Big Billion Startup: The Untold Flipkart Story

transform the area in the nineties into an exemplar of Indian suburbia.1 Now in the new millennium, Koramangala had become an attractive residential area for migrant engineers like Sachin. It had cheap, plentiful housing like the NGV complex, and many restaurants and bars had come up to meet the demands of the area’s new demographic. It also offered easy access to the city’s main business and entertainment sectors.
At the NGV complex, there was another group of four IIT graduates who shared a separate three-bedroom apartment and were friendly with Ankit and his flatmates. One of these young men was Binny Bansal.
IN A WAY, it was fitting that both Sachin and Binny, who would become India’s most famous internet entrepreneurs, hailed from Chandigarh.
As with the IITs from where both Bansals had graduated, Chandigarh, too, had been established as a manifestation of Nehru’s faith in modernity and technology. After India ceded much of the Punjab province in the Partition of 1947, Nehru wished to build a city within the Indian state of Punjab that would symbolize modern Indian ideals. Chandigarh was to be ‘unfettered by traditions of the past ... an expression of the nation’s faith in the future.’2 It wasn’t dissimilar to what Nehru had said of Bangalore. In 1951, Nehru hired the pioneering Swiss architect Le Corbusier to create the layout for Chandigarh city. Corbusier died before work on Chandigarh could be finished but it was his design, with a few tweaks, that was implemented when the city was finally set up. Chandigarh was divided into approximately thirty roughly equal rectangular blocks of concrete connected by wide tree-lined roads. A large public square was created, which was surrounded by three imposing government and legislative buildings.
Chandigarh, located at the foothills of the Himalayas, is about 270 kilometres from Delhi. The city’s landscape which used to be barren owing to the largely semi-arid climate of north India, was replaced by concrete buildings and attendant greenery, a forced order symbolic of the rise of science and technology.
By the time the Bansals were born in the early 1980s, Chandigarh had long been designated as a union territory that served as the capital of both Punjab and its neighbouring state of Haryana. It had grown in size, too. There were now nearly fifty sectors, new parks and gardens, a proliferation of restaurants. It had become a wealthy little city. Much like Bangalore, well-to-do government and military pensioners found it hospitable. Chandigarh had also produced one of India’s most famous cricketers, Kapil Dev. But the city wouldn’t exactly turn out to be the new urban paragon imagined by Nehru and Corbusier. As the role of the government in India’s economy weakened after liberalization, the private sector’s importance grew sharply. But Chandigarh couldn’t attract many companies, leaving few employment avenues for its young residents. Many of them, especially bright, ambitious young men like the Bansals, were eager to set off for more exciting terrain.
APART FROM THEIR surname, Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal had few things in common.
Sachin was born on 5 August 1981 to a business family. His father ran a grain-trading business while his mother has been a homemaker. Sachin is the older of two brothers. Binny was born the following year, on 3 December 1982. His father worked at a public-sector bank and his mother is a retired central government employee. Born to middle-class families, both had comfortable childhoods.
Sachin studied at the D. A. V. School in Panchkula, a town close to Chandigarh. He was known to be a quiet, well-mannered boy with few friends and his academic record was superior throughout. Uma Nijhawan, Sachin’s English teacher, remembers him as rather bright but equally shy and introverted, so much so that she was taken by surprise once when Sachin pulled off a small literature event with distinction. ‘He wouldn’t take the initiative but was very responsible and competent if you gave him something to do. He would come into his own then,’ Nijhawan recalls.
Binny went to St Anne’s Convent School in Chandigarh, and unlike Sachin, developed a passion for sports. He was captain of the basketball team and played football as well. He had also become familar with computers at a young age. In 2013, Binny told a journalist, ‘One major point of inflection [in school] was that I was introduced to computers at class four. It was love at first sight ... I was probably the only one at school who could program.’3 In the early 1990s, this level of familiarity with computers was rare. Most Indians had never seen a computer, much less used one.
Like other children of their age in Chandigarh, Sachin and Binny were relatively privileged, their teenage years mostly unaffected by a preceding period of disturbance in Punjab. In the 1980s, the state was a violent, volatile place. Sikh terrorism, orchestrated by the militant leader Bhindranwale, was at its peak in the first half of the decade. Punjab was haunted by the rise of Bhindranwale, who was eventually killed by the Indian Army in 1984 at the Golden Temple complex. The subsequent assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards in the same year unleashed another cycle of violence in Punjab that extended even to Delhi. By the time the Bansals entered their teenage years in the mid-nineties, the state had become relatively peaceful again.
After clearing their tenth-standard exams, both Sachin and Binny enrolled for their final school years at the D. A. V. College, where they were two years apart. College was a mere formality. Classes were sparsely attended, as parents put their children through private coaching in the hope that it would help them secure a seat at any one of India’s reputed engineering colleges, the most sought-after of which were the IITs. An IIT degree was the surest way of landing a secure, well-paid job at an IT firm or a multinational company. And getting such a job was considered no small achievement in the early years of the new millennium. Middle-class parents, who had grown up