Iyyappa turned out to be an excellent hire. At this time, Flipkart had a simple operations process. After customers placed their orders, Sachin and Binny entered the book titles and quantities on an Excel sheet, handed out printouts of the sheet to their packaging workers, who then bought the books from various bookstores. Iyyappa had an extraordinary memory, and he knew how courier services worked. He was skilled at organizing the procurement process and managed the packaging and courier workers well. Iyyappa and Binny worked closely over the next two years. They developed a patois of English, Hindi and Tamil that only the two of them could understand.
Soon, Iyyappa took charge of most of the physical operations work. This allowed Binny to direct his energies on expanding product assortment and automating the processing of orders. The Bansals were so pleased with Iyyappa’s performance that, within a month, they gave a referral bonus of ₹5,000 to his acquaintance at First Flight Couriers.
Iyyappa was Flipkart’s ‘human ERP*’8 until it reached a thousand orders a day. He had a sensational career at the company. In a year’s time, his salary soared from eight to nearly eighty thousand rupees a month. Over the next decade, he would become a crorepati by selling Flipkart shares and secure a BBA degree.
THE OFFICE ESTABLISHED, their first employee hired, the company financially stable, the website running smoothly, and customer numbers increasing every week, it was now time for Flipkart to raise venture capital. The Bansals knew how their friends at Chakpak had attracted funding, so, when asked, the Chakpak founders Gaurav and Nitin advised the Bansals to approach venture funds. The Bansals were looking for an initial $1 million so they could fulfil their expansion plans.
In early 2008, around the time they had hired Iyyappa, the Bansals had gone to a networking event for entrepreneurs called Open Coffee Club. This is where they met Abhishek Goyal.
Abhishek, who had previously worked at Amazon India, had been hired by Erasmic Venture a few months ago. After leaving Amazon in 2006, he had moved to a software firm called 3i. But Abhishek was a perennially restless employee. He had started an HR firm before joining Amazon but it had failed. He was bored at 3i and considered launching a mobile payments company with his friend, Mekin Maheshwari. But they gave up on the idea after another payments startup announced a large funding round. Still, Abhishek wanted to be part of the startup world in some way. Gaurav, the Chakpak co-founder who knew Abhishek from their Amazon days, introduced him to Subrata Mitra of Erasmic Venture. Subrata soon agreed to hire Abhishek as an associate. Abhishek’s task was to find promising startups and bring them to the notice of Subrata and his partners, Prashanth Prakash, Mahendran Balachandran and Gagan Kumar.
Abhishek had heard of Flipkart from friends and acquaintances, some of whom had tried and appreciated Flipkart’s service. A college senior of Abhishek used to joke that Flipkart was like an ATM for books – just as an ATM dispenses notes one after the other, Flipkart delivered book after book in quick succession. Abhishek had asked a mutual friend to introduce him to the Bansals but as fate would have it, they unexpectedly ran into one another at Open Coffee Club. It was organized by Amarinder Singh, an engineer with an MBA who worked as a sales executive and wanted to encourage entrepreneurship in India.
Abhishek hit it off with Sachin and Binny instantly. The three of them had similar personalities. In his mid-twenties, Abhishek was a shy computer science graduate from IIT Kanpur. He had a nervous laugh which gave away his social awkwardness. He was very serious about work and desperate to find his calling. In the Bansals, Abhishek saw two young software engineers who were living his dream of being an entrepreneur. He found them to be ‘very geekish’ and straightforward, like typical computer science students. The Bansals didn’t try to hardsell Flipkart, there was no posturing, no real pitching. It was a trait that even Abhishek’s superiors at Erasmic appreciated. ‘Sachin and Binny came across as a couple of tech guys who wanted to write code rather than run around doing operations. That was not surprising – most tech entrepreneurs were like that,’ says Abhishek.
After the first meeting itself, Abhishek decided to urge his bosses at Erasmic Venture to invest in Flipkart.
Over the next few months, Abhishek, who also lived in Koramangala, spent many weekends with the Bansals. He became a friend and mentor to Sachin and Binny. When gauging entrepreneurs, Abhishek would look for small clues that pointed to their problem-solving abilities. Every time he met the Bansals, they would talk of a new trick learnt, a discovery made or a problem solved. It was clear that Flipkart was unceasingly moving forward. Even its website was well made and unusually fast for the time.
During one meeting, the Bansals described their customer support email address to Abhishek. It was [email protected], kept intentionally short. Many e-commerce sites featured long, complex email addresses, perhaps because they didn’t want to be assailed by customer complaints. Sachin didn’t see the point to this. His rationale was simple. He explained to Abhishek, ‘If you don’t want customers to write to you then don’t publish your email. If you want to actually help customers then make it easier for them to write to you.’ It was a continuous trickle of such cues over many months that strengthened Abhishek’s belief that these were uncommon, dedicated entrepreneurs, on to something big.
Abhishek noticed that the Bansals would take a problem and break it down into ‘manageable pieces’. Other e-commerce firms would typically wait to source all the books that a customer had ordered and deliver them together to save costs. Almost always this caused long delays in deliveries because some books would inevitably
