Sachin and Binny began to make preparations for a Flipkart that would be many, many times its current size. They had already established a foothold in books. Now the company hungrily entered new categories. In the second half of 2010, Flipkart started selling mobile phones, music and film CDs, DVDs, and cameras. To launch these categories and to move to the next stage in its evolution, the company needed a capable management team. When a startup receives venture capital, investors insist that the company hire experienced leaders. Its new executives are expected to have previously worked at larger companies so they are able to bring to the startup their subject matter expertise or general management abilities. They are seen as necessary for propelling the startup to the next level or two. The startup is thereby able to attract larger amounts of capital which is supposed to help it grow even bigger, which then necessitates the management to be replaced by a newer set of leaders. At Flipkart, this cycle began in 2010 and would continue for the next eight years, as the company would see ceaseless growth, churn, volatility and drama.
The Bansals had formed a ‘Core Team’ that consisted of themselves, Mekin, Sujeet and Tapas. The five of them would meet for dinner every Wednesday to discuss the week’s events and make plans for bigger strategic moves. In 2010, the core team spent much of their time interviewing prospective candidates for a variety of new positions at the company. Within a few months Flipkart had added more than two dozen senior and middle managers. Finance, marketing and human resources departments were set up and the existing sales, operations, customer support and technology functions were expanded. This concept of the Core Team was one more peculiarity the Bansals had adopted from Amazon, apart from the principles of customer obsession, thinking big, and bias for action.2
Just like Amazon, even at that early stage, Flipkart instituted a high standard when it came to recruitment. All candidates who applied for jobs in the technology department were made to take tests and quizzes. They were asked to apply their technical skills to solve real problems that Flipkart was facing. But the company didn’t hire only from the IITs; engineers from Delhi College of Engineering, Punjab Engineering College, colleges in Tamil Nadu and other states were all welcomed. Mekin, who had devised the hiring process, was open to recruiting anyone who cleared the interviews, regardless of the candidates’ pedigree. The candidates would be posed technical questions, but these were mostly designed to test the engineers’ problem-solving abilities.
For the other departments, the company hired experienced professionals, entry-level workers, generalists, specialists – anyone and everyone who suited their needs and met its standards. Flipkart was an unknown internet company operating in an environment where startups were seen as career graveyards. But the Bansals knew they would need to attract highly capable people in order to succeed. More importantly, the people they hired would need to adopt Flipkart’s cause completely, become warriors for the company. Flipkart was creating a new industry from nearly nothing. Its employees would have to put the company at the centre of their lives – long hours, working weekends, fulfilling different roles at different times, relocation, and constant volatility would be the features of their lives. In return, Flipkart wasn’t even willing to offer exorbitant salaries. Understandably, many of the people Flipkart hired at that time were men and women who hadn’t experienced much professional success, felt a keen sense of insecurity, were desperate to prove themselves and discover their self-worth, not too different from Sachin’s situation when he joined Amazon, or Sujeet’s when he agreed to work for his former IIT juniors. At Flipkart, the prototype of the ideal hire was Ankit Nagori.
Ankit was born in Bokaro, a small town in Jharkhand, where his father ran a steel trading business. He had moved to Delhi with his family when he was five years old. A graduate of IIT Guwahati, Ankit had wound up his startup Youthpad, a social media platform, in early 2010. He was lost. A keen reader, Ankit visited a New Delhi book fair in March 2010, and found a stall with a sign that read Flipkart. Curious, Ankit looked up the company and realized that it was an emerging internet firm. Although his venture had failed, Ankit was keen to continue working at a startup. He emailed Binny, asking for a job. Some days later, Ankit interviewed with Sujeet and Anuj Chowdhary, Flipkart’s sales head. They were impressed by Ankit’s energy and the eagerness his fresh, clean-shaven face seemed to exude, and agreed to hire him. Ankit was to steer the launch of CDs and DVDs, what Flipkart referred to as ‘media’, another adoption from the Amazon playbook. At twenty-four years, Ankit was young even by Flipkart standards. He was a category head for all practical purposes but his formal position was at the lowest level of the hierarchy. It didn’t matter; as soon as he joined, Ankit completely bought into Flipkart’s mission. Flipkart hired many other executives in the coming weeks and months. They included Anuj Rathi, who headed product and worked closely with Sachin; Marcus Terry, who oversaw customer support; Vaibhav Pandey, who oversaw electronics; and Vipul Bathwal, who launched the mobile phones category.
Hiring people was relatively easy, but it was impossible to know whether one had made the right choice. As early as 2010, a pattern emerged at Flipkart that would haunt the company for a long time. Many executives would quit soon after they were hired. Some left of their own accord, many were forced out. Flipkart had already lost its first product chief, Shivakumar Ganesan. The day Ankit joined, Anuj Chowdhary, one of his two interviewers, put in his papers. Anuj had been doing well as the head of sales. But he was torn between staying at Flipkart and taking up entrepreneurship. Finally, he leftin April 2010 to start his own venture.
