Why is Flipkart the best place to work in India?

Rapido is doing well and we’ve just launched the bike pooling feature in the Rapido Captain app where if you’re traveling on your bike solo, you can just enter your destination and we’ll see if we can find someone to share that ride with you along your route. Cool, isn’t it?

I got a chance to travel solo again for a week and it gave me a lot of time to reflect upon. About Rapido and my life. How did I wither the different challenges that were thrown at me in last year and a half. And then it hit me that everything I am today, the skills I possess and the qualities I have are all courtesy Flipkart. And then I felt compelled to write about it. We keep reading about all the negative things in the news about Flipkart — about the recent management rejigs, exits of big leaders, valuation-mark-downs etc. Don’t want to comment on any of those things but would definitely want to write about how Flipkart helped me in my career and why if I could start over, I wouldn’t change a thing.

Flipkart teaches you to dream big. Flipkart pushes you out of your comfort zone. 3rd day on the job and I was meeting the MD of Wiley India. I mean who else has the guts to send a 22-year old to single-handedly negotiate a deal with a multi-national publisher. It’s almost like throwing you off the cliff expecting you to figure out how to fly. And you fly. And when you do, it’s surreal. At the same time, somehow a lot of industry veterans are humbled by Flipkart. People with immaculate business acumen, industry knowledge and sharp judgement struggle and are unable to cope up with the power of tech, product and data. Because that’s what Flipkart will do. Will throw things at you which you’re not comfortable with and back you to do them. Learning by Trial.

Another thing I love about Flipkart is it’s people. There is an army of immensely talented, supremely driven and insanely smart people in Flipkart. There is just so much to learn from. And so many to learn from. There are people from diverse backgrounds, from industry veterans to folks with the best education backgrounds, from people who have built successful products in different geographies to green-face babies straight out of colleges, you can find all sorts of people in Flipkart. There would be just one thing in common. Over the years I have realized that it’s not very easy to survive in Flipkart and the ones who could do it had one thing in common: They’re all very driven. Driven to make a difference in people’s lives. Driven to achieve something every time they set out to. And driven enough to accept failures and move on.

When you’re around such people you tend to learn a lot. Even when you don’t know it. I believe, as we grow in life, whatever field of work we’re in, getting the job done from other people — be it people who report to you or people who don’t, be it bigshots in the organization or outside of it — becomes a very important skill set. And when you have so many amazing people to learn from, you can just observe everyone’s style and how they do it and come up with your own brand of people management skills. I’d like to believe I’m still learning how to do it, but whatever I know is courtesy Flipkart.

The last thing I learnt from Flipkart is the hunger to be #1 in whatever you do. Flipkart doesn’t settle for anything other than #1. They don’t understand anything other than #1. One of the most famous lines I used to hear at Flipkart is “We’re IN it to WIN it!”. Whenever they’d launch a new category, the brief would be to become its largest player in India — online/offline notwithstanding. This attitude is part of Flipkart’s core DNA and it rubs off on all the employees as well. And when they do “win”, they party like crazy monsters. A large part of Flipkart’s values and culture is their parties. They like to party big and take pride in their accomplishments — which are so many and come so often. And it works wonders in binding the team members together. The friendships you develop not only help you at your work but also after. Even after leaving Flipkart since almost two years, I still have a lot of friends who not only help me every step of the way but are also sureshot bets to have fun when you need to.

People who’ve worked at Flipkart know what I am talking about. But people who haven’t — Go there for some time. I can guarantee it will be the experience of a lifetime. :)