The Ledger
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Radhakrishna: The world would not care if Flipkart or BYJU'S vanished
“In the grand scheme of things, if these two companies didn't exist, the world would still go on, right? That's our best, you know, most valued startups, and the world doesn't even care whether they exist or not. Apart from the shareholders of those companies, …”
Rajagopal: Myntra beat Amazon in fashion despite smaller selection and higher prices
“Myntra did not have a very large selection compared to Amazon Flipkart, the number of products. Same with pricing. Myntra did not sell it for a cheap price. Myntra did not give a faster delivery. In spite of that, Myntra is a much larger brand when it comes to…”
Horizontal Giants Wipe Out Vertical Startups by Adding a Tab
“Then what will Flipkart and Amazon do? Wait till the category becomes large enough. Then they will open one more tab and you will be wiped out. And we have seen enough examples of that happening across fashion, across baby products.”
Garg: India will produce more $500M–$1B outcomes than Flipkart-scale mega-exits
“There may not be Flipkart type Many, many, many outcomes in the ecosystem, but there can be a lot more, five hundred million to a billion type outcomes in the country.”
Bikhchandani: Strategic Acquisitions in India Rarely Deliver VC-Level Returns
“You know, if you look at
Strategic sales.
And you leave out Flipkart, they typically don't give you the kind of return that a VC investor would expect and hope for.”
Amazon and Flipkart act as the true VCs for Indian D2C brands
“I think Amazon Flipkart are the true VCs. I would say they have created hundreds of entrepreneurs, like both, look at both, look at Wakefit, look at Mama, look at so many brands out there. Amazon has created those so many D to C brands, right?”
Khan: Flipkart has created more millionaires than Infosys
“You've got companies like Flipkart, which have created more millionaires than Infosys has created, for example.”
Poddar: Passing on Meesho was a "stupid mistake"
“I think Misho was a big miss. And I think the reason was the same. I assumed that this would be a feature on Flipkart or Snapdeal or Amazon. Because you have, they have logistics, they have payments, they have supply base, they have user base, they have consum…”
Bhagia: Meesho successfully took on e-commerce giants Amazon and Flipkart
“Vidit had once told, like before they went up competing against Flipkart and Amazon yet told me I'm going to do it. I was just like, this guy is crazy, man. Like was at that time, Amazon Flipkart were like these giants, right? Like you couldn't imagine that th…”
Ganesh: Hyperlocal Sourcing Defends Online Grocery Against Horizontal Giants
“Grocery because there is a lot of local sourcing and it's more hyper local than a typical Amazon Flipkart, which is large warehouse national distribution.”
Sharma: Flipkart destroyed its own NPS, handing market leadership to Amazon
“By the time Amazon came, Jungli came, they didn't kill Flipkart. Flipkart had destroyed its NPS on its own by then. And now, therefore, they were able to take the high ground.”
Scaled Organic Growth Is Impossible Without True Product-Market Fit
“No matter how build an organic lever you build, right? Unless you have true PMF. Like when I say true PMF, I don't mean your great retention numbers and all. For me, true retention is if I shut my product down today, will 25 people line out outside of my offic…”
Maheshwari: 75% of advisors warned me against joining Flipkart in 2009
“The VCs and advisors I had spoken to before joining Flipkart and 75% of them had advised against it believe that Indian consumers would probably not be able to trust online commerce.”
Maheshwari: Macroeconomic conditions do not heavily determine early-stage startup success
“The impact of macro factors on very small enterprises and very small new innovative enterprises is reasonably small to start with. Right. We were, so while the economic situation was probably not not very amenable, macro factors like internet penetration in In…”
Lunia: Flipkart's revenue is bigger than all offline retail combined
“Frankly, I think bigger than all offline retail companies put together, right, in the revenues the credit goes to Flipkart, right?”
Chopra: Reliance and Tata would have crushed Flipkart if ecommerce was predictable
“When Flipkart came along initially. It was very hard to model whether Indians would shop online or not. There was just no precedent for it. If it was very easy, I think Reliance, Tata, and all these big companies would have entered it.”
Bajaj: Z47 rejected an early Flipkart meeting due to market size doubts
“Flipkart in particular, believe it or not, Axel had called me and they said, you know, we are doing this book site. And because you are an e-commerce founder, we want to be involved. I was like, I don't have internet users. So I didn't take the meeting.”
Siddhartha: Zomato, Flipkart, Paytm, and Zepto will reach $100B public valuations
“I'm most excited about these companies like Zomato, Flipkart, Paytm, and more of the companies that have Zepto, to reach a hundred billion dollar valuation mark in India on public markets. Okay. Once we reach that, we'll see, like Sky has the ambition for the …”
Garg: Flipkart's 2013 customer experience standard is now commoditized
“What Flipkart was offering in 2013 is a, is commoditized today. That next day delivery people, we are talking about quick commerce now, right?”
