Part IThe Story
In August 2017, a few weeks after SoftBank's Vision Fund wired $2.5 billion into Flipkart, the company's top two hundred executives gathered for a town hall at the Aloft Hotel in Bengaluru, a stone's throw from the old headquarters at Cessna Business Park. The mood was good. After the worst year in its history, India's most storied internet company had raised more capital in six months than it could spend. One tally put it at $4 billion and counting. The people in the room had come partly to hear about strategy and partly to learn how much their stock options were about to be worth. Kalyan Krishnamurthy, the chief executive, took the microphone and asked a warm-up question. Who thinks Flipkart has done extremely well over the last year?
Most hands went up, quickly. One did not. It belonged to a man in the first few rows, thirty-six years old and close to a hundred kilograms by his own later account, who had started the company a decade earlier with two computers in a two-bedroom flat in Koramangala. He had run it as chief executive for most of its life. He now held the title of executive chairman, which at Flipkart in 2017 described something closer to a portrait in the lobby than a job.
Then someone asked about the share buyback. Who would not be selling into it?
This time Sachin Bansal's hand went up fast, according to two people who were there. Binny Bansal, his co-founder, closest friend and by then group CEO, sold some shares in the program. Sachin sold none. "Flipkart was Sachin's life," a person close to him told the Economic Times afterward. He wanted to run it, this person said, for the next fifty years.
The two gestures came perhaps thirty seconds apart. The first was a refusal to applaud a company he was no longer allowed to run. The second was a refusal to let go of a company that had already, in most of the ways that count, let go of him.
Within nine months he would sell all of it.
By the Numbers
From Koramangala to Bentonville
₹4 lakhInitial capital, pooled ₹2 lakh per founder from family
0Orders Flipkart received on December 31, 2007
49Sachin's All India Rank on his second IIT-JEE attempt (first attempt: 2,470)
$100MGoods sold in 10 hours on the first Big Billion Day, October 6, 2014
$16BWalmart's price for a 77% stake, announced May 9, 2018
5.5%Sachin's stake at exit, sold for roughly $1 billion
₹3,350 crSize of Navi's draft IPO filing, March 12, 2022
The Last Copy in Bengaluru
The first customer was a man named VVK Chandra, who lived in a small town in what is now Telangana and kept a technology blog. In October 2007 someone signing himself "Sachin" left a comment on one of Chandra's posts with a link nobody had heard of: www.flipkart.com. Chandra clicked. He ordered a copy of John Wood's memoir Leaving Microsoft to Change the World. The site had been live for about ten days without a single sale.
There was a problem, and it would turn out to be the whole problem in miniature. Flipkart did not have the book. It did not have any books. The founders had built a website on the assumption that anything printed in India could be found somewhere in Bangalore, and so they checked with vendors across the country and then went looking through the city's stores. Nobody had it. "Still, we rode around in the rain for hours," Binny Bansal would write, a decade later, "until we tracked down a slightly worn-out copy, the last one left, at a Bengaluru store." It reached Chandra a day late and not in mint condition. He left a glowing testimonial anyway, because the two founders had kept him informed the whole way, and in 2007 Indian online shoppers did not expect to be informed. They did not, Sachin later said, "even expect their orders to reach them."
A memoir about leaving a large American technology company, delivered by two young men who had just left a large American technology company. The coincidence is almost too neat. The book was about a man walking away from Microsoft to build schools in Nepal. Its second sale in India, through a website with no stock, was the start of a ten-year argument over who gets to keep the thing you build.
The founders had a habit, in those first months, of standing outside Gangaram Book Stores on Church Street and pressing Flipkart bookmarks into the hands of people walking out with new books. It was the cheapest possible targeting. Binny would later describe riding his motorcycle forty or fifty kilometres a day around Bangalore with Sachin, collecting books from distributors, bringing them back, packing them. On December 31, 2007, Flipkart recorded a zero-order day. The money that kept them going was not venture capital. It was a ₹10,000-a-month allowance from their parents, paid for nearly eighteen months.
The parents had not wanted any of it. Both families were from Chandigarh, and both regarded a job writing software at Amazon as the kind of thing a sensible son keeps. "What if it doesn't work out," Sachin remembered them asking. The founders' answer was practical rather than visionary: if Flipkart failed, they could walk back into a programming job at any large company in Bangalore. There had been a third founder, Binny's friend Varun Sharma, who backed out under exactly this pressure, a detail the journalist Mihir Dalal records in Big Billion Startup: The Untold Flipkart Story, the closest thing the company has to a definitive history. History does not record what Sharma did instead.
— Sachin Bansal, recalling his family's objection, to The New York Times, 2011What if it doesn't work out, you have wasted some time and it will look bad on your C.V.
Sachin had arrived at that CV by a route that wasn't straight. He was born in 1981 into a family of foodgrain traders. His father was in business; his mother kept the house; his brother Nitin would go on to run a consumer goods company. He spent his first decade in a two-storey house on a quiet, leafy lane in Chandigarh, the planned city Le Corbusier drew for a newly independent country, the shared capital of two states, belonging fully to neither. He went to St. Anne's Convent School. On his first attempt at the IIT entrance exam, the national sorting machine that decides the fate of a few hundred thousand Indian teenagers every year, he ranked 2,470th. He went back, tightened his schedule, sat it again, and ranked 49th.
Then, having beaten the machine, he nearly walked away from what it gave him. At IIT Delhi he discovered Age of Empires and Quake III Arena. "I really wanted to become a professional gamer," he said in 2018. "In fact, at one point, I foolishly even decided not to finish my degree." He did finish, a year late. "He actually took one more year to complete his degree because he was gaming too much," Binny said. "He joined one year before me and passed out with me." Years later, when new hires at Flipkart tried to beat the CEO at games for a free dinner, nobody managed it.
It is worth sitting with the games. Age of Empires is a real-time strategy game. You start with a few villagers and a town center, gather resources, expand, fight off rivals, and race to build a civilization before someone else's army reaches your walls. A frightening amount of Sachin Bansal's later career reads like a man playing it with real money: the obsession with expansion, the appetite for big bets on thin information, the conviction that a bigger empire is a safer one. And the habit, which serious players of that game will recognize, of forgetting that the other players at the table are also playing.
Every early profile of Flipkart includes the same parenthetical, so let it appear here once and be done with: the Bansals are not related. Both grew up in Chandigarh. Both went to St. Anne's. Both studied computer science at IIT Delhi. Neither knew the other well until the end of college, and they did not meet in any of the places you would expect. Sachin, having fallen behind on coursework, had been ordered to work through the summer to meet his course requirements. Binny was on a project in the FPGA hardware lab. That is where they found each other: one there because he loved computers, the other because he had loved them a little too much.
Binny Bansal had a different kind of childhood behind him. His father retired as chief manager of a bank and his mother worked for the government. He had no siblings. He read Salman Rushdie and Stieg Larsson. After graduation he spent about a year and a half at Sarnoff Corporation, and Google rejected him twice. He was the one who liked "not so popular" courses. Friends called him the operations guy, the executioner, the one who turned Sachin's ideas into something that shipped on Tuesday.
