Sachin revelled in the success of the Xiaomi partnership. Even though it was his colleagues in the sales team who had actually worked out the details of the deal, he took great pride in having established a rapport with Lei Jun, who was regarded as one of the foremost technology entrepreneurs in China. By association, Sachin implied to his colleagues that he belonged in the same league. Now at the end of July, a week after the first blockbuster Xiaomi sale, his confidence soaring, Sachin declared his ambition to grow Flipkart into a $100 billion company. His plans of realizing this vision were, in fact, already in motion.
In August, Sachin called a small group of colleagues to his house in Koramangala. The agenda was to discuss what Flipkart needed to do so it could become a $100 billion company. He called the mission Flipkart 3.0. Sachin and Binny had led the company’s first phase, from its birth until the end of 2012. The second phase, dominated by Binny and Kalyan, had lasted eighteen months. It had been a great spell, one that had made the company into an efficient machine. But its time was up, Sachin believed. He also complained that this phase had introduced structural weaknesses that had to be undone. Flipkart had moved away from its technology mission. To become a $100 billion company, Flipkart needed a new vision, a new path. Now, he told his colleagues, the time had come for the company to undergo its biggest-ever transformation.
Three other individuals, apart from Sachin and Binny, would be present at the Flipkart 3.0 meetings. They were Mukesh Bansal, Amod Malviya and Vaibhav Gupta.
After the Myntra deal, Mukesh had grown close to the Bansals. Amod and Sachin shared a close professional relationship as well; despite their occasional conflicts, each held the other in high regard.
Vaibhav Gupta, simply called VG, had been at Flipkart since 2011. He was Sachin’s senior from IIT Delhi, but the two hadn’t known each other well at college. In his first year at Flipkart, VG had struggled to establish himself as a product executive in the supply chain division. But he had helped implement Sachin’s supply chain software, Flo. Over the past eighteen months, VG had also led the business finance function that had played a key part in the company’s revival and in its fundraising spree. He was one of the few Flipkart executives who was rated highly by both Sachin and Kalyan.
Later, Sachin created another group he called the Flipkart Think Tank which included a few other senior leaders who were responsible for directing the company’s daily operations. This group was to oversee the implementation of Sachin’s new vision.
As conspicuous as those present was the absentee: Kalyan Krishnamurthy, the man who was running much of the company – but this would have to change. In his mind, Sachin was clear about who would or wouldn’t have a place at Flipkart 3.0.
It was clear to Kalyan, too. By the middle of 2014, Kalyan had decided to return to Tiger Global sometime later in the year. His strained relationship with Sachin wasn’t getting any better.
SACHIN HAD BEGUN to reimagine the company in the midst of preparations for a special shopping event.
In early 2014, Binny and Kalyan had attended a gathering of the portfolio companies of Naspers, one of Flipkart’s investors. At the meeting, a Polish e-commerce firm had made a presentation about its shopping festival. It had set Binny thinking about hosting one on Flipkart’s site, and he charged Kalyan with organizing it. Online shopping festivals are common in the big internet markets of the US and China. In the US, Cyber Monday takes place at the start of the shopping season, a few days after the Thanksgiving holiday. Chinese companies have their own – the biggest, hosted by Alibaba, is called Singles Day.
Kalyan was confident that Flipkart could pull off such an event in India. In October 2013, a few days before Diwali – the biggest shopping season of the year – the company had held a hastily arranged sale event. Despite the lack of planning, customers came in droves, taking Flipkart by surprise. That month, the company raked in sales three times higher than the monthly average.
Now, in 2014, Flipkart set a far bigger target for the one-day event: ₹600 crore in gross sales. It was Sachin who came up with the name for the sale: Big Billion Day. It was to be held on 6 October, a few weeks before Diwali. The date of the sale, 6–10–2014, contained the numbers in the address of the NGV apartment – 6–10 – where the Bansals had founded Flipkart.5
Kalyan set about preparing for the event. The finance and sales teams under Kalyan busied themselves with preparations for months. Large orders for products were placed with vendors. Existing warehouses were expanded. Temporary warehouses were rented. Thousands of temporary delivery workers were hired. Courier companies were told to be ready for a spike in deliveries. Third-party sellers were persuaded to offer big discounts, which would be made up for with increased sales and higher visibility to customers. Everyone at Flipkart worked overtime. Amod Malviya and Sameer Nigam, the highest-ranking engineers at the company, made their team work fourteen to sixteen hours daily in the weeks leading up to the sale. New software tools for promotions and marketing were readied. Large tracts of additional server space were reserved to absorb the higher influx of
