2109th BLOG POST
14th Book of 2024
Out of many
transformations that my generation has experienced in front of them, the
evolution of start-up ecosystem is one of them. And it all began with Flipkart in
2007 when E-commerce industry had just begun in India with lots of excitement
and doubt among consumers. Author-duo Varadharaju Janardhanan and M. H. Bala
Subrahmanya has tried to explore the whole arc of Flipkart’s development in
their book named “A Billion Dreams”. This 150-pages short book also has the
tagline called “Decoding Flipkart’s Growth Story”.
As the title of the
book says, it does full justice to it by going deeper into how Flipkart managed
to initiate their ecommerce startup in India where there wasn’t even access to
Internet to many in the era of 2G internet. Indians, with the habit of touching
and verifying products before purchasing, trusted the new website and accepted
it with all the new promises the website was making. The book deeps down into
the journey how Flipkart became one of the first unicorns of India in 2012 and with
all its great strategies, became decacorn within 2 years itself in 2014.
One thing that I
like about Rupa Publication is its initiative of telling such inspiring and
informative stories through their short books which can be finished within a
single sitting. Even being a fast read, the authors doesn’t compromise on the
story and helps us understand every aspect of the business. They describe how
Flipkart went through the investment spree and got big cheques from biggest investors
of the world. Further, how they themselves opened a venture unit for investment
in new startups themselves once they got established.
Similarly, it’s
interesting to read one of the best strategies of Flipkart where they started
acquiring businesses or getting into mergers and acquisitions to ensure that
they benefit from the achievements of the other firms – either in terms of
their talent pool or the logistics/network they must have created which
Flipkart won’t have to create from scratch. Their Entrepreneurial culture
mindset is regularly mentioned in the book which talks about how they groomed and
motivated their employees in briefing new ideas which are out of the box. They
either implemented the same in Flipkart or helped a group of employees create a
new start-up.
One amazing fact about
Flipkart remains that they created a work culture in such a manner that many of
their employees created their own successful start-ups after leaving Flipkart
and in many of these cases, Flipkart themselves turned out to be the initial
investor to give them wings. This tells a lot about the leadership mindset the
firm and its founders have rather than killing the dreams of their employees by
adding clauses.
The book discusses
very well on several challenges that the firm faced in the first few years and
how the company found solution for each of them. It serves as a very big
example for all the management folks as well as people interested in opening a
start-up of their own. Authors have very intelligently added a section after
every chapter called “Add To Kart” which mentions the key take-aways that we need
to remember from the chapter. The book has a lot to learn from entrepreneurship
aspect. I have never been an aspirant of starting something of my own but the
growth story of Flipkart definitely motivated me to think something which I can
own and nurture like them.
The only concern
that I found with the book are few repetitive stories of their growth time and
again which becomes boring. I feel that authors should have either gone from
timeline perspective or strategy perspective and spoken about all the related
events in a single space. But authors have been little confused in that sense
and spoken about few elements every now and then which makes you skip few
paragraphs.
Overall, this is a
perfect book for younger children and start-up aspirants. I give this book 4.5
stars out of 5. Definitely recommended!
Thanks..
WRITING BUDDHA
