Binny Bansal: Inside the Success of Flipkart

**Hans Tung** (0:19)
Coming to you from GGV Capital, this is Evolving for the Next Billion, where we interview local champions and global giants in tech industry who are shaping the lives of the next billion Internet users.
My name is Hans Tung. I'm a managing partner at GGV Capital, and I've been working at and investing in startups across the US, China and other emerging markets for the last 20 years.

**Rita Yang** (0:45)
My name is Rita Yang. I'm the marketing manager at GGV Capital. On this show, you will hear stories about ambition, ingenuity and resilience unfolding every day from Singapore to St. Polo, Beijing to Bangalore.
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**Hans Tung** (1:28)
Thank Today on the show, we had Binny Bansal. Billy called on the Flipkart in 2007 and played a pivotal role in scaling it to market leadership in the e-commerce space.
It saw many fundamental customer and supply problems along the way.
From a small beginning, Binny, along with his friend Sachin, turned Flipkart into a massive online commerce venture that was bought over by Walmart in 2018 for a whopping $16 billion. He's also a prolific angel investor and mentor with over 30 investments in the start-up ecosystem in India already.

**Madhu Yalamarthi** (2:01)
Welcome to the show, Binny.

**Binny Bansal** (2:03)
Thanks, Hans. Thanks, Madhu. Excited to be on the show and talk about our journey.

**Hans Tung** (2:08)
So what is your favorite way to be introduced these days?

**Binny Bansal** (2:12)
I guess an entrepreneur who happens to invest.

**Hans Tung** (2:18)
An entrepreneur who happens to invest. So at your heart, you're still a founder.

**Binny Bansal** (2:23)
Yeah, absolutely.

**Hans Tung** (2:25)
What is the venture that you're most excited about these days? You share a bit about your own venture that you're working.

**Binny Bansal** (2:35)
Yeah, I think it's hard to pick. I think there is three, four ventures which I'm quite excited about. I think if you have to pick one, there is a very early stage company which is building an AI-based SaaS business in the legal space.
And I think that's what they can do in their vision. I think it's pretty powerful and I'm quite excited about that company.

**Hans Tung** (3:12)
You also do something that will help other founders in India to scale. Can you tell us a bit more about that?

**Binny Bansal** (3:19)
Yeah, so I've been helping founders in India since 2014-15. I'm doing a little bit of investing as well while I was still at Flipkart. And through that journey, I mean, given we are still an emerging startup ecosystem, I basically realized that a lot of the founders were going through similar problems. So there was sort of a set of a few problems and different sort of founders were going through some of the same problems.
And there were not too many people obviously in the ecosystem for them to reach out to get sort of help in these areas. So I basically said, okay, I can personally help only let's say 10 to 15 founders at a time. What about if I created sort of a system or there could be a system which could scale and help instead of 10, 15, hundreds of founders at a time, not just in India, but I guess across all emerging ecosystems, across the world. I think outside of the Valley and probably China, I think there are so many other emerging startup ecosystems. So that's how the idea was born.
So we started this company called X210x and it basically helps companies and founders after they hit a certain scale, after they've done product market for their kind of, let's say a series B or series C. And then you start facing very different challenges from your sort of early stage challenges, which is how do you scale your business, how many you found product market. So the areas where it sort of helps is multiple areas. So starting from just prioritization and strategy, what is the sort of simple way to do strategy, how do you then link your rock design and rock structure to that? How do you need to change your sort of operating system of the company as you now can't do everything on your own and you need to sort of work through others in a larger organization. So a lot of this scaling topics around new problems which come, help you through problems which come with scale. It's been pretty exciting. It's been two years and we have been fortunate to work with a lot of the best of Indian startups, a couple of your companies as well. And where you invested after we started working with them. So that was good validation from you guys of their work and some of our work as well. So it's been pretty exciting.