‘We’ve moved away from chasing the competition’

Flipkart has been able to raise more capital in past 12 months than in the nine previous years of its existence, and more capital is on the way as Walmart looks to back it. This has helped Flipkart stay ahead of rival Amazon. This recent growth, however, is not the doing of one or two people but the entire team of top leaders at Flipkart, CEO KALYAN KRISHNAMURTHY tells Alnoor Peermohamed & Bibhu Mishra. Edited excerpts:

In the past two years, things have swung around for Flip kart. From a time when it was looking difficult to raise the next round and global rivals were like big threats, Flip kart has become stronger. Howmuchcreditdo yougiveyourteam?

Today, the business is not run by chasing any competition. We moved away from that about a year or year and a half ago. We are a significant market leader, not just in the number of customers or transactions but also in terms of coming up with market-defining themes, creating new businesses, customer segments, geographies. So I will not necessarily relate my team to competition or anything like that. What you need to see here is that we have a solid seasoned team. The company is now 10 years old and there is a very strong group of people, who have been with us for a very long time, and have taken up senior, meaningful roles.

Howoptimistic are you on the leadership pipeline? Are they capable of steering the company to the next level?

When we look at our peer group, they are global companies of $100 billion-plus scale. This is the environment we operate in. The people Flipkart hires are visionaries, who have seen scale but are still very enterprising. They are entrepreneurial; they like to see pace and are innovative. The bar at Flipkart is very high. We look at truly exceptional and game-changing leaders. So we do take a bit more effort than the average company in India to hire leaders.

Howis attrition at the senior level? You lost a lot of leaders during several transitions in the recent past.

If you look at the past year or eight to 10 months, attrition at a leadership level is at a record low. We have 75 to 80 seasoned leaders as senior directors and vice-presidents. They have huge experience and come from very good backgrounds. They’ve achieved a lot, and these are not just run of the mill achievements; they have created categories, businesses.

A top leadership team is meant to think ahead and build business for the long term, not just run day-to-day activities. Have you been able to do that at Flipkart?

We have a huge number of leaders today who manage a billion dollars-plus in scale. Not every business or product can be measured in dollars but that is the scale some of our leaders manage. Some were CEOs in their previous roles, some were COOs, and these were consumer companies. These managers were managing big teams and touching millions of customers even in previous roles. These are all very seasoned and senior and we have a very good bench of them at Flipkart today.

What makes Flipkart different from others, according to you? Is it the entrepreneurial culture, decentralisation of decisionmaking or what?

The company was founded 10 years ago by Sachin and Binny (Bansal) with some philosophies — customer first, being audacious and whatever we do has to be on the back of cutting-edge technologies. These are the philosophies the founders imbibed in us when they started the company. I have taken that to the masses and the rest of the team. The teams have a huge amount of empowerment, they are encouraged to take big decisions, to take risks as long as the data supports them. I think at a high level and strategic level, we are all aligned. Outside of that, a lot of our senior team members are handling multi-billion dollar mandates and we are very proud to have nurtured people like them.