The next day, Sachin, Binny, Kalyan and a few other senior leaders gathered in a room to drafta response to their customers. A few of those present at the meeting said that Flipkart should apologize unreservedly and own up to all the errors that people had pointed out. Kalyan, however, stood his ground on one point. He defended the company’s pricing practices, arguing that Flipkart hadn’t displayed artificially high discounts; the prices had simply reflected the full discount amount on the maximum retail price rather than on Flipkart’s everyday prices, which were admittedly lower than the MRP. But he found his argument ignored.
Flipkart released a long email to customers from Sachin and Binny. The Bansals wrote, ‘Yesterday was a big day for us. And we really wanted it to be a great day for you. But at the end of the day, we know your experience was less than pleasant. We did not live up to the promises we made and for that we are really and truly sorry.’ They conceded that Flipkart’s preparation had been inadequate. ‘... Though we saw unprecedented interest in our products and traffic like never before, we also realized that we were not adequately prepared for the sheer scale of the event.’ They acknowledged all the issues that had angered customers and ended by apologizing again. ‘Everything that we have achieved at Flipkart is purely on the basis of our customers’ trust and faith. This is why we come to work each day and continue to remain extremely passionate about building the best possible customer experience for Indian consumers. We failed to live up to this promise yesterday and would like to apologize once again to every single customer for our failure.’8
The Big Billion Day sale of 2014 turned out to be a bittersweet experience for Flipkart, and especially for Kalyan Krishnamurthy. Kalyan had overseen the biggest-ever sale for the company, one that had revealed the true potential of e-commerce. In a single day, nearly twenty million people had converged onto Flipkart. It was truly unprecedented. And yet, a majority of the shoppers had left empty-handed. It was Kalyan the Bansals had blamed for the inadequacy in preparations.
Next month, Kalyan was back at Tiger Global, although, he still remained on Flipkart’s board of directors.
According to a former Flipkart official, Sachin and Kalyan had two common characteristics that made them incompatible. They were both alphas, they both ‘liked to be the one in command. Neither could take a backseat.’ Both of them also harboured extreme opinions about people, either holding someone in very high regard or thinking they were useless.
For many months now, what one thought about the other had been no secret within the walls of the Flipkart offices.
18
REINVENTING THE KART
‘He had ceased to be a businessman and become a conceptual artist.’
‘He had an animal desire to have what he wanted and not to have what he did not want.’
‘He wanted to create the company that invented the future.’
‘That was the miracle of Jim Clark: by the end of 1995 he had created a money-making machine in which he was the least easily replaced part.’
– Michael Lewis, The New New Thing1
In his mind, Sachin Bansal was now a true visionary entrepreneur. Even the world outside was treating him as such: his investors, the media whose scepticism had given way to hero worship, acquaintances, nearly everyone he knew. In hindsight, it seemed as if seven years ago, when he had started Flipkart, he had seen the future. He had done so when his IIT acquaintances had refused to join him, when venture capital firms had counselled him to stay away from e-commerce, when book distributors and courier companies had dismissed Flipkart. It was Sachin who had thought up the big ideas to unlock the potential of e-commerce in Flipkart’s early years, it was he who had the vision and the audacity to believe that a startup could be converted into a giant company in no time. Now, he would repeat his feat – on a much grander scale.
Sachin’s Flipkart 3.0 team had been meeting once a week at his house to discuss how they could turn Flipkart into a $100 billion company. They debated on the following matters: How was internet usage evolving? How would people’s shopping habits change over the next few years? What should Flipkart do to stay relevant over the next five years? How would Flipkart make money? Were the business models of Amazon, Facebook, Google and other American companies suited to the Indian market? Or was the modus operandi of the Chinese internet firms more likely to work in India? What would be the best business model for Flipkart?
In some ways, their discussion was a microcosm of India’s conundrum post liberalization and in a globalized age. On one hand were the developed economies of the West represented by the US, where post-World War II prosperity seemed to be waning. On the other hand was China, whose economic transformation launched in the early eighties was only becoming stronger. China’s economic achievement has made the country seem like a compelling exemplar to many Indians, not least because of the jealousy aroused when watching a neighbourhood rival that was a fellow backward country break out in such extraordinary fashion. In 2014, Flipkart embodied the anxieties of the Indian economy’s place in the world, its promise, its keen awareness of its inferiority vis-á-vis both China and the West. Sachin had been closely studying the business models of Chinese internet companies such as Alibaba and Xiaomi, as well as the business philosophies of the giant American technology companies, Apple, Facebook and Google. Over the past seven years the Bansals had come
