Big Billion Startup: The Untold Flipkart Story

by Mihir Dalal

  At the NGV complex, there was another group of four IIT graduates who shared a separate three-bedroom apartment and were friendly with Ankit and his flatmates. One of these young men was Binny Bansal.

  IN A WAY, it was fitting that both Sachin and Binny, who would become India’s most famous internet entrepreneurs, hailed from Chandigarh.

  As with the IITs from where both Bansals had graduated, Chandigarh, too, had been established as a manifestation of Nehru’s faith in modernity and technology. After India ceded much of the Punjab province in the Partition of 1947, Nehru wished to build a city within the Indian state of Punjab that would symbolize modern Indian ideals. Chandigarh was to be ‘unfettered by traditions of the past ... an expression of the nation’s faith in the future.’2 It wasn’t dissimilar to what Nehru had said of Bangalore. In 1951, Nehru hired the pioneering Swiss architect Le Corbusier to create the layout for Chandigarh city. Corbusier died before work on Chandigarh could be finished but it was his design, with a few tweaks, that was implemented when the city was finally set up. Chandigarh was divided into approximately thirty roughly equal rectangular blocks of concrete connected by wide tree-lined roads. A large public square was created, which was surrounded by three imposing government and legislative buildings.

  Chandigarh, located at the foothills of the Himalayas, is about 270 kilometres from Delhi. The city’s landscape which used to be barren owing to the largely semi-arid climate of north India, was replaced by concrete buildings and attendant greenery, a forced order symbolic of the rise of science and technology.

  By the time the Bansals were born in the early 1980s, Chandigarh had long been designated as a union territory that served as the capital of both Punjab and its neighbouring state of Haryana. It had grown in size, too. There were now nearly fifty sectors, new parks and gardens, a proliferation of restaurants. It had become a wealthy little city. Much like Bangalore, well-to-do government and military pensioners found it hospitable. Chandigarh had also produced one of India’s most famous cricketers, Kapil Dev. But the city wouldn’t exactly turn out to be the new urban paragon imagined by Nehru and Corbusier. As the role of the government in India’s economy weakened after liberalization, the private sector’s importance grew sharply. But Chandigarh couldn’t attract many companies, leaving few employment avenues for its young residents. Many of them, especially bright, ambitious young men like the Bansals, were eager to set off for more exciting terrain.

  APART FROM THEIR surname, Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal had few things in common.

  Sachin was born on 5 August 1981 to a business family. His father ran a grain-trading business while his mother has been a homemaker. Sachin is the older of two brothers. Binny was born the following year, on 3 December 1982. His father worked at a public-sector bank and his mother is a retired central government employee. Born to middle-class families, both had comfortable childhoods.

  Sachin studied at the D. A. V. School in Panchkula, a town close to Chandigarh. He was known to be a quiet, well-mannered boy with few friends and his academic record was superior throughout. Uma Nijhawan, Sachin’s English teacher, remembers him as rather bright but equally shy and introverted, so much so that she was taken by surprise once when Sachin pulled off a small literature event with distinction. ‘He wouldn’t take the initiative but was very responsible and competent if you gave him something to do. He would come into his own then,’ Nijhawan recalls.

  Binny went to St Anne’s Convent School in Chandigarh, and unlike Sachin, developed a passion for sports. He was captain of the basketball team and played football as well. He had also become familar with computers at a young age. In 2013, Binny told a journalist, ‘One major point of inflection [in school] was that I was introduced to computers at class four. It was love at first sight ... I was probably the only one at school who could program.’3 In the early 1990s, this level of familiarity with computers was rare. Most Indians had never seen a computer, much less used one.

  Like other children of their age in Chandigarh, Sachin and Binny were relatively privileged, their teenage years mostly unaffected by a preceding period of disturbance in Punjab. In the 1980s, the state was a violent, volatile place. Sikh terrorism, orchestrated by the militant leader Bhindranwale, was at its peak in the first half of the decade. Punjab was haunted by the rise of Bhindranwale, who was eventually killed by the Indian Army in 1984 at the Golden Temple complex. The subsequent assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards in the same year unleashed another cycle of violence in Punjab that extended even to Delhi. By the time the Bansals entered their teenage years in the mid-nineties, the state had become relatively peaceful again.

