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
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