Sachin Bansal is one of those entrepreneurs who set extraordinary targets for themselves and leave no stone unturned in somehow making their dreams a reality. Sachin Bansal, the co-founder of Flipkart, was part of the leadership team that created India's most successful e-commerce brand.
Before deciding to venture into e-commerce business, Sachin, an IIT graduate, had his stints at different technology companies like Techspan and the elite Amazon Web Services (AWS). Born in Chandigarh on August 5, Sachin Bansal had a modest upbringing in the life. He was born to a small businessman father and a homemaker mother.
In 2005, Sachin graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur.in Computer Engineering.
In 2007, Sachin Bansal started an online bookstore called Flipkart with his colleague Binny Bansal. With the initial capital of Rs 4 lakhs, this online bookselling venture, based in Bangalore at a small apartment, was put to test. The first few months were very hectic as everything, from creating the first version of the website to sourcing books to packing and delivering them, was handled by Sachin himself.
Flipkart's beginning sounds similar to that of Amazon, one of the largest e-commerce companies in the world, which had also started with the same idea of an online bookstore.
Sachin held the position of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) until 2016 when he finally became the the Executive Chairman of Flipkart. By this time, the company had become a behemoth in the e-commerce sector and was challenging Amazon head-to-head. A couple of years later, US-based retail chain giant Walmart decided to put its foot in India and offered to buy majority stake in Flipkart.
The deal went through with Walmart buying 77% of Flipkart's share for a staggering $16 billion, which was also the biggest deal for an internet company at that time. Walmart became the majority stakeholder in the company and Sachin Bansal thought that it was the right time to cash out and he did it. He sold his minority stake in Flipkart for $1 billion dollars.
However, he was made to sign a non-competitive clause that restricted him either from working for a competitor or developing a potential competitor to Flipkart for the next 3 years. But this did not stop Bansal from creating another venture though not in the field of e-commerce. Sachin ventured into a completely different business of financial service after exiting Flipkart.
Bansal along with his colleague Ankit Agarwal started Navi Group, which is a company that provides financial services like Mutual funds, Finserv and Technology. Apart from this, Bansal has invested in 18 startups. In 2018, he invested $100 million dollars in Ola Cabs while receiving a stake of 0.37 per cent of the company. In February 2019, he had investments in Ola, Grey Orange, Ather Energy, SigTuple, Inshorts, Unacademy and TeamIndus.
