Until the end of 2012, when Sachin was at the peak of his powers, he had undoubtedly been the pivotal figure at Flipkart. His ability to conjure a grand vision for the company, his knack for coming up with the big ideas that unlocked the promise of e-commerce, combined with his audacity in pursuing these ideas, made him a peerless entrepreneur. He had run Flipkart through instinct as well as careful thought.
But it wasn’t just Flipkart’s anatomy that had changed considerably in the time he had been away from the action; even the e-commerce market had grown by magnitudes. Flipkart, which was at the frontier of this change, had expanded considerably along with it. There were new dynamics; power equations between senior executives had altered. Teams coordinated with each other in new ways. This process had been organic, as it often is at a fast-growing startup. Employees would joke that one year at the company seemed like the equivalent of five at any other. All the senior leaders had strong personalities and had built fiefdoms of their own. They wielded enormous power, primarily because their performance was beyond reproach. Since the end of 2013, Sachin had been trying to recover his former authority, but it hadn’t been easy. Indeed, for months, he had been consumed by a strange, almost schizophrenic feeling – finally, when after years of being dismissed, Flipkart was finally being feted by the world outside, when Sachin himself was being lionized, he actually had little influence at his own company, and not much to do with its recent successes. He now had the fame and the glory, but not the entrepreneur’s satisfaction of directing his company’s affairs. And he felt its lack keenly. Especially since the billion-dollar funding had been finalized in July 2014, Sachin had been burning to get back onto the battlefield of daily operations.
Sachin’s criticism about the ‘lack of innovation’ in the company’s product function had become more forceful in 2014, and in the latter part of the year, he grew strident. He had been particularly unhappy with the development of the mobile website and app. He strongly believed that the mobile would soon replace the desktop as the primary medium of shopping. He vented to some of his colleagues, ‘Our technology and product teams have become slaves to the sales team.’ If things continued in this way, Flipkart would be destroyed, he complained. He also pulled up Flipkart’s engineers for continuing to spend their energies on tinkering with the website for soon-to-be-irrelevant desktop computers. ‘Desktop is the past; the present and future is on the mobile – that’s where the company needs to channel its resources,’ he insisted.
Much of this criticism was aimed, either directly or by implication, at Kalyan Krishnamurthy, who had by now become the most powerful figure at Flipkart. Under him, business was booming. Yet, Sachin believed that Kalyan’s empowering of the sales and finance functions over technology would harm Flipkart over time. Both Sachin and Binny thought that the discount-heavy approach favoured by Kalyan wasn’t sustainable either. For Sachin, Flipkart wasn’t simply a buy-and-sell trading business. He had always seen Flipkart as a ‘technology company, not a retailer’.1 His relationship with Kalyan, never great to begin with, was deteriorating.
A few months after Kalyan was promoted to Senior Vice President, Sachin and Binny had offered him a permanent role at Flipkart. Kalyan’s influence and popularity with the management team was plainly visible. It seemed like an obvious move, a just reward for his stellar performance. Besides, formalizing Kalyan’s position would sever his links with Tiger Global and give the Bansals direct, unquestionable supervision over him. They offered him a prestigious position, one that would elevate Kalyan as the seniormost leader at Flipkart after the Bansals. They also offered Kalyan a large amount of stock options in the company.
To their shock, Kalyan declined. He informed the Bansals he wasn’t ready to move to Flipkart permanently, that he wanted to return to Tiger Global at some point. Later, Kalyan told colleagues that he had refused the offer mainly because he believed that he and Sachin couldn’t work together. Their colleagues already knew that the two would always be at odds. Sachin considered himself a ‘product’ champion, a technologist who cut through the complexities of intractable problems with software and delivered outstanding service to his customers. Kalyan was a man of finance, driven by numbers, margins and the idea of saleability. Their visions for Flipkart couldn’t have been more different.
For much of 2014, Sachin and Kalyan coexisted awkwardly. In fact, Sachin clashed often with many senior executives that year. He had even fallen out with Sujeet Kumar. They had now known each other for nearly fifteen years. After Sujeet was sidelined at the end of 2012, the two had only exchanged words at team meetings. The cause of their rift was unclear to their colleagues, but it was evident that they were no longer close, not even cordial.
The environment at the upper management level grew increasingly toxic through the year. Powerful senior executives like Sujeet and Kalyan, who had little regard for Sachin, made their opinions clear to colleagues. They believed that he had little understanding of the day-to-day workings of e-commerce, and they had grown weary of his fault-finding, which they found to be unreasonable. They openly bad-mouthed Sachin and made fun of him within their inner circle.
On the other side of the tensions, Sachin was growing more zealous. Like many strong-headed entrepreneurs, he had always been unusually passionate about his ideas – it was a passion bordering on vehemence. Now in 2014, as he saw that he wasn’t being taken seriously by the likes of Kalyan and Sujeet, his manner during meetings became more imperious with each passing month, with each milestone Flipkart achieved. When asked for supporting data or evidence during arguments, Sachin would often counter by saying
