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CHAOS AND CONFUSION
On 14 May 2015, Myntra held a press conference. Sachin and Mukesh announced that Myntra would shut its website and become an app-only platform. It was no surprise; newspapers had been revealing this over the last several months. A few days ago, Myntra itself had emailed its customers about the shutdown. At the event, Sachin and Mukesh talked about revolutionizing the app by creating an interface like no other.
Myntra had actually been serving as a lab rat for Flipkart. Sachin declared that Flipkart, too, would shut its website over time. It hadn’t done so already only because of a lack of ‘internal readiness’.1 Within Flipkart, Sachin’s statements caused much consternation. While he had been talking of shutting down the website, a timeline hadn’t been agreed upon yet. But Sachin didn’t care. He was going to get it done.
Still, Sachin and Mukesh both failed to explain why Myntra and Flipkart couldn’t make their mobile apps revolutionary without having to shut down the desktop site. By the company’s own admission, Myntra would be forgoing more than thirty per cent of its orders by closing the website. So, why not keep the website and make the app attractive at the same time? the media wanted to know. In Mukesh’s view, the shopping experience on the app would be so enthralling that people would be compelled to use it over the desktop site in any case. The reporters present were incredulous. Mukesh hadn’t specified the changes that would transform the app. Indeed, the app’s interface had nearly been the same for months; it wasn’t even all that different from the Amazon or Snapdeal apps – or Flipkart’s own. But the changes were coming soon, Mukesh promised. ‘Every single desktop user will have a smartphone. It may take a few months, but every single person will end up using and liking the mobile shopping experience than what they are used to [on] the desktop.’ 2
The Flipkart engineers had been under pressure for months to deliver this magical interface. They were told that the Flipkart app would have to be so good that ‘customers should have an orgasm’ from using it. It was certainly an unbeatable way to take commerce to the masses.
Few people, either within or outside the company, were convinced that the app-only move was a smart one. Still, it had become the talk of the startup world. Investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, journalists – everyone put forth their own theories. Some drew on strategy literature to make sense of the decision, some ascribed it to thoughtfulness, others to ulterior motives. No possible explanation was leftuncovered. But the simple fact was that Sachin was propelled more by impulse than by hypotheses. It was clear that smartphones would become the primary medium of internet consumption in India. Sachin decided that Flipkart should drop everything else and make its app the best shopping platform in the world – it would then surely become the preferred choice of customers. Of course he drew on influences and cited data; he had also considered the repercussions. But eventually he did give in to an impulse; it was his ‘gut feeling’ that drove him to take this decision. Sachin had always been a radical entrepreneur. And now, the urge to be a visionary was irresistible.
Sometime around the middle of 2015, Sachin called for a meeting of the seniormost Flipkart leaders. By now, most of the dissenters had resigned from their positions. Sachin asked his newly appointed lieutenants to voice their opinions about the app-only initiative and prepare presentations backing their arguments. Many of these leaders agreed that the company should shut its desktop site. One presentation quoted the Irish intellectual George Bernard Shaw: ‘Doing what needs to be done may not make you happy, but it will make you great.’3 Sachin loved it. By the end of the meeting, he had decided that Flipkart would shut its desktop site before October. The app-only project was named Project Shaw.
In July, Flipkart called an all-hands meeting. Sachin and Flipkart’s product chief Punit Soni were to announce the decision to the rank and file. But at the time of the meeting, Sachin was nowhere to be found. Punit addressed the crowd by himself. He had privately been lukewarm about the plan. But as he addressed the gathering, Punit became the champion of the idea, savouring his moment in the spotlight.
He was surprised that Sachin hadn’t turned up. After making the announcement, Punit turned to some of the departing senior Flipkart officials, who were standing nearby, and said, ‘Sachin and I were supposed to do this together!’ They were greatly amused, unable to control their laughter.
IN AUGUST 2015, the New York Times published an investigative story about the work culture at Amazon. It showed Amazon to be a ruthless organization engaged in the single-minded pursuit of growth, marked by a ‘purposeful Darwinism’ that pitted employees against each other. It detailed several instances of ruthless treatment of employees including one where a breast cancer survivor was put on a ‘performance improvement plan’. Amazon was ‘conducting a little-known experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers, redrawing the boundaries of what is acceptable,’ the article suggested.4 These disturbing aspects aside, the piece also revealed – as have other accounts, including Brad Stone’s The Everything Store – how even after employing more than a hundred and fifty thousand people,5 the company was able to impose a uniform corporate culture.
After Flipkart had divided itself into three parts in early 2015, its employees were spread out over three large offices. The company had taken up two opulent spaces in Bangalore’s Outer Ring Road area. Its technology team was housed in one