After graduating in 2005 they moved to Bangalore with a group of eight IIT Delhi friends, shared an apartment, and "used to hang out together all the time." Sachin did a few months at a firm called Techspan and in 2006 joined Amazon as a senior software engineer, on the web services team rather than in retail. "At Amazon, we were not working with the e-commerce division," he later insisted, as if the distinction mattered to his independence. Then he recommended Binny for a job and collected an employee referral bonus. When Binny left Amazon after about eight months to start Flipkart with him, Amazon took the bonus back.
The first serious idea was not a store. It was a price-comparison engine, a search layer that would sit on top of Indian e-commerce and tell shoppers where to buy. They did the research and found there was almost nothing to compare. Indian e-commerce in 2007 was a handful of travel sites, the railway booking portal, and eBay's local arm, which had been operating as Bazee since 2000. So they stopped trying to index a market and decided to become one. "We just jumped into it," Sachin said. Asked whether his Amazon experience had helped, he said no. "Binny and I were glad that we didn't know much about those markets. There was no baggage and the thinking was fresh."
For their first year and more they had no titles. In late 2008, the institutional investors they were starting to meet kept asking the same question, who is the chief executive?, and the founders realized they didn't know. "We went back, looked at what a CEO and a COO does, spoke to advisors and then in quite an ad-hoc manner decided I would be the CEO and Binny the COO," Sachin recalled. It is an extraordinary sentence when you know how the story ends. The most consequential org chart in Indian internet history was drawn up on the spot, and for the next seven years almost nobody revisited it.
They were close the way founders in the early years are close. They finished each other's sentences in interviews. Asked in 2014 what kept the partnership together, Binny said, "By fighting every day," and they both burst out laughing. Sachin, asked for the main advantage of a co-founder, said: "A shoulder to cry on. A cofounder is a person who can hold you together." The press called them the Jai and Veeru of Indian startups, the two inseparable friends of Sholay. People who remember the film will also remember that one of them dies.
Sachin was always clear about the difference between them, and slightly proud of it. "Binny is very organised, while I am impulse driven. I am more emotional and intuitive and Binny is very rational and is able to assimilate a lot of data." Amod Malviya, who ran engineering, put it the same way: Binny analytical and logical, Sachin instinctive, "driven by emotion and passion." Both walked to work. Both flew economy and stayed in budget hotels. One employee compared them to Azim Premji, which in Bangalore is the highest compliment you can pay a rich man's modesty.
The Assumptions That Broke
"Some of our assumptions," Sachin told Business Standard in 2013, "were completely wrong and we had to suddenly deal with a lot of harsh realities that stared rudely in our face." There were three. The founders had assumed every book in India could be had in Bangalore. They had assumed vendors would welcome them with open arms, "because we were, after all, building this amazing, cool website that everyone would want to come to." And they had assumed those vendors would have technology. None of it held. "Our entire business model," he said, with a frankness CEOs rarely show about their own companies, "crashed even before we could start out."
What follows is the pattern that made Flipkart, and the pattern worth understanding. Each time the Indian market refused to behave like the market in an American business-school case, the founders did not argue with it. They built the missing piece themselves. When Bangalore's vendor base turned out to be too thin, they moved quickly into Delhi. When the courier networks and India Post couldn't handle what they wanted, they built their own logistics. When customers would not type card numbers into a website, and in 2007 most Indians had no card to type, Flipkart started accepting cash on delivery in 2010. By 2012, about 65 percent of its deliveries were paid that way. When customers didn't trust that an online product would be genuine, it offered a thirty-day replacement policy. The founders called this customer obsession. A less flattering name might be compensatory vertical integration: every gap in Indian infrastructure became a department.
Books gave them a training ground. "For the first three years, we were known as an online books vendor," Sachin said. By the end of 2008 they were doing more than a thousand orders a day. In 2009 they hired their first full-time employee, Ambur Iyyappa, took $1 million from Accel, opened offices in Delhi and Mumbai, and grew to 150 people. They put Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol up for pre-order, which in Indian e-commerce at the time was roughly like taking reservations for a restaurant that hadn't been built.
The move beyond books was where the training ended. "When we expanded beyond books, into electronics the sh#t hit the fan," Sachin told the Economic Times. A paperback can be left with a neighbour or the building's watchman. A phone cannot. Returns had to be supported, and the customer-service scores the company was built on dropped sharply. Fixing it took "a year's worth of work on technology, supply chain, logistics and marketing." They set up a 24/7 customer support unit. The logistics network eventually stretched from 20 cities to a thousand, with software planning delivery routes for the boys on motorcycles.
All of this produced a self-image that Sachin held onto long after the facts had grown more complicated. "I think we are a technology company that tends to do e-commerce," he told BusinessLine. He meant it literally. Flipkart built its own software rather than buying it because, as he said later about a different company, outsourcing "creates a bit of a layer of separation from technology to the business, which is not healthy." It was a coder's theory of the firm, and it would become one of the fault lines along which the company eventually split.
There were early failures, and he tended to own them. Flipkart bought the digital distributor Mime360 and the content library of the Bollywood portal Chakpak in 2011, launched a DRM-free music store called Flyte in 2012, and shut it in June 2013, beaten by free streaming. A television ad showing two children from the northeast giving two others a pedicure drew a backlash. "We didn't argue, we just apologised," Sachin said. "Real learning happens not when mistakes occur, they happen when one promises not to repeat the same mistake."
A Knack for Underestimation
In March 2011, with Flipkart running at roughly $10 million a year in sales, Sachin and Binny announced that they would reach $1 billion by 2015. Fortune put them on its 40 Under 40 list the following year: 50,000 shipments a day, sales of $100 million, up tenfold, a stated target of a billion by 2015. In March 2014 they hit it, a full year early.
"To say billion-dollar in 2011 was crazy when we were doing a $10 million run rate," Sachin said in his first interview after the milestone. "It was just a belief." The same article said he claimed to have "a knack for underestimation." There is a real self-awareness in that phrase, and also a gamer's swagger. The trick is to set a target outsiders find unhinged and then treat it as conservative.
By then the money had arrived, and with it the person who would matter most to Sachin's life after Binny. Lee Fixel of Tiger Global spotted the company in 2009, two years after it was founded. Tiger put in $10 million in 2010 and $20 million in June 2011. Fixel was in his early thirties then, a New York fund manager who had become a believer in Indian e-commerce after watching China's version play out. He had backed JD.com, which went public in 2014 at a $25 billion valuation. In Flipkart he saw the next JD, and he funded it the way Tiger funded things in those years, quickly and in size and with board seats. Tiger would eventually invest $2 billion in India, about half of it in Flipkart. A person close to the company later said that Fixel used to treat Sachin "with kid gloves."
Then came the round of August 24, 2012: $150 million from Naspers's MIH and Iconiq Capital. Then $200 million in July 2013 and $160 million more that October, from Dragoneer, Morgan Stanley, Sofina and Paul Allen's Vulcan. The company lost ₹281 crore in fiscal 2012–13, and nobody cared, because the founders had a ready answer. "We can be profitable today, if we choose to be," Sachin wrote in Business Today in 2012. "But our aim is to reach profitability at a much larger revenue base." The piece was about the best advice he had ever received, from "someone close to me": think long-term, act short-term. It is good advice. As it happened, the people who eventually took the company from him believed he had done neither.
