BIG BILLION STARTUP — The untold FLIPKART story
At a time when Capitalism replaced socialism as India’s guiding economy philosophy, consumerism went mainstream. This was a new India; a land of opportunities that saw the rise of internet entrepreneurship.
In the city of Bangalore which was once described by Nehru as ‘the city of the future’, Infosys proved that it was possible for entrepreneurs from India’s middle class to establish hugely successful business by dint of sheer innovation and hard work.
While all these factors created a hospitable environment, a crucial formative influence on internet entrepreneurship in India was that of Amazon, which created enthusiasm and inspiration for rise in entrepreneurship.
This book is a perfect torch bearer for young entrepreneurs set out to build next big thing. The author Mihir Dalal portrays the events and emotions in such a beautiful way that reader cannot keep it down from reading. It brings in to light all the politics within a startup company where there are lot of hidden agendas and animosity among the leadership.
The story of Flipkart has lots of ups and downs in the journey, wins and losses that shows what it means to be a businessman or how an Indian internet company works.
Few interesting facts I learnt about Flipkart are as follows:
1. The third cofounder of Flipkart dropped before even starting due to parents pressure which deflated Sachin and Binny as they debated if they should move forward at all. IIT friends ridiculed at the idea of selling books and called them foolish. However, they overcame their setback and started work on the e-commerce website in September 2007.
2. The Bansals couldn’t convince the Indian venture capitalist on the idea of selling online and Internet startups. At a time when Flipkart was struggling to raise funds, Vishal Anand, found of Infibeam offered 5% Equity in Infibeam and just 15K as salary to the Bansals, which later fell out.
3. The kart gets rolling as Tapas and Sujeet Kumar join hands with Bansals and agreed talk about salary after 6 months!
4. Accel Partners was the first investor in Flipkart which got 25% stake for an investment of $1 million, to be invested in tranches!
5. Flipkart introduced cash on delivery in year 2010 what would turn into biggest expansive force for its business and for e-commerce
6. Flipkart built its own logistics service to exercise complete control over order deliveries to maintain quality service and improve customer satisfaction
7. Sachin Bansal valued Flipkart for $ 1 Bn when Amazon approached for Aquisition which Amazon’s executive(Amit Agrawal) outrightly rejected
8. Flipkart was the first to introduce exclusivity, which convinced Motorola to sell their devices exclusively through Flipkart website. Flipkart launched Moto G sale, which saw 10000 phones sold in less than 20 min.
9. Flipkart bought Myntra for $ 330 million, mostly with company stock
10. First Big Billion Day was planned on 6–10–2014 when the site went down within 10min. of sale. Flipkart had recorded a ‘billion hits’ and achieved its twenty-four-hour sales target of $ 100 million in just ten hours.
11. In 2014, Flipkart had become one of the largest advertising platform after Google!
