas were joined by more than a dozen others from Seattle in the second half of 2004. By now, there was an additional project that needed attention. Apart from A9, Amazon had decided that it would work on another initiative in Bangalore, a micro-payments product called Flexible Payments Service that would let any small merchant receive money online immediately after a sale. One could sell something for even a cent or a rupee and receive payment for it. This service would have to be so sturdy, so fast, so secure as to be able to handle tens of millions of transactions on any given day. If it worked, it could transform commerce – all kinds of everyday buying and selling may then be done over the internet using Amazon’s payments service. The goal was to make this payment mechanism an integral part of Amazon Web Services (AWS), a new division of Amazon that would later settle the question of whether the company was simply a retailer or the most elitist of tech companies.
Vikas, the tech genius, and Amit ‘JeffBot’ Agarwal, took charge of the payments unit while Bharat oversaw the search engine. Vikas reported to Amit even though he was widely seen as the brains behind the payments unit.
Slowly, over the next nine months, after interviewing more than 1,000 people, Amazon painstakingly accumulated a team of about sixty by the middle of 2005. One fourth of this workforce had come from the company’s Seattle headquarters, others came from software companies like Trilogy and Tavant Technologies, and the rest straight from colleges, business schools and research institutes. Even a small number from Infosys passed through Amazon’s fine sieve. Most of the recruits were in their mid-to-late twenties, a couple in their early forties, and almost all were men, in conformity with the unwritten mores of the early twenty-first-century tech era.
Amazon’s recruiters believed that every single engineer from that initial team of sixty had the ability to start their own business; they had chosen to join Amazon only because they relished working with other young, driven, overachievers like themselves.
In fact, it so happened that more than three dozen people out of Amazon’s early hires, along with the Bansals who joined later, would go on to become entrepreneurs, influential tech leaders and investors in India’s startup world. Apart from Flipkart, many of the founding members of notable early startups including Infibeam, TutorVista and Chakpak, came from this batch. It was in part Amazon’s insistence on hiring only the most superior engineers that inadvertently fostered the entrepreneurship spirit in this group.
Gaurav Singh Kushwaha was one of the earliest members of the payments team at Amazon. In March 2006, eighteen months after he joined the company, Gaurav would become one of the first to leave in order to start his own business. His firm, a movie information site called Chakpak, would later be acquired by Flipkart. Gaurav’s co-founder at Chakpak, Nitin Rajput, was another early employee at Amazon India.
To attract these talented engineers, Amazon had adopted an unfamiliar approach. In the US, the company was known for its extreme frugality. It used old doors to make desks. Junior and senior employees alike flew economy and stayed in cheap hotels. Amazon was an outlier in the US tech world, where companies were known to spoil their engineers with inflated compensation and perks. In India, however, Amazon broke its own rules and splurged in order to draw the smartest engineers. It offered outsized compensation packages to all employees; the salaries of mid-level and senior managers were