After Binny resigned from the company, Flipkart abolished the post of Group CEO. It consolidated all its e-commerce businesses under Kalyan, who was made the head of Myntra and Jabong, in addition to Flipkart. Kalyan’s ascension was followed by the exit of Myntra CEO Ananth Narayanan. For months, Kalyan had been making the case for running Flipkart and Myntra–Jabong in a more complementary manner. His wish was finally granted by Walmart in November 2018. Putting Myntra and Jabong under Kalyan’s charge immediately yielded cost savings for Flipkart. Whether the move will continue to benefit the company in the future is unclear. In the past, Flipkart had considered a separate listing of Myntra’s shares. That possibility is all but dead now.
Kalyan is no longer seen as an associate of Lee Fixel or a Tiger Global representative; he is a powerful CEO in his own right with the full backing of Walmart. The American retail giant has appointed several executives to important posts in Flipkart’s finance and legal functions, but Kalyan has been given considerable leeway to run the company as he sees fit.
So far, Kalyan has delivered fine results. In the one year or so after its takeover, Flipkart has increased its lead over Amazon. Surprisingly, after Walmart’s entry, Amazon’s competitive intensity seems to have reduced. The company is close to exhausting the $5 billion in capital it had pledged for expanding its India operations. How much more capital the company will commit towards India remains to be seen. It is becoming increasingly clear that Amazon will take longer to realize its stated objective of making India its second-biggest market after the US by 2025.7
Lee Fixel leftTiger Global in June 2019 after a spell of thirteen years,8 during which time he established himself as one of the most promising young investors in the startup world globally and accumulated a personal fortune that will soon approach $1 billion. Much of his wealth is on account of the Flipkart wager. Lee plans to start an investment firm of his own. He continues to serve on the Flipkart board.
While Kalyan’s record in delivering market share gains has been almost exemplary, he is yet to prove that Flipkart can attain profitability. After agreeing to buy Flipkart in May 2018, Walmart had stated that it would seek a public listing of Flipkart shares within a few years.9 To date, this remains only a distant possibility, as Flipkart presently burns through approximately $1 billion in cash every year. Kalyan now has to reduce costs without sacrificing too much sales growth. It won’t be easy: e-commerce in India is an inherently expensive business.
One surprising windfall for Walmart could come from PhonePe. When Flipkart bought PhonePe in April 2016, it was optimistic that the latter would become a serious player in the digital payments space. PhonePe has surpassed Flipkart’s expectations. In early 2019, PhonePe entered discussions to become independent of Flipkart and raise capital from outside investors. The company could be valued anywhere between $5 billion to $10 billion.10 It would come as a huge win for Walmart if PhonePe is able to pull off a funding round at the higher end of the spectrum. Whatever the price, the PhonePe founders, Sameer Nigam and Rahul Chari, are sure to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Apart from PhonePe, Flipkart has spawned several other successful startups. Not only did the company help turn internet entrepreneurship into a desirable occupation, dozens of its employees have left to start their own companies over the years. The most prominent among these curiously reside next to each other in HSR Layout, a few kilometres away from where Flipkart was started: CureFit, a fitness and food platform that was launched by Mukesh Bansal and Ankit Nagori; and Udaan, a marketplace that facilitates business-to-business commerce that was birthed by Sujeet Kumar, Amod Malviya and Vaibhav Gupta.
In a sense, the founders of Phonepe, CureFit, Udaan and the other Flipkart-spawned startups are all indebted to Sachin. Many of them played important supporting roles and made Flipkart possible. But in the final reckoning, it was Sachin’s imagination and his audacity in pursuing big ideas that made Flipkart’s spectacular rise possible. Thinking big is now a mantra for startup founders; its prevalence can be traced directly to Sachin and to Flipkart’s success.
Meanwhile, Sachin has started a new venture. In late 2018, he incorporated a holding company by the name of BAC Acquisitions Private Limited. He has already invested a large part of his wealth into startups and financial services firms. At BAC Acquisitions, he has teamed up with Ankit Agarwal, his former hostelmate at IIT Delhi and NGV flatmate. Sachin’s LinkedIn profile states that he is ‘pursuing opportunities in the BFSI (Banking, Financial Services and Insurance) space.’11
It may seem like a plain statement, but Sachin’s zeal for pursuing the improbable remains undiminished. Sachin now wants to create a new corporate behemoth: a $100 billion enterprise in financial services. One could assume that this company, too, will have all the characteristics of a Big Billion Startup.
AUTHOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book is based on more than two hundred and fifty interviews, emails, regulatory documents, news reports, and video interviews of Flipkart executives available online. In most cases, the dialogues and quotes that appear in the narrative have been used verbatim from news reports or from interviews that I conducted. In the odd case, they are reconstructed from statements made to me in interviews.
While I have interviewed them several times in the past, the Flipkart co-founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal declined to speak to me for the purposes of the book. Flipkart did not participate either. I reached out individually to all the major characters at Flipkart who appear in the book. Some of them declined to talk or did not respond to my requests. However, I had deep access to many of the people who played a crucial role in the making
