A few weeks after Sujeet moved to Bombay, a recruiter reached out to Indranil Dutta, a young sales executive at Berger Paints. The recruiter told Indranil that an exciting new e-commerce startup was looking to hire a head for its newly launched Bombay office. When Indranil heard the name of the startup, his immediate reaction was, ‘Flip-what?’ Soon, he interviewed with Sujeet and Binny who promised to give him complete control over the western operations. Indranil was excited – after all, how many twenty-five-year-olds, just eighteen months into the corporate world, would even be considered for such positions? Indranil had wanted to launch a startup of his own, but the Flipkart offer was compelling. And Binny and Sujeet had seemed sincere. They were also offering a sizeable increase in salary. All options weighed, Indranil decided to join Flipkart as the head of its Bombay operations, which included Pune, Ahmedabad and a few other western cities.
After hiring Indranil, Sujeet moved east to set up Flipkart’s operations in Calcutta in early 2010. Yet again he repeated his bait-and-switch trick with book distributors as he launched Flipkart’s office and hired people. The company had now established its presence in all the four major regions of India.
MEANWHILE IN BANGALORE, the Bansals had hired a few coders. In July 2009, they also recruited Flipkart’s first head of product, Shivakumar Ganesan. They were now on the lookout for an engineering chief. Accel’s investment in Flipkart had strengthened the bond between Abhishek Goyal and the Bansals. Abhishek was the lone man in the venture capital world who had believed in them. He had even been willing to put his personal money into Flipkart. Abhishek empathized with the Bansals and saw the world as much as an entrepreneur as he did as a venture capitalist. He had become a valuable advisor to Sachin and Binny. When the Bansals told him they were looking for an engineering head, he introduced them to Mekin Maheshwari. Abhishek and Mekin had worked at Yahoo and had considered starting a company together. When that didn’t pan out, Mekin joined Ugenie, the startup that had been launched by former Amazon India employee Krishna Motukuri. After a two-year stint, Mekin quit Ugenie. Now in his late twenties, he wanted to be an entrepreneur. Neverthless, Abhishek urged him to meet Sachin and Binny.
Their meeting lasted more than three hours, after which Sachin offered Mekin a job as Flipkart’s chief of engineers. But Mekin wasn’t sure and asked for a week to consider his options. In that week, he placed an order from Flipkart – he had never used the website before. He sought advice from his friends and conducted a quick investigation of Flipkart online. Of the dozen or so people he asked for advice, most warned him against joining an unknown startup. They were also convinced that e-commerce wouldn’t work in India. Still, Mekin felt drawn to Flipkart – customers were raving about it on social media:
‘Finally found the book on Flipkart!’
‘Got the book in two days flat!’
Mekin could tell that customers loved Flipkart’s service.
A week later, he had another long conversation with the Bansals. He also visited Flipkart’s small headquarters to observe how the company handled its operations and figure out if Sachin and Binny’s spiel about customer obsession had been genuine. It didn’t take him long to notice that the entire company was designed to deliver books fast. A packaging worker coming back after picking up books from suppliers would first put aside current orders even though the more efficient move would have been to record all the books in the system together. He was also taken by the manner of the Bansals; they weren’t very talkative, neither did they try to hardsell Flipkart to him. Instead, they came across as two serious engineers who were absorbed by the challenge they had taken up. Mekin decided his startup could wait.
Along with Sujeet, Mekin became one of the two seniormost executives at Flipkart for the next three years.
By September 2009, when the Bansals hired Mekin, Flipkart was in pursuit of serious expansion. It adopted the famous Amazon motto: Get Big Fast. Before the Accel round was finalized in the summer, Flipkart had been marked by a series of setbacks and near-blunders, the Infibeam episode being just one of them. It got off to a painfully slow start due to shortages of capital and employees. The travails had strengthened the Bansals, turned them into shrewd business-boys. Now with dedicated, energetic employees on their side, their ambition was soaring. Even the venture lords had started to relent. The astonishing jump in Flipkart’s revenue had turned the heads of a few in the pantheon, who were finally ready to move past their scepticism about Flipkart and e-commerce in general. Around this time, firms such as Nexus Venture Partners entered into investment discussions with the Bansals.
Sachin, in particular, was charged up. From this period until the start of 2012, he would take centre stage at Flipkart. The dynamic between the Bansals that had developed in the early years would consolidate. It was already becoming apparent that Sachin defined Flipkart’s vision and ambition while Binny designed the blueprint to realize it all. To their colleagues Sujeet, Mekin and several others, the partnership seemed ideal.
