AFTER QUITTING AMAZON in early 2006, Gaurav wanted to launch a mobile ads company. But he dropped the plan after realizing that the field was crowded and began searching for other startup ideas. A few months later, his roommate and longtime friend, Nitin Rajput, who was also employed at Amazon, joined forces with him. Soon, they noticed that there were no Indian websites that offered film content the way IMDB did internationally. This was a surprising omission in a country of over a billion people known for their love of movies – and potentially a big business opportunity. In early 2007, Gaurav and Nitin launched Chakpak, conceived as a social network for all content related to Bollywood.
To expand, they needed capital. Gaurav approached Subrata Mitra, his former boss at Tavant Technologies, who had started a fund, Erasmic Venture, to invest in young startups. Erasmic and Canaan Partners invested $2 million in Chakpak. It was one of the biggest cheques written for a nascent internet company, a rare instance of a classic venture investment in India. Gaurav and Nitin had little idea of the market’s size. They lacked a long-term vision, couldn’t tell a balance sheet from a profit-and-loss statement. But they did relish the everyday excitement of running their own startup and offering for the first time in India quality film content in an online space where users could interact with one another.
To attract customers Chakpak ‘gamed Google’. Chakpak would feature at the top of Google search results to do with Bollywood films and film stars. Ensuring such a result and attaining virality on Orkut and Facebook wasn’t just a proud achivement, it was Chakpak’s business model. The site drew as many as 150,000 users a day – an impressive number for its time.
Gaurav and Nitin worked out of the Erasmic Venture office on Bangalore’s Cunningham Road, less than half a mile away from Amazon’s Ali Asker Road office. A few months after Chakpak’s launch, Sachin and Binny sought out Gaurav and Nitin for advice.
AT AMAZON, SACHIN and Binny were bored. Work had become uninspiring. The payments product they were working on hadn’t taken off and the office had lost the energy of the early years. They did enough to escape censure but preferred to spend work hours playing video games and in various other pursuits. Sachin Dalal recalls that the Bansals played truant for several months in 2007. They would be ‘out all day and work late when they could order pizzas and take it easy’ after the bosses had already returned home to their families.
In reality, when Sachin Dalal thought the Bansals were just evading work, they were actually out conceiving a plan to start their own company.
In early 2007, Sachin had started talking to his friends about launching a startup. By mid-year, he felt more confident about his plan as well as teaming up with Binny. Sachin had said to a colleague at Amazon, ‘This doesn’t work ... working for someone doesn’t work for us.’
By now, Sachin and Binny had known each other well for nearly two years. They were still not close friends, but out of their NGV group, they were the only ones inclined towards entrepreneurship. This formed the basis of their bond, which would grow into a strong partnership that would take their friends by surprise. Sachin would admit to his mates that while he and Binny weren’t best friends, they got along well and thought on similar lines.
Years later, in a 2013 interview, Binny spoke about his early interactions with Sachin. ‘The journey [with Sachin] started seven years back, I think, when I joined Amazon. And we started interacting more ...’11
Sachin and Binny resigned from their posts at Amazon in the second half of 2007. This caused some consternation at the office. The company was losing people in hordes but two employees resigning in the same week was especially worrying. The bosses had reason to be surprised, too. Owing to his fine performance in 2006, Sachin had been promoted only a few months ago while Binny had barely completed six months at Amazon. Why would they leave now? A manager of theirs wondered if a rival company was methodically stripping Amazon of its prized talents. But there was no such nefarious plot. Amazon India had lost its way and its ambitious employees were simply moving on to pastures new.
On one of Sachin’s final days at Amazon, he had a brief exchange with his namesake, Sachin Dalal. Dalal had said, ‘I heard you are leaving and starting your own company. Haan, why not try it? You’ve anyway got a promotion and can always come back.’ Sachin had laughed in response.
The only downer for the Bansals was that Sachin had to return the referral bonus he had earned for recommending Binny to Amazon.12
4
THE DESERTION
Sachin and Binny knew Nitin Rajput, Gaurav’s co-founder at Chakpak, from Amazon. Gaurav had interviewed Sachin at Amazon in early 2006. And all four of them lived in Koramangala.
Initially Sachin and Binny considered starting a website that would offer product reviews. It would collate information on products on various e-commerce sites and guide customers to the most reliable ones. The modus operandi would be the same as Chakpak’s: ‘game Google’.
This trick – better known as search engine optimization (SEO) – was to use all kinds of mechanisms to have one’s site at the top of Google search results. At that time, internet awareness was still low; most users were not familiar with more than a handful of websites, and Google had become their gateway to the internet. Naturally, it became critical for websites to find a prominent place on these search results. Gaurav had gamed Google to make sure Chakpak would get noticed whenever anyone in India browsed the internet for movies. Similarly, Sachin and Binny wished to make their website popular for shopping-related searches. But why wouldn’t they just sell the products themselves? Sachin later explained