  After clearing their tenth-standard exams, both Sachin and Binny enrolled for their final school years at the D. A. V. College, where they were two years apart. College was a mere formality. Classes were sparsely attended, as parents put their children through private coaching in the hope that it would help them secure a seat at any one of India’s reputed engineering colleges, the most sought-after of which were the IITs. An IIT degree was the surest way of landing a secure, well-paid job at an IT firm or a multinational company. And getting such a job was considered no small achievement in the early years of the new millennium. Middle-class parents, who had grown up with the fear that such rewarding, stable employment would be out of their reach, hammered their insecurities and aspirations into their children with uncompromising zeal. If they didn’t study relentlessly, what awaited them was a dire life on the streets, they were assured.

  Sachin made his first attempt to clear the IIT-Joint Entrance Exam in 1999 but failed to secure admission. He joined a lesser institute, the Punjab Engineering College, but took the IIT-JEE test again while still enrolled there.

  A local tutor by the name of Ashok Chitkara had achieved fame in Chandigarh as someone who could identify the brightest kids and help them secure admission into the best colleges. Sachin signed up for Chitkara’s classes. Chitkara had a peculiar teaching style. He would sometimes explain complex mathematical concepts in Hindi, using muhavares, or draw on well-known historical events to make his point. He was also eminently methodical. He assigned class slots and devised seating arrangements based on his estimation of his students’ abilities. Students had to regularly take mock exams. Sachin’s scores were often in the top tier even though he was never to be seen at the ‘front benches’. After a year of Chitkara’s coaching classes, Sachin got his break. He pulled off an impressive national rank of 49 in the IIT-JEE test in 2000, surprising Chitkara himself.

  That was a record year for both Chitkara and his city with respect to the IITs.4 Every one of Chitkara’s front-benchers – his most obviously sincere students – made it into the IITs. Many of the ‘back-benchers’, which included members of Zomato and Grofers’ founding teams, also got in. Chitkara’s fame grew, and so did his ambition. He launched his own university a few years later. Unfortunately, by then Chandigarh was producing IIT-worthy students in far fewer numbers.

  In 2000, Sachin and most of Chandigarh’s other star pupils, hoping to become engineers, chose to go to IIT Delhi. This would be the first fortuitous step in Sachin’s drift towards entrepreneurship. Later, taking a job at Amazon India would be another.

  At IIT Delhi, Sachin would meet the people who would later become crucial early employees at Flipkart. He would build his first technology product at this institute, learn how to overcome the humiliation of failure, how to give up addiction. He would cultivate deep friendships here and, for the first time, be able to venture out of his sheltered life in Chandigarh. He would get his first taste of life in a metropolis, and of the West. In fact, IIT Delhi’s graduating classes of the early 2000s turned out to be the most significant suppliers of the country’s initial entrepreneurs. The founders of some of India’s most influential startups, such as Snapdeal, Zomato and Delhivery, were students at IIT Delhi at the turn of the century.

  Hostel life greatly characterized one’s time at IIT Delhi. There wer
e several social networks apart from classes – study groups, sports groups, cultural activities – that brought people together. But the hostel ranked the highest in importance. Loyalty to one’s hostel was paramount; some of the competitive-minded senior students enforced this unwritten law and passed on their zeal for their respective hostels to the juniors. Rivalries grew intense during inter-hostel competitions and campus elections. It was common for students to lose their voice after screaming abuses against rival hostels. This subsequent inability to speak was considered a badge of honour. By usual Indian campus life standards, what went on at IIT Delhi in those years wasn’t exactly outrageous.

