By early 2012, many of the better-performing employees had leftthe company. The ones who stayed behind weren’t too concerned, and neither were the company’s founders.
Flipkart’s was also a corporate culture cultivated and designed by men, for men. Until 2012, the company had no woman employee at the senior level. It wasn’t simply because there were very few women in the tech world at that time; the company’s male executives were also more comfortable working with other men. It seemed that the culture of India’s engineering colleges had been replicated at Flipkart.
10
THE KING OF SHAKTIPEETH
Sachin may have been an unfamiliar figure at the company’s warehouses, but at Shaktipeeth he ran the show. In the words of one of his colleagues, ‘Whatever Flipkart was until 2013, it was what Sachin had imagined.’ In interviews with reporters, Sachin came across as energetic, geeky, and he was always quick to smile. At Flipkart’s offices he was an impulsive, ruthless capitalist, given to temper tantrums and serial impatience. Sachin was perennially unhappy with the state of affairs at Flipkart, constantly finding fault, always demanding more, and stingy with compliments. His inherent shyness notwithstanding, he had long transformed into a daring businessman, relishing the high-risk game that was internet entrepreneurship. In many ways, Flipkart’s internal environment was a reflection of his personality – volatile, chaotic, excited, constantly churning in the rush to grow by leaps and bounds. Thinking small was discouraged and executives who delivered moderate performance failed to survive for long.
In 2011, Sachin moved into a new apartment near the Flipkart headquarters in Koramangala so he could walk to work every day. He was at the peak of his abilities and immersed himself in all functions at the company. From the start, Sachin had taken charge of the product department, unrelenting in his efforts to offer the cleanest, smoothest interface to users. He directly oversaw many of the improvements on the website. Along with Binny and Sujeet, he backed Flipkart’s push into logistics. While he hadn’t taken much interest in the supply side and had little knowledge of the field, that year he led a project called Flo to design a new supply chain system. Flipkart’s previous software, Open Taps, used to constantly collapse under the ever-increasing volume of orders.
Working with a small team of engineers, Sachin now hunkered down in the company’s second-ever office, the bungalow in Koramangala. He believed in providence – this was where Flipkart’s rise had begun in earnest. The team emerged only weeks later, when the new software was almost ready. Initially, the new supply chain system caused severe disruption with vendors and at warehouses but over time, after several fixes, it resolved many of the problems with the old system. Some Flipkart employees still complained that the software fell quite short of being sufficiently reliable.
On the demand side, Sachin left no such room for criticism. He led the company’s email and other digital marketing efforts. He personally crafted the first set of marketing emails that Flipkart sent to customers. He set absurdly high targets and pushed his team hard towards them. In 2016, when Sachin, who had now become an investor in startups in a personal capacity, was asked about what he looks for in an entrepreneur before investing, he said, ‘Is the entrepreneur going after really big problems? To the extent that it should almost feel scary. Is it really possible what this guy is thinking?’1 He consistently urged his colleagues and investors to think along similar lines. The greatest instance of this was when he set a sales target of $1 billion – to achieve this, the business would have to grow by one hundred times in four years.
The number one billion held special significance for Sachin – he was in its thrall, and would be for many years to come. An in-house brand would be coined Billion; Flipkart’s annual shopping event would be named Big Billion Day. To Sachin, this was a fitting nomenclature in a country of more than a billion people. It was an expression of Flipkart’s mission to take e-commerce to the masses, and also, perhaps, an expression of Sachin’s own desire to become a visionary billionaire entrepreneur.
In Binny, Sachin had the ideal foil. Where Sachin was given to grandiosity, Binny was grounded. Sachin took the bold decisions, while Binny was more thoughtful about how to implement them. It wasn’t as if Binny was less ambitious; he completely backed his business partner’s larger-than-life vision, and was just as demanding. But he was the calmer of the two. Where Sachin glared and shouted, Binny was more willing to hear out employees who had done disappointing work. He had an eye for details and numbers. He would deliver post-mortems of failures or underperformance in a cold, even tone, often using sarcasm, that would make the recipient feel diminished.
When Flipkart was still new, Sachin ensured that the company stayed true to its promise of pleasing customers. He would insist that new employees spend their first few days fielding calls from customers and would obsessively track what customers said about Flipkart on social media.
A key associate of Sachin in this enterprise of pleasing customers was Tapas Rudrapatna. Tapas didn’t have an official title. On his LinkedIn page, he described his role as Flipkart’s ‘Sex Appeal Bringer’. With his long hair, exceedingly thin frame and many tattoos, Tapas resembled the hippies at the US technology startups of the seventies. His two-bedroom bungalow, full of books and guitars, was located near a popular Koramangala bar called Sathya’s which Tapas visited every evening. He ate little, often getting by on just one meal a day, and kept odd hours. His house served as the