Garg: Flipkart's first Big Billion Day was Indian e-commerce's inflection point
“The first big billion day happened, which was a great event for the country, humbling experience because while it met its numbers, but a customer experience wasn't great on but it was the inflection point for Indian e-commerce. The first big billion day after …”
Garg: Flipkart founders refused to penalize 98% of users over 2% return abuse
“When we even started the returns policy, there you always have people who abuse such policies on the platform. The founders were very, very clear for two percent cases. We will not, you know, penalize 98%. We want to give them you know, best experience out the…”
Sudhakar: Walmart's Flipkart Acquisition Opened Floodgates for Indian Startups
“Flipkart-Walmart deal didn't, what it did was, I think it suddenly Open the gates to startups. Yeah. I think suddenly a lot of people said, wow, this is like big money.”
Ahluwalia: Meesho matched or beat Flipkart's order volume during 2022 festive sales
“Misho is competing with the likes of Flipkart head to head in 2022, right? They clocked almost equal number of orders or higher number of orders in the recent, you know, the great India annual festival, which is done before Diwali.”
Goel: Early Indian merchants preferred marketplace commissions over building custom storefronts
“Over the years we understood that, you know merchants were actually not struggling with building their websites at mass because they didn't want to. Most of the merchants were long tailish in nature. And Amazon and Flipkart had created a certain amount of mark…”
Online marketplaces can scale early D2C brands to 1 crore monthly revenue
“I think online platforms, Facebook ads, Google ads, Amazon, Flipkart, they are more than capable. Could take you a crore rupees a month also without, without actually thinking about distribution.”
Accel India initially invested 70 lakh INR for 10 percent of Flipkart
“And we ended up getting like first investment was 70 lakh for 10%.
And then we put in another money.
And so we, then the deal was to put another two crore for 10%.
And then we had another option of getting five percent at additional investment, but by then Tig…”
Accel India invested only $2.5M to $3M total into Flipkart
“We as a fund, we invested only I think two and a half, three million in that company.”
Flipkart was rejected by practically every Indian investor over nine months
“Practically they met every single investor in India for over a span of eight, nine months.”
Chandrasekaran: Snapdeal and Freecharge were too early with e-commerce payments model
“So today, if you look at what PhonePay is doing inside of Flipkart definitely that model has proven to be true, but we were also a little bit early we tried to do it in 2016, 20 17, that time frame.”
Flipkart and Amazon primed Meesho's initial 1,000 suppliers to sell online
“In the beginning getting suppliers, manufacturers or traders on the platform now in 20 twenties, even in 2016 was not that hard because Flipkart and Amazon had done so much work in terms of getting these small or large businesses to learn how to put products o…”
Lunia: Amazon still has not conclusively taken India's top e-commerce spot
“I mean, it's been like six years since Amazon entered, they still haven't taken the number one spot conclusively.”
Rajagopal: Women form 65% of Myntra's base while Flipkart skews male
“More than 65% of the consumer are women in Myntra, and in Flipkart, you would see it to be the other way around.”
Banglani: Stellaris backed 8-9 companies from Flipkart-Myntra ecosystem
“Just the Flipkart and Myntra ecosystem. And just with one fund ours, we have funded at least eight or nine companies just from that one ecosystem.”
Garg: Flipkart was the first to introduce debit card EMIs in India
“Flipkart was the first one to come up with a debit card AMI because India, they understand India has debit cards, you know.”
Venture-Backed B2C Unicorns Drove 80% of Exotel's Early Revenue
“70%, 80% of our revenues were still coming from. On the back of a venture capital enabled companies in the B to C space. So we were really supporting Flipkart and Ola, Uber and Swiggy and Zomato and all of these guys.”
Bhatia: I doubted Flipkart and Amazon's Indian growth over last-mile trust
“I would not have predicted the growth of Flipkart and Amazon in India because like every other naysayer you know, I also felt that the last mile delivery problem was a very difficult one in India where, you know, you could not trust people with packages and, y…”
Flipkart pioneered mandatory ESOP grants for junior engineers in India
“Flipkart, for example, was one of the first few companies at any kind of realist scale, which actually shared ownership around. So like some of my friends, younger brothers who joined Flipkart, even as junior engineer, all of them got ESOPs mandatory. And now …”
Offline Sales Reached 10% of The Moms Co. Revenue by March 2021
“Offline went from zero to about 10% in March. And within online our website and Amazon and Ika are pretty much similar numbers depending on months and depending on activations that we do, they flip positions, one, two, and three, but those are our three bigges…”
Goyal has realized angel returns primarily from Flipkart and Delhivery
“So I think I have so far, like, made money broadly in two companies, like Flipkart Exit gave me something, and then in delivery, I had taken some secondary. Other than that, I have largely folding positions in all the companies.”
India's entire online book market was under $20M when Flipkart launched
“So they were doing books and the entire online books market was less than twenty million.”
Lunia: Seedfund's biggest early misses were e-commerce startups including Lenskart
“What we did not do, and we should have done in 2010, 11, Was invest in e-commerce. So the companies that I missed were largely e-commerce. Horizontal and vertical both. We missed the horizontal e-commerce companies in 2008 to 10, you know, around the time of F…”
boAt built its audio business by disrupting distribution via e-commerce marketplaces
“We have a company called Boat, which has now built a very large Mobile accessory business primarily audio headsets and earphones and wireless speakers, which has disrupted the whole approach of how this business can be built, working with partners like Amazon,…”