  Among the programmes, computer science was easily the most in demand, owing to the IT boom and the general hype around computers and the internet. This was followed by electrical engineering. The rest of the programmes were perceived as inferior. It was believed that the academic abilities of the computer science students were far greater than those enrolled in civil engineering, for instance. Sachin’s exceptional rank in the IIT entrance exam ensured that he was one of a select group of about sixty admitted into the computer science programme in 2000. Many engineers who became entrepreneurs later boasted degrees in computer science from the IITs or other engineering colleges.

  The computer science programmes at the various IITs aren’t identical. At the Delhi campus, the focus is on the fundamental principles of programming rather than a specific manner of writing code, which is an ever-evolving process. Many IIT Delhi graduates benefited from this approach as working professionals.

  The professors, mostly middle-aged or elderly men, were unsparing. One professor would spend his class hours writing complex equations on the blackboard in tiny handwriting, without stopping to check if his students were able to keep up. On finishing, he would simply wipe the board clean and no explanations would be proferred. Instead, he would inform his clueless students that assignments were going to be based on his blackboard notes. Harsh Dhand, one of Sachin’s batchmates, compares the computer science programme to being ‘thrown into a deep well’. If one emerged victorious, this victory could be replicated in their career. But there are always a few who can’t handle the pressure.

  Each semester lasted about four and a half months, during which time students had to take a variety of tests; there were also class assignments, cultural events, sports competitions and the call of hostel life.

  Ajay Bhutani, who knew both Sachin and Binny at IIT Delhi, says that the programme ensured students learnt how to cope in a high-pressure environment. ‘The number of things you have to do ... you don’t necessarily [have time to] get organized – you just figure out how to do things. You learn to solve problems faster, more efficiently.’

  SACHIN’S FIRST FEW days at IIT were not pleasant. He was an ‘ek thappa’ – cricket slang adapted into IIT Delhi lingo to refer to those who had passed the entrance exam after one failed attempt. Those who secured admission on the first try were called ‘full toss’ and the ones who needed three attempts were crowned ‘dead ball’. All first-year students had to endure being ‘ragged’ by the seniors from their respective hostels. These ragging sessions were called ‘interactions’ or ‘interviews’, which often lasted a few weeks. The severity of the ragging depended on the personalities of the victim and the interviewer. First-years were meted out tasks that could range from having to scream slurs against other hostels or wear full-sleeved shirts in the choking Delhi summer; only in the rarest cases were the freshers physically abused. Mostly, these sessions ended with juniors and seniors finding a degree of bonhomie amongst one another. Very few juniors rebelled. Sachin was one of them. He took an instant dislike to these interactions. He didn’t do his tasks properly, his displeasure evident, and on a few occasions, he refused his seniors outright. Nevertheless, in the years after Flipkart’s founding, one of his ‘interviewers’, Sujeet Kumar, would become one of the most influential employees at the company.

  Sachin was assigned to the Jwalamukhi hostel, Jwala for short. Some hostels such as Kumaon and Aravalli were known for producing skilled sportsmen and hosting impressive cultural activities. Jwala, which means flame in Hindi, was the most infamous. True to its name, it was considered to be the most aggressive hostel when it came to student body elections. The hostel’s frequent success in these elections made it all the more unpopular. It also boasted an excellent canteen which served a weekly chicken biryani of great repute. But Jwala’s notoriety was primarily due to its high population of Instant Chutiyas or ICs. IC is IIT slang for an abrasive, irritating fellow, instantly recognizable by their off-putting personality. According to Pranay Gupta, a student at IIT Delhi in the early 2000s, the ICs were essentially oddballs. ‘You would come across them and think, “Faltu mein apne aap ko hero samajh raha hai.” He thinks too much of himself for no reason.’ ICs were misfits, and not in an interesting way. They were considered uncooperative and duplicitous, not willing to help their classmates with homework even if they had completed it with ease.

  Sachin wasn’t considered an IC, but he was made an involuntary member of the Chandigarh Chutiya Association, or the CCA. All IITians hailing from Chandigarh were clubbed together in this imaginary group. Students from Chandigarh tended to stick together and there were many of them at IIT Delhi. Several of them exuded confidence, were generally liked and, most importantly, were popular with the very few girls on campus, hence condemned by their less-fortunate mates into the infamous CCA.

