Sachin was also crowned Entrepreneur of the Year at the 2013 ET Awards, an event organized by the Economic Times.2 He accepted the award in the presence of India’s biggest business tycoons. It announced his arrival as a promising new player in the corporate world. The award was proffered to him by none other than P. Chidambaram, India’s finance minister at the time. The irony was impossible to miss – the award came at the end of a year in which Sachin had been interrogated by the financial police of the government.
Sachin had, in fact, begun to grow restless within his company. Dealing with the regulatory inquiry and fronting the fundraising discussions were essential tasks, but they were removed from the company’s business operations. On the periphery of daily affairs at Flipkart, he had to watch the company thrive from a distance. It was unsettling. Sachin had loved being in charge, directing the company, taking it onto new, unexplored avenues. He enjoyed the power, the successes – the thrill of entrepreneurship was beckoning him back.
But in what way could Sachin go back? What would he do now at Flipkart? The company’s growth in 2013 owed much to its strong foundation created largely through Sachin’s vision and key insights about cash payments and a flexible returns policy. But it was now one year since Sachin had stepped back; the dynamism of the internet space is such that even a short spell on the sidelines can lead to a loss of understanding, and disorientation.
Still, Sachin was determined to find a way back. When he was in charge, the engineers had been the masters of the company, at least in his view. Every month he would ask his team, ‘What new features have we built for our customers?’
Now, under Binny and Kalyan, the sales team had become ascendant, and the technology team only played a supporting role. This was unacceptable to Sachin. Towards the end of 2013, he began to complain to colleagues that Flipkart had stopped ‘innovating’ and was being run in a ‘blindly tactical’ manner. According to a former Flipkart executive, Sachin was especially peeved with the company’s product function. He wasn’t happy that Flipkart had failed to produce exciting new features on its website. Sachin noticed that engineers had become subservient to their sales counterparts, and weren’t ‘creating new experiences for customers’. While this was true, according to the executive, it had its benefits. ‘It wasn’t like the sales team was asking the engineers to make random features.’
Sachin had watched Kalyan’s growing stature with alarm. Their relationship wasn’t great. Kalyan was a straight-up dhanda guy. He had little time for technological tinkering that didn’t provide a direct, immediate boost to sales. He thought of Flipkart as a retail business whose sole purpose was to grow its sales as fast as it could, through the most economic means, and thereby increase its valuation. Sachin, on the other hand, thought of himself as a technologist and inventor, and of Flipkart as a company that was using the power of software to offer a high-quality commerce service. Their personalities, too, were mismatched. Kalyan sometimes travelled with Sachin for meetings with investors, recounting later to his friends that these were awkward trips, filled with long silences and conversations that ended as abruptly as they would begin. Kalyan was an extroverted leader who liked shooting the breeze with his trusted colleagues; Sachin was an inward-looking engineer, inherently awkward around people, whom he found less interesting than his video games.
Nevertheless, it was clear to Sachin and Binny that many people at Flipkart, especially executives in the sales and finance functions, enjoyed working with Kalyan. Sachin may not have been happy about it, but there was no denying that Kalyan with his single-mindedness had helped transform Flipkart from a promising startup into a highly efficient machine ruthlessly achieving its goals every week, every month, every quarter. Lee Fixel was insistent that the interim CFO prolong his stay at the company. Besides, even Binny held Kalyan in high esteem.
In December 2013, despite Sachin’s reservations, Kalyan was rewarded with the role of Head of Categories – Retail. The move legitimized Kalyan’s growing influence at the company. He had initially moved to Flipkart for a few quarters to help fix its finance function; it was now clear he would be here much longer.
Despite promoting Kalyan, Sachin continued to express disapproval at the way Flipkart was being run. One of his more persistent complaints had to do with the slow progress of the company’s mobile business. He pointed out that customers were increasingly using their phones to browse and shop. Soon, the launch of 4G connections and the introduction of cheaper smartphones would trigger a huge shiftin browsing from desktops to the mobile. Yet, Flipkart remained stuck in the ‘desktop era’. Its mobile app and mobile site were substandard, Sachin moaned. And they weren’t improving fast enough. He would often raise hell with the engineers working on the mobile technology team. In turn, they would vent to their bosses, ‘Humare haath dho ke peechhe padha hai Sachin. He is being relentlessly demanding. Can’t you tell him to go easy on us?’
IN EARLY 2013, a recruiter had reached out to Michael Adnani on behalf of Flipkart. The fifty-something Michael was a veteran of the American retail and technology sectors. He was employed at the Chicago offices of Sears, the retail pioneer that was struggling to survive, partly because of Amazon’s rise. The recruiter told Michael that an upcoming Indian e-commerce firm called Flipkart was looking for a senior sales executive. Michael was intrigued. Not only was he unaware of Flipkart, he had never even visited India. After a few conversations with the Bansals, Michael realized that they had reached out to him because his last name, Adnani, sounded Indian. Michael was, in reality, an Iranian-American who had lived in the US most of his life. But the conversations had gone well, so they continued to stay in
