7
THE EYE OF THE TIGER
Flipkart received the first instalment of about $250,000 from Accel Partners in the first half of 2009. By now, the company had moved into a new office in a charming part of Koramangala. The new premises, on the first floor of a large, sunlit bungalow surrounded by trees, was an upgrade from the drab space that had so far housed the Bansals and their first few employees. Subrata Mitra from Accel joined Flipkart’s board as part of the funding round. But there had been a problem with wiring the money. For some reason, Accel was unable to send the entire amount to Flipkart. So, Subrata reached out to his friend Ashish Gupta, head of the venture capital firm Helion Venture Partners. This was the same Ashish who, along with his friends, had sold his price comparison site Junglee to Amazon in the late nineties. He later founded the IT services firm Tavant Technologies. In 2006, Ashish set up Helion to invest in Indian startups. Helion had looked into Flipkart but concluded an investment in the company was too risky. But Ashish didn’t mind investing in his personal capacity. In 2009, he wrote a cheque of about ten lakh rupees to Flipkart which was sent along with one of the Accel tranches. Less than nine years later, that bet would turn into one of the most lucrative startup investments in India, yielding Ashish more than a hundred crore rupees.1
With Accel’s funding, Flipkart finally had the cash to hire engineers and supply chain staff. By now, they desperately needed more support. Sales were beginning to soar as Sujeet signed up distributors in Delhi, expanding Flipkart’s assortment by thousands of books every month. In the mornings and afternoons, Sujeet would pitch Flipkart to both small and large distributors. In the evenings, he would meet with courier services and oversee the packaging and shipping of books. In all of this, Tapas played a key supporting role. Apart from accompanying Sujeet on some of the visits to distributors’ offices, he trained the packaging workers and courier personnel. Binny, too, spent a few months at the Delhi office, working closely with Sujeet as he designed Flipkart’s supply processes. It was areas such as this where Binny was gifted – he enjoyed setting up structures and systems. How does one upload the pricing and volume data of books onto the Flipkart system? How would the Bangalore and Delhi offices sync up? How could packaging workers make use of the systems? Binny had all the answers.
As business grew, Flipkart rushed to hire more people in Delhi. Sujeet got in touch with a few people from his IIT gang. He usually moved around with his troops. He had brought along some of his IIT friends even to his previous outsourcing startup. At Flipkart, Sujeet persuaded Maneesh Mittal and Anuj Chowdhary, his mates from IIT Delhi, to join him. It was a measure of Sujeet’s interpersonal abilities: Anuj had declined to join Flipkart in 2008 when he was approached by Sachin. Of course, the funding from Accel helped this time around. But it was Sujeet’s association with the company that had ultimately been reassuring. Maneesh joined in early September 2009, Anuj a few days later. They quickly settled into their new roles.
Maneesh and Sujeet had been batchmates at Delhi while Anuj had been in Sachin’s class. All four of them had stayed at the Jwala hostel, a detail that was presented as a toxic nexus in a controversial magazine story some years later.2 That story scarred Flipkart for years, but in the beginning, Maneesh and Anuj did turn out to be productive recruits in the operations function. Sujeet had the force of personality to bring together a driven, talented team and cultivate a spirit of kinship. But it was Maneesh and Anuj who had a head for details, for thinking up and implementing the day-to-day processes that allowed Flipkart to thrive. Maneesh oversaw warehousing activities while Anuj took up the responsibility for signing up publishers and distributors. Both men reported to Sujeet. Just as the Bansals had given Sujeet free rein, Sujeet, in turn, chose not to interfere in Maneesh and Anuj’s work.
Even though the orders for books were increasing by multitudes, Flipkart maintained its diligence in pleasing customers. Each order would be handled with the same rigour – every customer’s tweet would be taken seriously, customer complaints would be investigated with the seriousness of a murder inquiry, lessons learnt would be applied and processes improved. The company instilled this ‘customer obsession’ in all employees. Maneesh, who loved reading, would urge employees to treat books like heeras. It was even common for many of the company’s senior members to deliver books personally if orders piled up.
Sachin and Binny were also continuously refining the packaging and delivery processes. When they had started out, the two of them would gather books on the office floor, then organize them as per customer orders. As the orders increased, this process became untenable, so they moved to a shelf-based system. Books would be loaded onto shelves rather than stacked on the floor. Both these systems were designed for speed and efficiency; books had to be packed and shipped almost as soon as they would come in. But by October 2009, Flipkart was fulfilling a few hundred orders every day, up from just a few dozen a year ago. The shelf-based process had to be shelved. Sachin and Binny designed a new system which they called the ‘pigeonhole’. This system was based on orders rather than individual books. If a customer ordered three books and Flipkart had at least two or all of them in stock, it made little financial sense to ship them separately as orders increased manifold. The pigeonhole method thus allowed Flipkart to upgrade from a book-by-book delivery system to an order-based system.
A MAJORITY OF Flipkart’s sales came from Bangalore and Delhi simply because the company could deliver quickest
