The Bansals soon overcame their setback and started work on the e-commerce website in September 2007. Their resolve and the increasing strength of their relationship took the people around them by surprise. For the most part, Sachin and Binny didn’t even discuss Flipkart with their friends, who took this as a sign of maturity, and suggestive of the trust that had developed between the duo. At least at an interpersonal level, Flipkart was starting to work out.
5
UP, DOWN, HELLO, GOODBYE
As Sachin and Binny recovered from the shock of Varun’s desertion, the Flipkart website took shape. Coding up a site was no problem for the two IIT computer science graduates. But the Bansals also wanted it to be seamlessly easy to use. Ever since he had created the file-sharing system at IIT, Sachin had nursed an interest in product design. Now, both he and Binny were determined to produce a neat, uncluttered website that would stand out from the messy interfaces of existing e-commerce portals such as Indiaplaza and Indiatimes.
The website was ready in October 2007. The Bansals tinkered with it some more after showing it to their friends and gathering feedback. Finally, they felt confident enough to unveil it to the public. Flipkart.com highlighted all of Flipkart’s promises in clear, simple terms: a large selection of books, low prices, free delivery and secure transactions. The letters ‘f’, ‘l’ and ‘p’ were treated in an orange font, the ‘i’ was inverted to make it look like an exclamation mark, and the last four letters that formed ‘kart’ were a sapphire blue. The search bar was prominently displayed.1 The website’s design wouldn’t have won awards but the Bansals had produced a clean, functional interface. They asked their friends and family members to try it out. Ankit Agarwal, Sachin’s flatmate at NGV and former IIT-mate, was among the first to successfully place an order on Flipkart. The Bansals were elated.
That is how it is in the early days of entrepreneurship. One day the entrepreneur is flailing, filled with self-doubt, anxiety, frustration. The next day, a task done well, they feel superhuman, chest out, adrenaline pumping, ready to take on the world. Likewise, with the website launched and the first orders placed on Flipkart, the Bansals felt on top of the world.
They had decided to start with books. The cue had been taken from the Amazon playbook. It made sense to do so, especially in India. Books are cheap, standardized, easy-to-deliver items that many customers might not feel compelled to physically hold before buying. The hope was that if a website sold original, first-hand books at a discount and ensured that the books reached customers in a few days, they wouldn’t mind buying from the website.
In online retail at the time, the books category was primarily a means of establishing that essential factor in the success of commerce anywhere: trust. In 2007, no Indian e-commerce firm allowed customers to pay with cash. Transactions had to be completed online using credit or debit cards. And only the most well-to-do Indians, a demographic that included people who spoke English and spent money on books, had credit cards. But this upper class did not trust online retailers yet. Many customers had had bad experiences in the early days of online shopping. Payments failed often, products turned up after months when one could no longer remember why they had placed the order, sometimes the wrong product would be delivered, or it would turn out to be defective, the delivery worker would have difficulty finding the recipient’s house – it seemed every time someone bought something online, e-commerce firms would discover a new way of botching up the centuries-old practice of selling things. In this scenario, the Bansals realized that they would first have to win their customers’ confidence, and history had shown that books were the easiest means to accomplish it.
A few months after Flipkart was launched, Sachin told a friend over dinner: ‘Yaar, we’ll make an Amazon in India. Why should we work for them when we can run our own business? If they can do it, so can we.’
ONE IMPORTANT ASPECT that internet entrepreneurs in India tend to skip in their creation myth-making is the matter of caste.
Both Bansals hail from families that identify as being from the larger Bania caste which has for long been India’s single-most powerful business community. The Ambanis, the Birlas, the Ruias, even Dilip Shanghvi, are all Banias. Within the Bania caste, the Agarwals are a prominent community. Businessmen such as the Jindals, Airtel’s Sunil Bharti Mittal, and Anil Agarwal, founder of Vedanta, belong to this community.2 This predominance of Banias in the business world extended into the internet space through the Agarwals, and in particular through the Bansal community. The Bansals are one of the eighteen gotras, or clans, within the Agarwal community.
Apart from Sachin and Binny, other well-known internet entrepreneurs from the Agarwal community include Myntra co-founder Mukesh Bansal, Snapdeal’s Rohit Bansal and Ola’s Bhavish Aggarwal. These entrepreneurs are not usually found referring to the dynamic mercantile history of their communities – the creation myth has to be unique after all. In any case, to say that one is endowed with business acumen at birth is far-fetched. And of course, it’s not as if all Banias are inclined towards entrepreneurship and neither are all people of a different caste inclined towards one specific occupation. But one can argue that caste-based practices and traditions in dominant mercantile communities such as the Agarwals can cultivate in the younger members of a family an inclination towards entrepreneurship. If one happens to be born to a business family, one is likely to be inclined to follow suit.
When Sachin moved to Bangalore in 2006, he drove one
