OF THE BANSALS, Sachin joined Amazon first, in January 2006. A few months later, the company moved its office to Ali Asker Road. Named after the Persian horse trader who settled in Bangalore a few years after it was set up by the British,13 Ali Asker Road is a wide, tree-lined stretch of concrete. In the heart of colonial Bangalore where streets display their British lineage with names like Cunningham Road, Brigade Road and Richmond Road, Ali Asker Road stands out primarily for tracing a different ancestry.
By the time Amazon hired Sachin, its employees had completely absorbed the company’s ethos. Sachin, then twenty-four, was placed in the payments team. After graduating from IIT Delhi, he had spent a few months at a Bangalore IT firm called Techspan.14 He came to Amazon as a young, intelligent, but somewhat naive man, eager to prove himself, but without much knowledge about how the world worked. He was also confident – getting into the IITs can take care of that – but had no idea of his worth. Amazon loved hiring people like Sachin; they were easily lured onto the company’s internal battlefield with temptations of wealth, power and glory, shown to be always within reach, but only attainable if one complied with Amazon’s methods and mandates.
Sachin entered a team of overachieving men with supreme technical skills and attendant egos. Some of these men were engineering managers such as Amar Nath and Ashish Agrawal. Sujayath Ali and Raghu Lakkapragada, who had been hired straight from the Indian School of Business, worked as product managers. There was Ajay Bhutani, Sachin’s junior from IIT. The seniors – by experience – included Gaurav Kushwaha, Mohan Varadarajan and Aditya Lal, who would all soon start their own firms. Among the engineers Sachin worked closely with were Vijay Subramanian, the self-styled Tamilian film star, Sachin Dalal and Alok Chandra – all of whom would later help build Infibeam, an online retailer that played a small but nearly climactic role in Flipkart’s first year. And at the top of this pyramid were Amit the Jeff Bot, and Vikas the Tech Genius.
In Amazon’s elite engineering crowd, Sachin had come to be regarded as a middling programmer, competent but not outstanding. There were several others like him, but many more were considered better. A former teammate of Sachin remembers him as a ‘regular’ guy, neither too quiet nor too shy and not very social either.
Sujayath Ali, who was briefly Sachin’s colleague at Amazon, recalls that Sachin was as inclined towards understanding how a product would be used as he was towards writing code. The tech world broadly categorizes these two areas respectively as ‘product’ and ‘engineering’. A product-oriented worker prioritizes the ease of use, while an engineer cares more strongly about the strength of the code they write. Product and engineering work together but are often in conflict over what needs to be prioritized. ‘Coding-wise, Sachin was average but he had a sharp business sense ... if you gave a feature to him, he would develop it in a very consumer-friendly way, says Sujayath.
Soon, these qualities would come together to propel the rise of a singular Indian startup.
2
THE BANSALS GO TO IIT
The first few years of an engineer’s professional life can be like an extension of college. It is often the case that Indian college students – many of whom come from middle-class households – with certain proclivities gravitate towards classmates with similar interests. Once a student has moved to a new city with a new job, it isn’t uncommon for them to share their accommodation with friends from their college hostel who might have moved to the same city. A group of friends will often stay in the same flat, sometimes two or three people to each bedroom. The living arrangements aren’t necessarily salutary. Cheap furniture, bean bags and mattresses are common fixtures, arranged so weed and alcohol can be consumed and video games played with minimal expenditure of effort. It isn’t too unreasonable to say that in many cases, this extended adolescence is brought to a close only by marriage, often arranged by the engineer’s family. It can even be argued that some engineers never truly grow out of their adolescence.
Sachin Bansal’s post-IIT life was no different. When he moved to Bangalore in 2005 after graduating with a B.Tech., he called upon one of his closest hostel friends, Ankit Agarwal. Ankit and two of his IIT friends, Kapil Makhija and Prayank Swaroop, shared a three-bedroom apartment at the National Games Village complex and worked at different tech companies. Soon after relocating, Sachin moved in with them. Located in the upcoming Bangalore suburb of Koramangala, the NGV was built in the 1990s to host the athletes participating in the 1996 National Games in Bangalore. It was a large apartment complex with dozens of buildings, many of them named after rivers. The flats were compact, but the complex boasted gardens, badminton courts, a swimming pool and walking lanes. In the nineties, the NGV had played an important role in the gentrification of Koramangala.
Koramangala is situated a few miles away from Bangalore’s former cantonment area. Year 2008 onwards, this suburb developed into a thriving startup centre. Just two decades ago, however, its landscape had been dominated by an artificial lake. (Such lakes have been the major source of water in the city since it was established in the sixteenth century.) Koramangala’s gentrification began in earnest after Infosys launched operations in the suburb in the late 1980s. Over the next decade, as the IT industry burgeoned, many companies, including Infosys, moved their offices to the nearby Electronic City. Koramangala benefited from its proximity to this new IT hub. Wealthy IT businessmen like Nandan Nilekani and Ashok Soota took up residence in Koramangala. The construction of the NGV complex and the launch of the grand Forum Mall helped