Not everyone was charmed. On November 30, 2012, officers of the Enforcement Directorate raided Flipkart's offices, investigating alleged violations of foreign-investment rules, and carried away documents and hard drives. The structure that brought in all that foreign money, a Singapore-registered parent owning a web of Indian entities, was built to work around a regulatory regime that didn't permit foreign-funded inventory retail. By November 2014 it included nine firms across the two countries. In August 2014 the directorate said it had found violations. The Flipkart story is usually told as two young men versus Amazon. Running underneath it the whole time was a quieter, more Indian story: young men versus Delhi. Years later, after leaving, Sachin told an awards panel that he could "sense a lack of trust between entrepreneurs and bureaucrats in Delhi." He was speaking from experience. The Enforcement Directorate would send him a notice about his Flipkart years long after he had left.
The Vest
May 2014. Flipkart has just announced it is buying the fashion retailer Myntra, its largest deal yet, in a transaction reported at somewhere between $280 million and $330 million. The press conference is crowded. Sachin Bansal, thirty-two, is wearing, as a reporter from The Hindu noted, "the Flipkart vest that we've come to associate with the company's delivery boys." It is a costume, and a sincere one. Someone asks whether the deal moves him closer to his old ambition of becoming the Amazon of India.
"Actually, no," he says. "We look up to the Alibaba Group of China, that's where we want to be."
The reporter caught the timing. Sachin had talked about being India's Amazon when Amazon was not in India. Amazon had arrived a year earlier. Now the role model was Jack Ma, the former schoolteacher, and Sachin had been traveling to China and the Philippines to meet entrepreneurs and technologists. "While the U.S. might lead in search and communication," he said, "in emerging fields the work is cutting-edge." Mukund Mohan, who ran Microsoft Ventures in India and had known the founders since they delivered books from the Koramangala flat, used one word for him: bold. "What's striking about him is he'll take big decisions with little information at hand," Mohan said. "Most entrepreneurs in India are focussed, not obsessed, with eliminating risks. If you do so, then you're just another small company."
Myntra came with its own Bansal. Mukesh Bansal, also unrelated, had studied computer science at IIT Kanpur and spent ten years in the San Francisco Bay Area working at early-stage startups. His father had been in the apparel trade before moving into a government job, and Mukesh liked to say that with Myntra he had "been able to bring back the apparel trade back to his family." That August, Business Standard asked the founders of India's three biggest e-commerce companies what they would have done otherwise. Four of the five were named Bansal, and all five came from north India: Sachin and Binny from Chandigarh, Mukesh from Haridwar, Snapdeal's Rohit Bansal from Malout, a small Punjab town near Bathinda, and his co-founder Kunal Bahl from Delhi. Bahl, a Wharton graduate and former Microsoft engineer, had become an entrepreneur partly by accident, after his American work visa expired. Mukesh would have gone into academics. Bahl would have been a traveling food and film critic. Binny would have built computer games. Sachin would have played them, professionally.
So Indian e-commerce was built largely by the sons of north Indian traders, bankers and shopkeepers, educated at elite state engineering schools and trained in American companies. They came home to put the bazaar on a server. The founders noticed the pattern themselves, and it made them sentimental about something specific: an Indian company, run by Indians, beating the foreign money that kept arriving. "The real battle lines are drawn between the domestic players," Sachin said that May, "not the international ones who may initially throw around a lot of money." He was funded by Tiger, Naspers, DST, GIC, and later Tencent, Microsoft, eBay and SoftBank, so the irony was already sitting in the room.
Two months after the Myntra deal, on July 29, 2014, Flipkart raised $1 billion at a $7 billion valuation. It became, overnight, one of the most valuable startups in the world. In December came $700 million at $11 billion, and in May 2015 another $550 million at $15 billion. In September 2015 Sachin and Binny each debuted on the Forbes India Rich List at number 86, worth an estimated $1.3 billion. In April 2016 Time would name them to its list of the world's 100 most influential people.
Before most of that, on October 6, 2014, came the Big Billion Day. Flipkart sold $100 million of goods in ten hours. The site buckled, stock ran out, and social media filled with what The Indian Express called "millions of unhappy customers." Kishore Biyani's Future Group complained to the Commerce Ministry about predatory pricing, and the ministry said it would look into it. Sachin's position on predatory pricing was simple: "There is nothing called predatory pricing. Customers are taking away the business. They are voting for online players."
Inside the company, people later told Mint, something else changed. After the $1 billion raise in July 2014, "Sachin Bansal became a different man." He had always been "well-liked and respected" and also "mercurial... prone to mood swings and tantrums." After the money, by these accounts, his behaviour became so erratic that he alienated people who had worked with him for years. Dalal's book is harder still: a big dreamer given to grandiosity, a man who relied on gut feel to make decisions but would not accept gut-based reasoning from anyone else.
The man in the delivery vest was, by most accounts, sincere. He was also no longer someone a delivery boy could approach.
Fifty to a Hundred Billion
In early 2015, Sachin, Binny and Mukesh Bansal, the last now positioned as the third most powerful executive at the company, called a meeting of Flipkart's senior leaders and junior managers. Sachin had something to explain. Flipkart was going to transform itself, all at once. It would shift from holding its own inventory to operating as a marketplace for other sellers. It would push its customers toward the mobile app and, eventually, onto the app alone. And it would bring in a new layer of senior executives, many of them hired from Silicon Valley, including Peeyush Ranjan from Google and Punit Soni from Motorola.
The people who actually ran the company day to day were not convinced, and they said so. How will this work? Why are we doing this? Do we need to make all these changes? Do we need to make them at the same time? Sachin answered most of the questions himself. The changes were necessary, he said, if Flipkart was going to leapfrog into a $50 billion to $100 billion company.
Every one of those questions turned out to be the right one.
In October 2015 the Big Billion Days ran as a multi-day event exclusive to the app. They did $300 million in gross merchandise value, which sounds like a triumph until you set it against what the company was spending to get there: a cash burn of $50 million to $60 million a month. The marketplace shift ran into regulators who, in January 2016, said they did not recognize the marketplace model as a form of retail at all. The app-only bet pushed away customers who still shopped on desktop, and Amazon, newly arrived and deep-pocketed, was there to welcome them. The new executives collided with the old ones. In Dalal's account, senior meetings became shouting matches and the org chart was rearranged every few months. Mukesh Bansal, Peeyush Ranjan and Punit Soni were all gone within roughly a year.
The Economic Times later summed up the verdict in one dry line: under Sachin's leadership, "Flipkart's strategy of going mobile-app only, turning into a marketplace model instead of being inventory-led, and letting product take precedence over business grossly misfired."
On January 11, 2016, Flipkart announced that Binny would become CEO. Sachin would become executive chairman, focused on "strategic direction," mentoring senior leaders, new investments, and representing the company in "external forums." The press release presented it as a natural evolution. A professor at IIM Bangalore called it a mark of maturity, a successful passage "from being a company managed by a group of IIT wing or dorm-mates to a company run by professionals." A venture investor noted that Snapdeal's Kunal Bahl already spent all his time meeting investors and nobody at Flipkart was doing that job. Investors now owned at least 80 percent of the company, and Tiger was the largest shareholder. The same professor added, more quietly, that the changes were "very likely" driven by that group of investors.
