How to build a high-performance team and culture w/ Binny Bansal (Co-founder & Executive Chairman, Flipkart)

**Smarth** (0:00)
Hello, and welcome to the Recruiting Today Podcast. Today we have with us Mr. Binny Bansal. He's very well known in the Asian startup ecosystem and overall e-commerce startup ecosystem. He's the co-founder and ex-CEO of Flipkart that realized a massive outcome by selling and joining hands with Walmart. Thank you, Binny, for doing this and taking out the time.

**Binny Bansal** (0:23)
My pleasure, Smarth. Great to be here with you.

**Smarth** (0:27)
So, Binny, let's start with your journey.
You came from an engineering background, worked in Amazon, and then started Flipkart. What was the tipping point for you to say that, hey, I really want to do something big? So, help us walk through that journey and the mental model.

**Binny Bansal** (0:43)
Yeah, I think the tipping point really was a lot of boredom. So, I had joined the Amazon AWS team in Bangalore as a software engineer. And the project we were supposed to work on or working on was not going anywhere. And there was very little work that was there to be done. So, for a couple of months, I was going to office and not doing much and just getting very, very bored. And that made me think about, okay, what I should be doing. I really was trying to optimize that thing in hindsight for learning and creating some sort of an impact.
And that was obviously clearly missing since I didn't have much work to do.
And fortunately, unfortunately, I had interviewed twice at Google already and they rejected me. So, I thought Google is not hiring me, Amazon, there is no work. So, let me maybe start something of my own. And my co-founder searching was in the same team as me and he also didn't have any work.
And he also was thinking on similar lines. So, we got together and started brainstorming ideas and one thing led to another. And we ended up starting Flipkart within 3-4 months after that.

**Smarth** (1:59)
Interesting, interesting. And specifically the candidness, because a lot of people would say that, hey, I really want to solve this problem. This was big market. I wasn't able to solve that problem for myself. I was facing it. But your journey is very different.

**Binny Bansal** (2:12)
Yeah, I think we stumbled upon the e-commerce idea. We actually stumbled upon it. We didn't start with it. We brainstormed many different ideas. We were just two software engineers.
So e-commerce looked like something very daunting. I mean, there are too many things you need to do to make e-commerce business work. So I think our original idea was just to code, just to write code and build a comparison shopping engine where you don't have to do much but just code. And we started doing that. And while we were doing that, we realized that there were not too many good e-commerce companies in India to compare.
And then we felt that it shouldn't be that hard. We could just see what was wrong with the ones that existed and we thought we could do better. So I think that sort of gave us the inspiration to try it out. And then we basically decided to start with selling books online.

**Smarth** (3:11)
And I read one of your stories where the first customer or one of the first few customers that you had, you had to travel so many miles just to get that book for that customer.

**Binny Bansal** (3:22)
Not just so many miles, so many miles over so many days over so many bookstores and so many book distributors. I would have spent hours and hours in bookstores and the warehouses of our book distributors trying to find that book. And then I remember after we exhausted that, we spent one day calling bookstores and book distributors all over India.
And then somehow we found a copy of the book in Bangalore itself, thankfully. And then I drove to that bookstore, Sapna Book House, and bought the book.

**Smarth** (3:53)
And now that you've exited the business, how would you define your journey at Flipkart?

**Binny Bansal** (4:00)
My journey at Flipkart? That's a big question. I think the journey at Flipkart was definitely, I think, full of, I would say, sort of a lot of ups and downs, full of just different experiences. I think it was, again, I mean, I go back to the learning sort of mindset and the objective to learn. I think it was like I learnt a lot about life, about business, made a lot of great friends, most importantly. And I guess we created something. I mean, I think the one thing I'm proud of is not really, I mean, Flipkart has become obviously one of the large, sort of largest companies in the country. But I think more importantly, it's become sort of also an inspiration for every entrepreneur in India. And now, I mean, Indian ecosystem has a lot of companies similar to Flipkart in different areas.