The serial builder

THE FLIPKART EXECUTIVE WHO BUILT BUSINESSES FOR OTHERS IS NOW BUILDING ONE OF HIS OWN

- ANEES HUSSAIN

PRAKASH SIKARIA JOINED Flipkart in 2014 as a consultant, planning to stay for six months. He stayed for eight years.

Flipkart was still operating out of scattered offices in Bengaluru then, long before its sprawling headquarters came up. What caught his attention was not the office but the culture. Problems were broken down into numbers and solved analytically rather than debated endlessly.

“It felt like you're talking to like-minded people,” he says. That approach kept him there and, over time, made him someone to whom CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy repeatedly turned when a new competitive challenge emerged. As Amazon built an advertising business, Sikaria helped create Flipkart Ads. As loyalty became critical, he launched Supercoins and Flipkart Ultra. When Meesho gained ground in smaller towns, he built Shopsy to target the same segment. He also led the acquisition of Cleartrip. By 2021, Flipkart had consolidated customer, marketing, growth and new businesses under one organisation and Sikaria was asked to lead it. “Every two years I was building a new business,” he says.