For a while Sachin maintained publicly that founders should run Indian internet companies. "We have discussed getting an outside CEO, even last year," he said. "I feel that for an internet company in India, which is at a stage like ours, having a founder CEO is important." In February 2016 Forbes India ran an interview under his words: I treat Flipkart like my child, it's a big part of my life. The Times of India ran another under a different line of his: It's lonely at the top.
Then, in August 2016, at a town hall where employees were frightened about layoffs (about a thousand people had just been let go in what the company called an appraisal process), he said something founders almost never say in front of their staff.
— Sachin Bansal, Flipkart town hall, August 2016, as reported by FactorDailyJust look at who was (in the) management six months ago, one year ago, and who is (in the) management today. It's completely changed. Right? Yeah, I mean, nobody is here. I have changed. I was the chief executive and I have changed. It was performance-linked.
It is an unusually candid admission, and the grammar gives something away. I have changed means I have been changed. It was a man saying, in front of the people he had built a company for, that the shape-up-or-ship-out rule applied to him too. It also shows what he couldn't quite say. The sentence keeps reaching for the passive voice, which is the voice of things that happen to you.
Kid Gloves
In January 2017 the board installed Kalyan Krishnamurthy as CEO of Flipkart. Binny became group CEO, and Sachin stayed group chairman. Krishnamurthy was not a founder or an engineer. He had worked at eBay and then at Tiger Global, where he was close to Lee Fixel, and Tiger had sent him to Flipkart as an operator. He became, as the Economic Times put it, the investor's "operator through its executive." He was hands-on and tireless, and he won the loyalty of the rank and file. Dalal's portrait is less warm: a micro-manager with "a ruthless quest for power," a man who saw Flipkart as a retailer where Sachin saw a technology company, and who cared about anything that moved sales. The discount-heavy model customers loved gained legitimacy, in Dalal's telling, on Krishnamurthy's watch.
In 2016, while the company struggled, Fixel's own position at Tiger came under pressure. The fund had gone heavily into India across 2014 and 2015, backing Series A rounds at what the Economic Times called "dizzying valuations." When the funding boom ended in mid-2015, those bets started to look exposed. Tiger needed Flipkart to work. It needed someone running it who could be held accountable to a spreadsheet, and Sachin, the instinct-driven founder who had just told employees his own removal was performance-linked, was not going to be that person.
The Business Today review of Dalal's book calls Fixel "the real phantom of Flipkart's opera. Sitting in the United States, he could pull the strings at will." That is a fan's line, but the record supports the outline. A relationship that had once been the defining founder-investor bond in Indian internet history, compared at the time to Peter Thiel and Facebook or Masayoshi Son and Alibaba, turned to frost somewhere in 2015 and froze completely by 2018.
The company recovered, though not along Sachin's lines. In April 2017 it raised $1.4 billion from eBay, Microsoft and Tencent at an $11.6 billion valuation, a sharp markdown from 2015, and absorbed eBay's Indian business. That July it offered between $800 million and $900 million for its domestic rival Snapdeal and was rejected. On August 10, SoftBank's Vision Fund invested $2.5 billion, taking a large stake partly by buying out Tiger. On September 21, during that year's Big Billion Days, Flipkart sold 1.3 million phones in twenty hours. In 2017 it accounted for 51 percent of online smartphone shipments in India, ahead of Amazon's 33 percent.
A few weeks after the SoftBank money landed, two hundred executives sat in a hotel ballroom near Cessna Business Park, and a CEO from Tiger asked who thought the year had gone extremely well.
You can read Sachin's lowered hand several ways. A sulk. A protest. A statement of principle: that a company living off sale events and discounting had stopped investing for the long term, which is what he would later say. But the raised hand that followed tells you the most. He was still trying to buy. While others took liquidity, he wanted more ownership. People close to him said that after he was pushed out of day-to-day management in 2016, he "realised how much he loved Flipkart." That is how people talk about something only once they've lost hold of it.
Bentonville
His fate was sealed, Mint later reported, in Bentonville, Arkansas, in late April 2018.
He had been central to the sale process. With Fixel and Binny, he had spent months courting strategic investors, and the list of people who passed through that negotiation reads like a roster of world commerce: Doug McMillon of Walmart, Satya Nadella of Microsoft, Sundar Pichai of Google, Masayoshi Son of SoftBank, and Jeff Bezos, whose company had once employed both founders. Sachin and Walmart's executives met with Pichai, who said Google was open to investing up to $2 billion. Sachin worked to persuade SoftBank to keep its stake of more than 20 percent. Tencent signaled it would stay, and Microsoft considered putting in more. Alongside SoftBank, Sachin had even solicited a rival offer from Amazon. The structure under discussion through most of April would have given Walmart a majority of at least 55 percent, with existing minority holders and new investors holding the rest. The point of that design was to keep Flipkart from becoming merely a Walmart subsidiary and to preserve an eventual IPO.
Sachin saw a way back in. He planned to buy $450 million of Flipkart shares as part of the transaction, raising his 5.5 to 6 percent stake, and was looking at taking a loan to pay for them. With a larger stake, he wanted a larger role: an operating job, and strong shareholder rights for himself and the minority holders, giving them a meaningful say over strategy, management appointments and related-party transactions. Mint called the deal "supposed to be Sachin Bansal's shot at redemption."
At least three board members refused: Fixel, Accel's Subrata Mitra, and Naspers's Bob van Dijk. They backed Krishnamurthy, who wanted autonomy. Walmart, for its part, was clear about the one Flipkart person it definitely wanted, and that person was Krishnamurthy. According to insiders, the Americans saw no role for two founders on the board. Tiger held drag-along rights that could have forced dissenters to sell. It never had to use them. Sachin, who in April had been preparing to borrow to buy more of Flipkart, agreed in May to sell all of it.
On May 9, 2018, Walmart announced it would pay $16 billion for 77 percent of Flipkart, the largest e-commerce acquisition in history at the time. Doug McMillon flew to Bengaluru and stood alongside Krishnamurthy and Binny for the announcement. Sachin was not there. Walmart's official statement did not mention his departure. At an employee town hall, Binny told staff that Sachin was "not part of the platform anymore." In an email he was kinder: "None of this would have been possible without the vision and leadership of Sachin." People close to Sachin told the Economic Times he was "very disappointed." Up until the final stretch, they said, he had been expecting "to buy more shares and not sell his stake."
His own statement came hours later, on Facebook. "Sadly my work here is done and after 10 years, it's time to hand over the baton and move on from Flipkart." He said he would be "watching and cheering from the outside," that he would take time off for personal projects, "catch up on gaming and see what kids are playing these days and brush up on my coding skills." It was the voice of the IIT student who nearly left to play Quake, borrowed now by a thirty-six-year-old billionaire who had just been told to leave.
