In November 2008, Sujeet visited the Bansals in Bangalore. He wanted to see for himself how Flipkart worked and size up the co-founders. He didn’t know Binny, and it was important to get a sense of the COO’s personality if they were to work together. They went out for drinks, reminisced about their IIT years, discussed their common friends. He found Binny to be a pleasant fellow, with whom it would be easy to get along.
Sachin, on the other hand, had changed a little from the guy Sujeet had known in college. He didn’t even seem to exactly be the man he had spoken to at the beginning of the year. The new Sachin sounded very enthusiastic about Flipkart. It was clear that he thought Flipkart could become big. His confidence was striking, a significant transformation from Sachin the IIT student. He also seemed careful about what and how much information was to be shared with someone else.
Encouraged by his observations, Sujeet decided to give the job a try. He decided to spend the next few months working with the Bansals. If it worked out, he would stay on at Flipkart.
When he agreed to join them, Sachin and Binny brought up the matter of compensation. Sujeet told them, ‘Comp-womp chhod yaar. Let’s see if I’m comfortable working with you and if you are comfortable working with me. We’ll talk after six months.’ Sujeet had enough money. What he wanted was to ‘build something’, to prove himself. His salary was finalized only in June 2009. After that, they never again spoke about it.
As soon as he started at Flipkart, Sujeet began focusing on establishing relationships with book suppliers. Until then, Flipkart had built partnerships with a few book distributors but had no relationships with publishers. It still sourced at least some of its orders from bookstores. This mode of operations had been necessary in the beginning, but it wasn’t sustainable. Flipkart’s raison d’être, as is that of most internet businesses, was to replace the offline stores rather than depend on them. Even though the Bansals worked with a few middlemen, Flipkart now needed to move up the chain and establish direct connections with the businesses that controlled the supply of books.
SUJEET WAS A mirror image of Sachin and Binny. Sujeet’s inability to write code was complemented by the Bansals’ lack of interpersonal skills which had made it difficult for them to break into the closed world of publishing. Sachin and Binny were introverted coders; Sujeet was an extroverted, all-action hustler. It was an ideal combination, one that worked in a symbiotic manner to catapult Flipkart into an explosive startup. From the day he went to work there, Sujeet was given complete independence to run his function. His role at Flipkart grew as fast as the company’s business. Sujeet became the engine of the company. Outside the technology and marketing functions, it was his word that became the writ in the key functions of sales and supply chain. Sujeet would quickly become the most powerful man at the company, after the Bansals. During his first four years, the Bansals rarely questioned any of his decisions, even though they didn’t always approve of his unconventional methods and aggressive tactics.
This became Flipkart’s guiding philosophy with respect to its employees: hire smart people and don’t tell them what to do. It was applied to Sujeet, and to most of the senior employees the Bansals brought into Flipkart.
In the early years, the Bansals also openly admitted to their weaknesses. After Sujeet joined them, he asked the Bansals for the contact details of Indian publishers. But they didn’t know any. They had struggled to establish contact with publishers, who showed little interest in engaging with two anonymous software engineers. The Bansals were happy to leave it to Sujeet to build relationships with publishing firms. ‘It [was] a great thing. Many others would have wasted time lying,’ says Sujeet.
Meanwhile, at Infibeam, Vishal Mehta still hadn’t given up hope of convincing the Bansals to sell Flipkart. In early 2009, Vishal flew to Bangalore. At a Café Coffee Day outlet in the eastern part of the city, he met Sachin, who had brought Sujeet along for the meeting. It was here that they politely but firmly told Vishal that Flipkart, with its five employees and a-few-dozen-orders-a-day business, wasn’t up for sale.
By April 2009, the few dozen orders shot up to more than 200 as the company began working directly with more book distributors in Bangalore. But Bangalore represented a minuscule part of the publishing world, the centre of which was Delhi. To become a force in the books business, Flipkart would have to cultivate relationships with the publishing houses and distributors in the capital. In the summer of 2009, Sujeet and Tapas travelled north to set up Flipkart’s first office outside Bangalore. This office properly complemented the company’s headquarters located inside a two-bedroom apartment. Situated in Daryaganj, the Delhi office was a single room of twenty square footage on the first floor of a dingy building. A few minutes’ walk from Jama Masjid in Old Delhi, Daryaganj is home to many large and small book distributors and hosts regular kitab bazaars that attract thousands of thrifty book buyers.
In the summer heat, the poorly ventilated room which lacked air-conditioning and had just one small window, felt suffocating. But it was here, amidst the blaze of the madly cramped lane, that Flipkart established itself as a major force in the books world. Sujeet used all his sociability and cunning to jostle, charm and manipulate distributors, who agreed, one after another, like fish taking bait. He immersed himself in every aspect of the books business. After it became evident to Sujeet that he would have to be stationed in Delhi for a while, he installed an old used air-conditioner in his tiny office.
Within
