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influenced by what was happening
there. Many were engineers who
studied and worked in the U.S. and
got to witness firsthand the impact
start-ups can have on an ecosystem.
When the dot-com bust happened
in the early 2000s, the start-up eco-
system picked itself up, and com-
panies such as Google and Amazon
not only survived, but thrived.
That being the case, they rea-
soned, the economy in India holds
much promise—driven by a grow-
ing middle class, a demographic
dividend from a huge population of
working age, and above all, by gov-
ernment policies that seemed to be
growing friendlier for businesses.
Technology—computers, Inter-
net, software, devices—was going
global as well. If Amazon can sell
books to Americans, they reasoned,
an Indian version of Amazon can
do the same for Indians. Thus, by
the end of the 2000s, India had a
bunch of start-ups that drew their
optimism mainly from the success
of American tech companies.
For example, Flipkart, an e-com-
merce company which was bought
by Walmart in 2018 for $16 billion,
was started by two engineers—Sa-
chin and Binny Bansal, who had
worked for Amazon in India. As
Amazon did back in the 1990s, the
Bansals started in 2007 by selling
books. They were not the first to do
it; there were a half-dozen others al-
ready selling books in India, but the
Bansals understood the importance
of the customer experience as few
others did.
The rather tepid performance
of their predecessors did not deter
them, because by 2008, Internet
penetration was higher, broadband
was picking up, and costs were
coming down. They got support
from investors including Accel, and
were focused on customer satisfac-
tion, a mantra they were initiated
into at Amazon.
However, they soon realized that
to satisfy customers, which boiled