Binny wrote him a public letter. It began with the blogger in Telangana, the comment, the link, the first order, the rain, the worn-out copy. It mentioned the foodgrain traders, the leafy lane, the gaming, the summer work requirement, the FPGA lab. Dear Sachin, you will be missed. At a media briefing the next day, a reporter asked Binny whether he had tried to persuade his friend to stay. "That's an understatement," Binny said.
Tiger, Accel, Naspers, eBay and SoftBank all sold. eBay took $1.1 billion for its stake and announced it would relaunch in India. Indian traders protested the deal as a threat to domestic business. On August 18, 2018, the transaction closed, and Walmart added $2 billion in fresh equity. On November 13, 2018, Binny Bansal resigned as group CEO after an allegation of "serious personal misconduct." Walmart said its investigation had found no evidence to corroborate the complainant's claims, but had found "lapses in judgment, particularly a lack of transparency" in how he handled the matter. Within six months, both founders were out of operating roles at the company they had started.
The newspapers had a headline ready. From outsized Flipkart presence to outcast, Mint wrote. Abhishek Goyal, who had first spotted Flipkart as a young associate at Accel and later co-founded Tracxn, put it more gently: "Sachin was the visionary at Flipkart... someone who had the vision and at the same time a very gut driven person."
The Most Unhappy Billionaire
In September 2018, at a public event, his wife Priya, a dentist he had married years earlier, described the new household arrangements to a reporter. "We see a lot more of him now," she said. They went for walks in the park. The parents visited more often. "Sachin and our eight-year-old son literally spend the entire weekend gaming. Sometimes, I have to turn Hitler and say 'Enough.'"
It is a funny line, and its warmth is real. It also carries an almost unbearable undertone. The professional gamer who never was had finally been given the time to play, and he hadn't wanted it.
His later account is plainer. "Vijay and I talked extensively after I exited Flipkart," he said in 2025, referring to Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder of Paytm, "and he jokingly said that you are the most unhappy billionaire I've ever seen. I was extremely unhappy after exiting because it was not something I had planned… it just happened."
— Sachin Bansal, on leaving Flipkart, to Business Standard over lunch in Koramangala, February 2020Frankly, I had not thought about it. It was not planned. I would have loved to continue but circumstances were such that it made sense for me to leave.
He spent about four months reading, mostly economics, industry analysis and technology, and meeting people. He decided he was "too young to retire" and that he had to be careful where the money went. He picked out three sectors where Indians spent most of their money: health care, education and financial services. E-commerce was not on the list. "I think I was done with e-commerce, and also, today, it requires a lot of capital. The table stakes have gone up. You need to be a Reliance to be able to think about e-commerce." A man who had raised about $3 billion in twelve rounds by August 2015 was now saying the game had become too expensive for any newcomer to join. He was also bound by a non-compete: eighteen months before he could start a competing business, thirty-six months before he could invest in one.
Meanwhile he invested elsewhere. He had been angel-investing since 2014, writing checks of $1 million to $2 million into early-stage startups. One of the better stories involves Tarun Mehta of Ather Energy, an electric-scooter company that had come out of IIT Madras. Mehta called asking for advice on scaling, and Sachin told him to come by. "As he was leaving and was near the lift lobby," Sachin recalled, "I instinctively called him back and said I would like to invest." Big decisions with little information at hand. In January 2019 he put ₹150 crore into Ola, the ride-hailing company founded by Bhavish Aggarwal, as part of a commitment reported at roughly $100 million for a 0.37 percent stake. By February 2019 his portfolio included Ola, Ather, Grey Orange, SigTuple, Inshorts, Unacademy and Terminus. He had led the investment in Team Indus, a private moonshot to land on the actual moon, while Binny had led one in Pandorum, a regenerative medicine company. Asked why he invested in startups, Binny said it was a way of giving back. Sachin said it was a way of learning, "Flipkart is not the whole world," and talked about what Inshorts had taught him about app metrics.
Mehta's company would go public in 2025. In a blog post that year, a Bangalore product manager named Manas Saloi traced the line of cause and effect: no Flipkart, no Sachin exit; no Sachin exit, maybe no Ather. Saloi also passed on an old piece of startup folklore, paraphrased and impossible to verify, that when early investors told Sachin that Amazon already existed and anyone could copy it, he answered: Sure, why don't you do it and show then?
On December 10, 2018, seven months after the Walmart announcement, he incorporated BACQ Acquisitions Private Limited with Ankit Agarwal, an IIT Delhi batchmate. The Economic Times noted that it set up shop close to Flipkart's first office. You can call that sentimentality or convenience. Koramangala is, after all, where Bengaluru's startups live. It was also where he had begun.
A Modern HDFC Bank
The thesis was simple enough to explain to a grandmother, which is what an interviewer, invoking Infosys founder N. R. Narayana Murthy, asked him to do in 2020. "If you are a high net-worth individual in India, you get a great service," Sachin said. "All the banks are after you but if you are a middle-class person or a lower-income person, you get a very bad experience." Banking had become a technology business without learning to build technology the way technology companies do. "We are going to build a lot of technologies in-house instead of outsourcing them." It was the Flipkart argument moved onto a new market, by the man who still believed what he had said in the delivery vest: we are a technology company that tends to do something else.
To the newsletter The Ken, he described the ambition as building "a modern HDFC bank." He had already picked a public fight with the original. In December 2018, when HDFC Bank's online services went down for four days, he tweeted about it and called for the resignation of its chief technology officer. In December 2019 the bank went down again, for three days.
His approach to building the challenger was not to build from nothing. It was to buy. In October 2019, BACQ, by now renamed Navi Technologies, acquired Chaitanya Rural Intermediation Development Services, a Bengaluru microfinance lender, and Sachin became its CEO. In December 2019 Navi bought a software consultancy called MavenHive. In January 2020 it bought DHFL General Insurance, part of the collapsing Dewan Housing Finance group, for a reported ₹100 crore, and renamed it Navi General Insurance. In December 2020 the securities regulator approved its purchase of Essel Mutual Fund. In May 2021 the renamed Navi Mutual Fund moved its headquarters from Mumbai to Bengaluru, making it the city's first asset management company. In April 2020 Gaja Capital put in ₹209 crore and Navi named Sachin managing director. He put ₹3,000 crore of his own money into the company. "I am bringing all of my capital into this business," he said. A lending app for instant personal loans launched in June 2020, then home loans, then a two-minute online health insurance product. He wanted all of it to be judged against banks and non-bank lenders, not against fintechs. Fintechs don't lend, he pointed out. He refused to build a payments business, having watched PhonePe at Flipkart: "Payments on their own don't make much money."
The real prize was the license. In early 2020, Chaitanya applied to the Reserve Bank of India for a universal banking license. On January 27, 2020, Sachin resigned as an independent director of Ujjivan Small Finance Bank. His letter is a small masterpiece of the new register he was learning. "Given an entity owned and controlled by me has made an application to the RBI for a universal banking license, I felt it was — in the interest of propriety and corporate governance — only appropriate that I stepped down from this role." It is formal and procedural, and written by a man who now understood that he was courting the most important stakeholder he had ever had.
