Sachin Bansal success-story

Sachin Bansal was born in Chandigarh on 5th August 1981. His father was a businessman and also mother was a homemaker. He had completed his schooling from Saint Anne’s Convent School. Being a scholar who always scored well, Sachin was a propitious student. His family believed in inculcating good education and attaining success by excelling in academics. Bansal worked very hard for JEE preparation and went on to stand 49 in All India JEE rankings. Later, he got into Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. At one point in time, he wanted to be a professional gamer. Sachin Bansal soon graduated from computer science engineering and became a software engineer.

Sachin Bansal had a productive job as a software engineer at Amazon. While them working at Amazon, Sachin Bansal decided to start India’s own e-commerce website. It was a road less traveled and had uncertainties but it never affected his conviction. Sachin Bansal has a profound interest in solving practical trouble and thought that e-commerce in India can be much better. His old friend, Binny Bansal also together him to create what now is the most famous Indian e-commerce startup – Flipkart.

Career      

After completing engineering from IIT, Delhi; Sachin started working for Techspan Company. Bansal served there for a few months until he got an opportunity to work at Amazon India as a Senior Software Engineer. At Amazon, he learned the dynamics of e-commerce. Later, his friend Binny Bansal also started working in the same team. Within the time span of around 6 months, both of them decided to quit their job to discover the possibilities of e-commerce in India.

The Success Story

Along with his partner, Sachin Bansal invested some money and started working on Flipkart. The duo launched the website sitting in their two-bedroom apartment in Koramangala. It was primarily a residential area where Flipkart now owns multiple offices. They decided to kick-start the new company as an online bookseller. For 10 days, the site did not see even a single sale until a customer from Andhra Pradesh placed the first order for the book, ‘Leaving Microsoft to Change the World’ by John Wood.  In the early days, Sachin and Binny used to deliver books on their own scooters.

There was a dearth of money earlier but Sachin never fell short of passion. Moreover, he believed that Internet shopping has a great scope in India and deserved to be better. The Flipkart founder worked extremely hard and showed great marketing acumen in the early stage. They used to give away pamphlets of their company outside bookstores to target their actual customers. They were not thinking about numbers in the beginning and believed that something big could be built on an e-commerce platform. Gradually, Sachin and his co-founder started observing exponential growth.

Sachin joined Amazon first and a little over a year later on, in 2007, Binny joined the same team as his upcoming business partner. It was during this period that the thought of starting up crossed their minds. Remember, this was still 2007 after entrepreneurship was not yet cool. Direct e-commerce was not their first idea — it was to launch a price comparison site. But market research led them to the idea of an e-commerce site, and thus, Flipkart was born in October 2007. And the rest is Indian start-up and e-commerce history.

With Walmart acquiring Flipkart, the latter is now valued at over $20 billion and the two founders are multi-billionaires. While they started out, their parents gave them Rs 10,000 a month as an allowance for nearly 18 months. They have invested Rs 2 lakh each from their savings. It was in their two-bedroom flat in, Bengaluru that the duo, who shares a common interest in computer science, built the first version of the site, with just two computers. People who know them say they have different temperaments.

Several say Sachin is quick to take offense, whereas Binny isn’t. Sachin also has a dry sense of humor the description on his LinkedIn profile for his task as CEO of Flipkart reads as “Odd jobs”. Sachin is said to be more instinctive, while Binny is a data junkie.

Sachin, when CEO, was more often the face of Flipkart. Binny, who was COO until 2016, would connect Sachin for joint interviews during essential occasions, like the Myntra gaining in 2014.

In informal interactions, Binny opens up more easily, like him joking to this reporter that he had developed into a complete Myntra man as he was trying the site’s private label jeans and was carrying a Myntra brand wallet for the event that announced Flipkart acquiring the fashion e-tailer. There is also a streak of sentimentality that sometimes reflects how the company communicates and operates even now.

For occurrence, it was in 2007 that Flipkart moved to its first good office a bungalow in a quieter lane of Koramangala. Today, the company’s headquarters is housed in 30 floors across three buildings, which translates to 8.3 lakh square feet. Yet, the company has booked that first office. Some teams back away to this office every now and then.

A few months ago, when Sachin was building the Billion personal label brand for Flipkart, he chooses to base his team in this bungalow. The bungalow’s landlord has said in the past that Sachin used to pay the rent in person for many years.