Billion-dollar bet on Bharat

THE CO-FOUNDERS BELIEVED STRONGLY THAT COPYCAT MODELS WON'T WORK IN INDIA, WHICH HAD A UNIQUE CONSUMER BEHAVIOUR AND MARKET STRUCTURE

- S SHANTHI

BEING PART OF A family of traders, terms like revenue, sales, profit&loss were part of everyday dinner conversations for Vaibhav Gupta, co-founder and CEO of udaan. But a young Gupta opted to focus on a good education and a good job. A BTech in computer science from IIT Delhi, Gupta, now 44, worked as an engineer for a software firm for two years, went to a business school in the US and eventually joined McKinsey in 2008 which kindled his interest in building something from scratch.

This led him to a conversation with Flipkart founders, Sachin and Binny Bansal, who were his friends from IIT. "When I met Sachin again in 2010, Flipkart was still very small. I liked what he was doing, and we connected." In 2011, he decided to join Flipkart and worked there till 2016. Those years gave him a deep belief in the power of the internet and the scale e-commerce could achieve in India.

"Flipkart grew rapidly. The experience of building something from the ground up, at that speed, was transformational," he recalls. But, he also began to feel that the models they were importing from the US and China didn't fully work for India. He felt that India's economy, consumer behaviour and market structure were very different.

"India has over 100 million farmers, 25-30 million kirana shops, millions of small manufacturers and sellers, and a huge rural population. The average Indian doesn't pay for convenience; they pay for value," he says.