In September 2021 a Moneycontrol reporter visited Navi's new office. Sachin, fully in charge of a company once again, said what he hadn't said in 2018. I'm all in, I want to build Navi for the next 20 years, never wanted to sell Flipkart. (A BusinessLine interview from his CEO years had run under a headline taken from his own mouth: I will never sell Flipkart.) On March 12, 2022, Navi filed a draft prospectus for a ₹3,350 crore IPO. On May 17, 2022, the RBI rejected Chaitanya's application, along with three others, as "not found suitable" to run a bank. "There could be an appeal from us against this decision," Sachin said that afternoon. It was "not the end of road." A fundraising round reportedly aimed at a valuation above $4 billion, involving SoftBank among others, fell apart. TechCrunch noted local reports alleging governance lapses, foreign-exchange violations and careless handling of customers' personal data. In August 2023, Navi sold Chaitanya, the vehicle for its banking ambitions, to Svatantra Microfin for $178.5 million.
Other things were happening in the same years. In March 2020, Priya Bansal filed a criminal complaint alleging dowry harassment and assault against Sachin and members of his family. Sachin and his family petitioned the High Court of Karnataka, which quashed the complaint and the first information report in orders dated August 13 and September 28, 2021. Her challenge to those orders was dismissed by the Supreme Court of India on March 11, 2022. The Enforcement Directorate also sent him a notice over alleged foreign-exchange violations from his Flipkart years, which he challenged in the Madras High Court. The past, in several forms, kept coming back.
On October 21, 2024, the RBI barred Navi Finserv from sanctioning or disbursing new loans, citing excessive pricing and markups well above its cost of funds. The restrictions were lifted that December after what the company described as several rounds of discussions to fix the problems. In April 2025, on a panel at the Startup Mahakumbh in Delhi, Sachin talked about it with the weary candor of someone who had lost his company to a board once and had no intention of losing this one to a regulator.
— Sachin Bansal, Startup Mahakumbh, April 2025In most industries, you worry about customers, competition, investors, employees... but in fintech, the regulator becomes an important stakeholder. Sometimes depending on the situation, they can become the most important stakeholder in the equation at the detriment of customers or employees.
It was, he said, "like getting punched in a boxing ring and keep going at it. But if you don't mind the pain then it's very rewarding." On the same panel he named the thing that still drove him: "The goal was to take the platform that I created, or helped create, to a billion people at a large scale even globally over time. That's an unfinished business that I'm still pursuing." It is worth noticing the correction in the middle of that sentence, created, or helped create. Seven years on, he was revising his own credit, and the revision went toward modesty.
Flipkart went on without either Bansal. Walmart's stake grew to roughly 85 percent. On January 28, 2024, Binny resigned from the board and later sold his remaining shares to Walmart. In 2022 PhonePe, the payments startup Flipkart had bought in 2016 and that Sachin had decided was not a business worth copying, was spun off at a valuation that made it one of the most valuable fintechs in India. In December 2022, Flipkart paid out about $700 million to roughly 25,000 current and former employees holding its stock options, people who had in many cases joined because the founders made a startup a respectable thing for an Indian engineer's parents to accept. By one count, former Flipkart employees have gone on to start more than 200 companies. A 2023 AllianceBernstein report put its share of Indian e-commerce at 48 percent. In fiscal 2025 it had revenue of ₹82,787 crore and lost ₹5,189 crore. That year the company announced it would move its legal home from Singapore back to India, ahead of the IPO its founders never got to ring in.
The Moneycontrol reporter who visited Navi in September 2021 wrote that it was easy to miss the founder at first. The office was in Koramangala, the same suburb where two young men from Chandigarh had once wrapped books for strangers. Sixty percent of the staff were back after the lockdown. Sachin was twenty-five kilograms lighter. He had started exercising during the pandemic. "I used to be a 100 kgs before," he said. He wore no glasses, no jacket, no branded sweatshirt; just a plain black T-shirt and jeans. He did not have a cabin. He sat among rows of his employees, hunched over a laptop, in a room where nobody had to raise a hand to be seen.
Part IIThe Playbook
What follows is not a celebration. Sachin Bansal's career is a rare thing: a single founder who demonstrates both the best version and the most cautionary version of the same instincts, at one company, inside one decade. The cash-on-delivery founder and the app-only founder are the same man. So are the man who announced a billion-dollar target at a ten-million-dollar run rate and the man who promised a hundred-billion-dollar company to managers who wanted to know why everything had to change at once. The principles below try to separate what worked from what it cost, and to name the structural lessons, especially about control, that founders tend to learn only after it's too late.
The principles
- 1.Let the market break your assumptions in public, and fast.
- 2.Build trust infrastructure before demand infrastructure.
- 3.Announce the absurd number.
- 4.Earn depth before you buy width.
- 5.Own the stack where the stack is the business.
- 6.Pair instinct with a ledger, and know which one you are.
- 7.Watch what capital does to the founder before what it does to the company.
- 8.Never run three transformations at once.
- 9.Control lives in rights, not in titles or affection.
- 10.Name your failures out loud, in the active voice.
- 11.Carry the thesis out with you when you lose the company.
- 12.In regulated markets, the regulator is your most important customer.
Principle 1
Let the market break your assumptions in public, and fast
Flipkart's founding business model collapsed almost immediately. The founders assumed every Indian book could be sourced in Bangalore, that distributors would be eager partners, and that those distributors would have technology. All three were wrong, and Sachin later said so with unusual bluntness: "our entire business model crashed even before we could start out." The first order nearly failed because of the first assumption. The founders found the last worn copy of a memoir only after hours of riding through the rain.
The useful part is not that the assumptions were wrong. Every founder's are. It's how quickly the company rebuilt around the failures. Within a year the founders had moved part of the operation to Delhi for its larger vendor base. They then went on to build warehouses, logistics and a support network: the expensive infrastructure that later became Flipkart's moat against better-funded rivals. The price-comparison idea had died the same way. They researched the market, found it too thin, and turned. They didn't defend the first plan for a moment longer than the data allowed.
A founder who treats an early model as a hypothesis can absorb a collapse in weeks. One who treats it as an identity can take years.
Tactic: Write down the three assumptions your business model most depends on, then design the cheapest possible test that would prove each one false before you've spent money as if it were true.
Principle 2
Build trust infrastructure before demand infrastructure
The heart of Flipkart's early advantage was not price or selection. It was trust. In 2007, Sachin said, Indian online shoppers "didn't even expect their orders to reach them." Most had no credit card and wouldn't have used one online anyway. Flipkart's answer came in layers: cash on delivery from 2010, its own last-mile logistics, a thirty-day replacement policy, round-the-clock customer support, and constant updates to anxious buyers. The very first customer left a glowing testimonial for a book that arrived late and battered, because he had been told what was happening.
By 2012, about 65 percent of Flipkart's deliveries were cash on delivery. That is not a payment feature. It's a market being created out of the absence of trust. Each trust mechanism was operationally expensive, and each, once built, was hard for a competitor to copy cheaply.
The general lesson is that in an immature market, the scarce input is usually belief rather than demand. Demand that can't trust you won't convert, however much you spend acquiring it.
Tactic: Identify the single moment where your customer is most afraid of being cheated, and spend disproportionately to remove that fear before you spend another rupee on acquisition.