  Sachin assimilated at IIT Delhi after the first-year ragging sessions. His hostelmates and classmates alike remember Sachin as a regular guy, who was just one of the boys. Short and dark, with glasses perched loosely on a square, smooth face, Sachin was of medium build. He mostly stuck to his small group of friends and did well in his first-year exams.

  Varun Gupta was Sachin’s roommate in their first two years at IIT Delhi. The Jwala hostel rooms were small at just twelve feet by twelve feet. A half-wall of concrete separated two rooms. In this cramped space, Varun found Sachin to be a quiet, serious fellow, a pleasant roommate who even had a sense of humour. Varun was the highest scorer in Sachin’s batch and later found success as an academic in the US. Many people in class would borrow Varun’s notes, but not Sachin, who preferred to read the textbooks. ‘Sometimes he would lose interest in a topic and ignore it. But if the topic interested Sachin, he would be really good at it,’ Varun recalls.

  Sachin was also rather blunt. Harsh Dhand, a fellow CCA member, believes that with Sachin, one always knew where one stood. ‘If he didn’t like something about you ... he would tell you that without caring much for the consequences.’

  In Sachin’s second year, the college installed internet connections in the hostels. This prompted some of the more well-off students to install computers in their rooms. Previously, students could use computers only in a communal laboratory. Now, this new infrastructure changed the way students lived. It is probable that Sachin had some exposure to computers before coming to IIT. Binny, by his own admission, was familiar with the machines to a great extent before starting college. As for many of their classmates, especially those from smaller cities and towns, it was at IIT where they were introduced to computers for the first time. Some of these people, who had not seen or used computers, much less the internet, until just a few years prior, would soon find success as internet entrepreneurs or senior executives in the technology world.

  As soon as some students installed computers in their hostel rooms, they began to spend large parts of their days cooped up; Sachin confined himself in his room more than others. While he was neither popular nor notorious at IIT, occasionally his independent and rebellious traits came to the fore.

  During his intermediate years at IIT, Sachin created a new file-sharing software. It was his first foray into creating technology products, which would later become a full-time occupation. This software allowed users to share photos and videos with each other. The product had a sleek, well-designed interface that made files o
n one computer accessible to all computers within the same network. Theirs being a network of adolescent male engineering students, Sachin’s software was mainly used to share pornography.

  A few weeks after Sachin designed the file-sharing system, it caught the attention of the forbidding IIT administrators, who made sure that it quickly fell out of use. The students quietly moved on to a more covert alternative. Sachin was crestfallen. He had hoped the software would become a fixture and bring him lasting recognition and popularity.

  Despite this setback, Sachin soon displayed his tech skills again. An electronic game of anagrams had become popular on campus. Those who decoded anagrams fastest would be awarded the highest scores. Naturally, the players most proficient in English did better than the rest. Sachin, whose English was only passable, grew very irritated with the game. So, he wrote up software, that could help him solve the word puzzles – he had not beaten hundreds of thousands of fellow nerds in the entrance exams only to be shown up by the English language. Other players started using software, too, and soon several students deleted the game in disgust because it was impossible to tell man from machine. This was exemplary engineering retribution by Sachin, and a classic example of Instant-Chutiya-like behaviour.

  By the end of 2002, in the third year of his programme, Sachin had become addicted to computer games. While many students would spend hours on these games daily, Sachin’s addiction was more serious. He was also very good at gaming, which was why the anagram game had rankled. Students regularly played two games in particular – Age of Empires and Quake. Quake required expert hand-eye coordination while Age of Empires was a strategy game, testing the player’s ability to plan their moves in a shrewd, tactical manner and allocate resources efficiently. Sachin was among the few who excelled at both games. He was almost unbeatable at Quake. His hostelmates frequently heard his shouts at the end of a session – ‘Killed it!’ – late in the night as he celebrated his latest victory.