Flipkart, India’s first billion-dollar company, was launched in 2007 by two engineers, Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal. Originally an e-commerce platform for books, Flipkart expanded its reach to become a competitor of e-commerce giants such as Amazon and eBay. It went on to acquire Myntra, Jabong, and eBay’s India business, which garnered the interest of potential big acquirers. In May 2018, Walmart moved in against Amazon to acquire Flipkart for $16 billion. Walmart’s takeover of Flipkart presents new opportunities for Sachin Bansal, the company’s co-founder, Former Chairman, and Former CEO. We explored how Bansal might leverage his considerable relationship capital to support his next venture.
In January 2018, Flipkart announced that Bansal would become its Executive Chairman and provide strategic guidance while scouting for fresh investment opportunities. As the acquisition was finalized in May 2018, however, Walmart saw no reason to have 2 co-founders on the board of this 10-year-old company. With fellow co-founder Binny Bansal remaining on the board, Sachin Bansal had to “very disappointedly” exit from Flipkart. This move left him sidelined while the company he co-founded reached a huge milestone of being acquired. As a part of the acquisition deal, Bansal sold his complete 5.5% stake of Flipkart to Walmart.
This sale has made Bansal a rich man with an opportunity to explore new ventures. Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal founded a new company on December 8, 2017 named Sabin Advisors Private Limited, whose business may include venture capital funding, insurance, and online ventures. Since launching any new business requires leveraging relationship capital, now is a good time for Bansal to take stock of potentially valuable connections that he might not be using. We explore these connections using RelSci’s Relationship Discovery tool. Available in the Enterprise platform, Relationship Discovery enables users to explore how a given network breaks down by industry, location, or role.
Mapping Bansal’s 1st degree relationships displays his potential connections to 1296 people and 327 organizations within the Internet Software & Services Industry, his main industry. With the recent acquisition of Flipkart, Bansal could bring new expertise to a company in this industry as a board member or advisor.
Although Sachin Bansal is based in Bangalore, India, he still has the capability to connect with people all over the world. For example, he has connections to 81 people and 119 organizations in New York City. Were Bansal to use Relationship Discovery to plot his next move, he could also use the role filter to explore his connections to board members. Doing so indicates direct connections to 301 people and 867 organizations. Bansal could further use Discovery dig into his connections with board members by organization, including the strength of his relationships to each organization. This would help him identify which companies would be easiest to approach about a board member or advisory role.
Hovering over one of these donuts, or over a company name listed on the left, provides a snippet summary of relationships within it.
The “All People” tab lists Sachin Bansal’s relationships to specific board members that he can connect with.
Bansal has a direct connection to Christian Kunz, an eBay senior employee and a board member of ricardo.ch AG, a Swiss company. Although Bansal and Kunz are both important retail executives, what they have in common is not immediately evident. We explored further, using the hover-over to showcase RelSci’s logic for calculating people connections. The men have a connection through Naspers, a company that invests in tech companies. Bansal was the CEO at a company that Nasper invested in, and Kunz was a CEO at a Nasper subsidiary. eBay has also previously invested in FlipKart, improving the strength of the connection. The connections have additional weight because both men had senior roles at the firms in question.
We’ll have to wait and see what Bansal is up to next, but if he wants to plan his next moves, it looks like he’s well-connected. A RelSci user can do this same research on their own connections, using Relationship Discovery and Path Finder. Take a few minutes to look at your own opportunities and see if there are any connections that surprise you. To gain access to Relationship Discovery and other powerful tools, request an enterprise demo today.