Principle 3
Announce the absurd number
In March 2011, at a $10 million annual run rate, Sachin and Binny publicly committed to $1 billion in sales by 2015. They hit it in March 2014. "It was just a belief," Sachin said. The announcement did real work. It recruited engineers who otherwise would have chosen the safe jobs their parents wanted for them, it set the scale at which investors priced the company, and it gave the organization a target big enough to justify building things like its own logistics instead of patching around the gaps.
There's an important asymmetry here. The billion-dollar target was absurd in scale but grounded in mechanics: books, then electronics, then fashion, each built on infrastructure the company already owned. The later "$50–100 billion" pitch of 2015 was absurd in the same way but was attached to three simultaneous structural bets the operating team didn't understand. The first number pulled the company forward. The second pulled the company apart.
Tactic: Set a public target that is ten times your current scale, but only after you can name, in sequence, the specific capabilities you would need to build to get there.
Principle 4
Earn depth before you buy width
"For the first three years, we were known as an online books vendor," Sachin said. Books were a forgiving category. They were cheap, durable, easy to leave with a watchman, rarely returned. They let the company learn customer service, cataloguing and fulfilment at a low cost of error. When Flipkart moved into electronics, the forgiveness disappeared ("the sh#t hit the fan," in his words) and the company needed a year of re-engineering across technology, supply chain, logistics and marketing to recover.
The years in books are why the electronics expansion survived at all. A company that had never mastered fulfilment would not have lived through the shock. The pattern repeated at Navi in a different form. Sachin bought licensed entities (a microfinance lender, an insurer, an asset manager) to get regulatory width quickly. When the banking license that was supposed to tie them together was refused, the company eventually sold the microfinance arm it had been built around.
Tactic: Before entering a new category, list the three operational failures it will expose that your current category has hidden, and fix at least one of them in your existing business first.
F
Category Expansion and Its Shocks
Each move into a less forgiving category exposed a new layer of infrastructure Flipkart had to build.
| Category | What it forgave | What it exposed | Response |
|---|---|---|---|
| Books (2007–2010) | Late delivery, drop-offs with neighbours | Thin vendor base, offline distributors | Scale Own warehouses, move into Delhi |
| Electronics (2010–2011) | Very little | Returns, high-value handoffs, service collapse | Try 24/7 support, own logistics |
| Digital music (2012–2013) | Nothing; free streaming won | No defensible distribution advantage | Risk Flyte shut in June 2013 |
| Fashion via Myntra (2014) | Brand separation | Integrating a firm a quarter of Flipkart's valuation | Scan Run as standalone subsidiary |
Principle 5
Own the stack where the stack is the business
Sachin's most consistent conviction, held from the Koramangala flat to the Navi office, is that technology built in-house is better than technology bought. "We are a technology company that tends to do e-commerce," he said of Flipkart. At Navi he said the same about banking: outsourcing creates "a layer of separation from technology to the business, which is not healthy." His public attack on HDFC Bank's CTO after a four-day outage was this belief, stated loudly.
The conviction was right where the technology was the advantage: route planning for delivery staff, data from customer behaviour, the speed of interface experiments ("we try new things every couple of hours"). It became a liability where it turned into an identity, as in Dalal's account of the conflict with Krishnamurthy, who saw Flipkart as a retailer and acted on what moved sales. The real discipline is knowing which parts of your stack create advantage and which are just pride.
Tactic: Classify every major system in your company as "core" or "commodity," and insist on building in-house only where a competitor's equivalent would visibly change your customer's experience.
Principle 6
Pair instinct with a ledger, and know which one you are
The founding partnership worked because it was asymmetric. "Binny is very organised, while I am impulse driven," Sachin said. Colleagues saw the same split: Binny analytical, Sachin instinctive and emotional. Mukund Mohan admired Sachin's willingness to "take big decisions with little information at hand." The Ather investment, made by calling a founder back from a lift lobby, is the purest example of that gift.
The partnership's failure was that the roles were assigned "in quite an ad-hoc manner" in 2008 and not seriously revisited until investors forced it in 2016. By then the instinct partner had been CEO for eight years through a period when the company needed more ledger than instinct. Dalal's harshest observation is that Sachin trusted his own gut while dismissing gut reasoning from others, which is what happens when the instinct partner's judgment goes unchecked.
⚖
The Founding Asymmetry
How the two Bansals divided the work, according to their own statements and colleagues' accounts.
| Dimension | Sachin Bansal | Binny Bansal |
|---|---|---|
| Self-description | "Impulse driven," "emotional and intuitive" | "Very organised," "very rational" |
| Colleagues' view | Visionary, "gut driven," mercurial after 2014 | Analytical, calmer, approachable |
| Role, 2008–2015 | CEO, face of the company, strategy | COO, supply chain and logistics |
| Role, 2016–2018 | Executive chairman, then group chairman | CEO, then group CEO |
| At the Walmart deal | Exited, sold entire 5.5% stake | Stayed until November 2018 |
Tactic: Once a year, have each co-founder write down which decisions in the past twelve months were made on instinct and which on data, and rotate authority toward whoever's mode the current stage of the company needs.
Principle 7
Watch what capital does to the founder before what it does to the company
The most important single date in Sachin's Flipkart career may be July 29, 2014, when the company raised $1 billion at a $7 billion valuation. Executives later told Mint that he "became a different man" after it, that a mercurial streak became erratic enough to alienate long-time colleagues. Over the next year came billionaire status, the Forbes list, the Time 100, and the Alibaba comparisons. Then the most expensive strategic misjudgment in the company's history.
Founders tend to model capital as something that changes the company: more runway, bigger bets, faster hiring. They rarely model it as something that changes them, inflating self-belief and shrinking the circle of people willing to disagree. Each round was a vote of confidence that made the next disagreement harder to hear.
Tactic: After every major funding round, ask three people who've worked with you for more than two years to tell you privately what has changed about how you behave, and treat their answers as a board agenda item.
Principle 8
Never run three transformations at once
In early 2015 Flipkart tried to move from inventory to marketplace, from web to mobile app, and from its existing leadership to a new layer of Silicon Valley hires, all together. The managers in the room asked exactly the right question: "do we need make changes all at the same time?" Sachin answered with a valuation: $50 billion to $100 billion.
Any one of those changes might have worked. Together, they made it impossible to tell which one was failing. The app-only push drove away desktop customers just as Amazon was spending heavily to get them. The marketplace shift ran into a regulator that, in January 2016, declined to recognize the model. The new executives clashed with the old ones and most were gone within a year. By January 2016 the CEO was out. Sachin said in August that it was "performance-linked."
Tactic: If you must run more than one structural change, stagger them so each can be measured cleanly on its own, and require that the operators who'll carry it out can explain why before you announce it.
Principle 9
Control lives in rights, not in titles or affection
This is the lesson Sachin learned most painfully and stated most clearly in his actions. By 2016, investors owned at least 80 percent of Flipkart. Sachin had 5.5 to 6 percent. Lee Fixel, who once treated him "with kid gloves," led the camp that blocked his return in 2018. Tiger held drag-along rights it never had to use. When Sachin tried in Bentonville to win back an operating role and strong minority protections, offering to put in $450 million of borrowed money, three board members said no, and Walmart wanted only one founder.
