The response from the spectators wasn’t encouraging. On hearing about the drastic changes, the employees who ran Flipkart on a day-to-day basis, expressed doubt.
‘How will this work?’
‘Why are we doing this?’
‘Do we need to make all these changes?’
‘Do we need to make all these changes all at once?’
But the three Bansals were unfazed. Like a king presiding over his janta, Sachin told his employees that all the changes mentioned were necessary for Flipkart to leapfrog into a $100 billion firm.
Over the next two days, Sachin, Binny and Mukesh, along with other Flipkart executives, elaborated upon the upcoming changes to their respective departments. But employees showed little enthusiasm. ‘You’re talking gibberish,’ some said. ‘The more I tried to explain it, the more embarrassing it became,’ recalls one of the department heads.
Nevertheless, Flipkart pushed forward with the new plan. Within the next six months, the company would, to some degree, remake itself in exactly the way Sachin had envisioned.
THE NEW FLIPKART would have another essential feature: a new management team. This plan had been conceived by Sachin and Mukesh, and Binny had backed it. The three Bansals together believed that for Flipkart to ascend to the greatest heights, the company would need superior leaders. Sachin, in particular, had no doubt that while the old team had served Flipkart well so far, they had reached the limits of their abilities. Their resistance to Sachin’s plans was also inconveniencing. In order to elevate Flipkart to a world-class company and transform it into a true bastion of technology, new managers would have to be found.
Flipkart had already appointed a new finance chief: Sanjay Baweja. In his mid-fifties, Sanjay was a well-respected CFO, having worked at companies such as Airtel and the Tata Group. He had been hired with the long-term objective of taking Flipkart public. But the most important appointment was that of a chief product officer.
Punit Soni had been the lead product manager for Motorola since its buyout by Google. He had led software development for the new Motorola phones that turned out to be among the bestselling smartphones of 2013–14 across the world. Punit had grown up in Anushakti Nagar, an eastern suburb of Bombay, a few kilometres from the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, where his father worked as a nuclear scientist. Anushakti Nagar, one of the very few well-planned areas of India’s financial capital, served as the housing colony for the scientists, engineers and doctors working at the research agency. After finishing school in this elite environment, Punit would spend six years studying engineering at two ultra-conservative places, first in Haryana at the National Institute of Technology, Kurukshetra, and then at the University of Wyoming, in the eponymous mid-sized American state, the population of which is lower than most Bombay suburbs. After obtaining his master’s degree, Punit moved to Silicon Valley just as the dotcom bust was beginning at the turn of the new century. Now in his mid-thirties, Punit was looking to move on to a new job after having spent eight years at Google.
Sachin had met Punit in early 2014 after Flipkart and Motorola became exclusive partners. Punit had betrayed a supercilious manner. Once during a routine meeting, when Sachin asked him about Motorola’s upcoming products, Punit pulled out a phone from his bag and showcased its features, some of which were futuristic. Sachin was awestruck, his eyes widening as the product was demonstrated to him. Sachin, always a firm believer in Flipkart’s technology prowess, had then drawn a parallel between the new Motorola phone and the Flipkart app, which he claimed was ahead of its time, too. Punit waved his hand dismissively, ‘Nah, I don’t think so, Sachin. The technology we’ve built is way ahead of anything Flipkart has created. It’s incomparable.’ This had made Sachin bristle. But it had also made Punit seem more impressive. Sachin would keep telling his colleagues, ‘This is the kind of person we need.’
In the second half of 2014, Sachin offered Punit the role of Flipkart’s product chief. He wanted a technologist to carry out his vision of turning Flipkart into a cutting-edge internet company. He thought he had found this pioneer in Punit. Not only was Punit looking to change jobs, like Sachin, he also intensely wanted to make history. Like Sachin, he was a believer in the supremacy of technology and possessed by the dream of creating The Great Indian Internet Company. Punit’s academic background and extensive career in Silicon Valley had greatly impressed Sachin. As a bonus, Punit, a bespectacled, observing sardar, was of Indian origin, which meant the cultural adaptation wouldn’t be as hard as it might have been for a foreigner. Sachin believed that Punit, with his bright turbans and energetic personality, would be a good fit at Flipkart.
Along with Punit, Flipkart hired another senior engineer from Google. Peeyush Ranjan came in as Chief Technology Officer. Saikiran Krishnamurthy, a senior partner at McKinsey, was hired as Chief Operating Officer of Flipkart’s core e-commerce business. To lure these and other coveted executives away from their highly lucrative jobs at companies far bigger than Flipkart, the Bansals offered astonishing compensation packages worth millions of dollars (most of it in stock options). These hires were symbolic of the momentous cultural change that Flipkart had ushered into India’s corporate world. A few months ago, it would have been inconceivable for a partner at the world’s premier consultancy or senior engineers thriving at the world’s leading technology firm, to join an Indian company, much less Flipkart, a little-known startup. Now, it was a compelling proposition. Flipkart and a small number of other Indian internet startups had