What should stand out to any founder is the order in which he sought protection. He went after shareholder rights and a larger stake at the very end, when he had the least leverage. In 2014 and 2015, when Flipkart was the most coveted private company in Asia and investors were lining up to buy into it, the founders could have negotiated almost anything. Being loved by investors is not a governance structure. It disappears when the numbers turn down.
⏳
The Erosion of Founder Control
Key moments in how Sachin Bansal moved from founder-CEO to outsider.
2007
Flipkart founded with ₹4 lakh from the founders' families; founders own the company outright.
2008
Investors ask who the CEO is; Sachin and Binny assign titles "in quite an ad-hoc manner."
2010
Tiger Global invests $10 million; Lee Fixel becomes Flipkart's champion investor.
2014
$1 billion raised in July at a $7 billion valuation; colleagues say Sachin "became a different man."
2015
Simultaneous shift to marketplace, app-only and new leadership; strategy "grossly misfired."
2016
January 11: Binny named CEO; Sachin moved to executive chairman. Investors own at least 80%.
2017
Kalyan Krishnamurthy, ex-Tiger Global, becomes CEO. SoftBank invests $2.5 billion.
2018
Late April in Bentonville: bid for operating role and minority rights blocked. May 9: Walmart deal announced; Sachin exits.
Tactic: Negotiate founder protections (board composition, veto rights, protective provisions) in the round where investors want you most, not in the transaction where they need you least.
Principle 10
Name your failures out loud, in the active voice
Sachin had a real gift for public admission, and it's underrated. On Flipkart's early model he said it "crashed." On a tone-deaf ad: "We didn't argue, we just apologised." At an August 2016 town hall, in front of employees facing layoffs, he said that his own removal as CEO was "performance-linked." Few founders anywhere have said anything like it to their own staff.
The weakness is in the grammar. "I have changed" and "it just happened" describe things done to him. Even his later account of the exit, that leaving "was not planned," frames the loss as weather. Admission builds credibility. Admission in the active voice, I chose this, I misjudged that, builds the kind of credibility that lets a board trust you with a second chance. By 2025 he was correcting himself in mid-sentence from "created" to "helped create," a small move in the right direction.
Tactic: When you announce a failure, write the sentence first with yourself as the grammatical subject of the decision that failed, and don't send it until it reads that way.
Principle 11
Carry the thesis out with you when you lose the company
Sachin left Flipkart with about $1 billion and the reputation of "the most unhappy billionaire" Vijay Shekhar Sharma had ever met. What he did next is instructive. He didn't try to rebuild Flipkart. "I was done with e-commerce," he said; you "need to be a Reliance." Instead he spent four months studying where Indians spent most of their money, and picked the sector where his central belief, that consumer-grade technology could serve the middle class that legacy institutions ignored, had the most room.
Navi is the Flipkart thesis transplanted: in-house technology, a customer base ignored by incumbents, an ambition sized for "a billion people." He put ₹3,000 crore of his own capital into it and kept, this time, the ownership that would stop anyone from taking it away. What he carried out of Flipkart was not the company or the market. It was a worldview, and a hard-earned lesson about who controls the cap table.
↻
The Thesis, Transplanted
How Flipkart-era convictions were carried into Navi, and where the new market pushed back.
| Conviction | At Flipkart | At Navi | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| Build tech in-house | "A technology company that tends to do e-commerce" | "Build tech like tech companies" | Scale Consistent across both |
| Serve the ignored middle | Cash on delivery for the cardless | Lending and insurance for middle-income India | Try Regulatory pricing scrutiny |
| Enter through acquisition | Letsbuy, Myntra, PhonePe | Chaitanya, DHFL General, Essel MF | Scan Fast licensing, harder integration |
| Founder control | 5.5% stake at exit | Own capital is the core funding | Scale Lesson applied |
| Regulator as background | ED raid, FDI disputes worked around | License refused 2022; lending ban 2024 | Risk Lesson still being learned |
Tactic: If you lose a company, write down the one belief you'd stake a second company on, then choose a market where that belief has the most room to be true rather than the one where you have the most experience.
Principle 12
In regulated markets, the regulator is your most important customer
At Flipkart the regulator was something to work around. The Singapore holding structure, the marketplace model and the cash flowing through nine entities were all ways to build inside rules that didn't quite allow what the company wanted. The Enforcement Directorate raided the office in 2012, alleged violations in 2014, and was still sending Sachin notices years after he left. Flipkart grew anyway, because e-commerce didn't need a license to exist.
Banking does. Sachin seems to have understood this at first: his January 2020 letter resigning from Ujjivan's board, "in the interest of propriety and corporate governance," reads as a deliberate signal to the RBI. Then the RBI rejected Navi's banking application as "not found suitable," and in October 2024 halted its lending over pricing. His 2025 description of the regulator as sometimes "the most important stakeholder... at the detriment of customers or employees" is both a complaint and an admission. In his first company he had treated the state as a constraint. In his second it was the gatekeeper.
Tactic: In any regulated business, staff a dedicated function whose sole job is to understand what the regulator fears most, and review every pricing and product decision against that fear before launch.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Sachin Bansal, Facebook post announcing his exit, May 9, 2018Sadly my work here is done and after 10 years, it's time to hand over the baton and move on from Flipkart.
— Sachin Bansal, to The Economic Times, March 2014, on the $1 billion sales targetTo say billion-dollar in 2011 was crazy when we were doing a $10 million run rate. It was just a belief.
— Sachin Bansal, to Business Standard, February 2013Real learning happens not when mistakes occur, they happen when one promises not to repeat the same mistake.
— Sachin Bansal, to The Economic Times, August 2013, on what a co-founder offersA shoulder to cry on. A cofounder is a person who can hold you together.
— Sachin Bansal, Startup Mahakumbh, April 2025The goal was to take the platform that I created, or helped create, to a billion people at a large scale even globally over time. That's an unfinished business that I'm still pursuing.
Maxims
- Find the last copy. The first order is a promise, and keeping it when the system fails is what turns a stranger into a testimonial.
- Build the missing department. In an immature market, every infrastructure gap you fill yourself becomes a moat your competitors have to pay to cross.
- Trust before traffic. Demand that can't trust you won't convert, however much you spend acquiring it.
- Make the absurd target mechanical. A tenfold goal pulls a company forward only if you can name the capabilities that get you there, in order.
- Assign roles on purpose, then revisit them. Titles decided "in quite an ad-hoc manner" tend to harden into the structure that removes you.
- Each funding round is a mirror. Ask the people who've known you longest what the last round changed in you, not just in the company.
- One transformation at a time. When three bets fail together, nobody can tell which one killed you.
- Affection is not a governance structure. Negotiate founder rights when investors want you most, because by the time you need them, they'll need you least.
- Admit failure in the active voice. "I have changed" is candour; "I chose wrong" is credibility.
- Keep the thesis, leave the battlefield. When you lose a company, carry out the belief, not the market, and keep enough ownership that no one can ask you to leave again.
