A few weeks after Japanese telecom and internet giant Softbank led a round of funding in India’s largest online retailer Flipkart in August 2017, the company’s top 200 executives met in a town-hall gathering at the Aloft Hotel, a stone’s throw from its old headquarters at Cessna Business Park in Bengaluru. The country’s most storied internet company had made a comeback after its toughest year in 2016, and in a span of six months had managed to raise more capital than it could spend: $4 billion and counting.The plan was to discuss the path ahead, and one of the topics that the employees were curious about was how much they will get through the sale of their stock options. CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy took the microphone and asked everyone: Who thinks Flipkart has done extremely well over the last year? Most hands went up quickly, but not of Flipkart cofounder, former CEO and executive chairman Sachin Bansal , who was sitting in the first few rows.Then a question about buyback was asked. Who will not be selling their shares in the programme?This time, Sachin, who had been sidelined to mostly a non-operational role since January 2016, quickly raised his hand, according to two sources who were present at the meeting.Ultimately Flipkart cofounder and Group CEO Binny Bansal sold some shares, while Sachin did not sell any during the buyback.This was more than symbolic and reflected what was going on in Sachin’s mind. That Flipkart could do better if he was more involved. And that he was more committed to the organisation than anyone else.“Flipkart was Sachin’s life. After being pushed out of day-to-day management in 2016, he realised how much he loved Flipkart,” said a person close to him, adding that Sachin wanted to run the company for the next 50 years.Over the last one and half years, Sachin had been trying to figure out how to get behind the steering wheel of the company. When Flipkart started talking for a sale to Walmart and later Amazon India, Sachin saw an opportunity to renegotiate his agreement and get a more hands-on role. But Sachin had a fallout with Flipkart’s board and Walmart as he did not get the rights and the role he wanted.Ultimately his journey culminated earlier this week when he announced that he would leave Flipkart. Sachin is expected to sell his 5.5% stake for about $1 billion, but that may not have been the end he was hoping for.Sachin had led 11-year-old Flipkart through most of its existence as CEO from 2008 to 2015, and, with the current stake sale, has reached a milestone.At a valuation of $22 billion or Rs 1,47,700 crore, Flipkart would have been the 17th most valued company if it was listed -- just behind Bharti Airtel, which was founded in 1995, and much ahead of IT giants like Wipro and HCL, founded in 1945 and 1976, respectively. Flipkart also saw its pre-money valuation double in just over a year from $10.2 billion in April 2017 to $20 billion now. That is higher than the combined valuation of its offline retail peers like DMart owner Avenue Supermarts, Future Retail, Shoppers Stop and Future Lifestyle Fashions.Indian corporates have not seen anything like this before. The size of the acquisition is close to Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp for $22 billion, the biggest buyout of a private technology company in the world. The difference is that Walmart-Flipkart deal is all cash, which is also a new precedent in Indian startup space, which is used to seeing stock mergers like Makemytrip-Ibibo or Snapdeal-Freecharge.Sachin’s journey -- of taking Flipkart to its heights in 2014-2015, which also coincided with strategic mistakes and then his ouster from day-to-day management -- holds significant lessons for entrepreneurs.For one, it proves that massive outcomes are possible in India, investors’ big bets will yield results and wealth cam ne created for employees, proving naysayers wrong. Another is that in India’s internet economy, especially if you are competing with global giants like Amazon and Uber, after a point, hands-on execution trumps vision and radical business model innovation. Founders should perhaps let go and hand over the reins to a more experienced management at the right time. They should realise that there is no Steve Jobs-like comeback opportunity in a cut-throat, competitive market like India.While Sachin may have led his passion get the better of him and made some mistakes, he helped create the playbook for modern entrepreneurship in India. According to Binny, the words “audacious” and “disruptive” personify Sachin.“He taught and pushed everyone to think big, take big bets, often guiding them to think for customers, for India. His biggest contribution, perhaps, has been in shaping Flipkart in its formative years… and it was his long-term vision that led to Flipkart becoming one of the most recognized brands in India,” Binny wrote in a post on the company blog.Both Sachin and Binny hail from Chandigarh. They both joined IIT-Delhi. But their paths hardly crossed till the summer of 2005, their final year at the institute. The two became friends when they were living in the same apartment in Bengaluru. While Sachin was working with Amazon’s India Development Centre, Binny was working at Sarnoff. Soon Sachin referred Binny to Amazon.By September 2007, the duo decided to quit Amazon and start up from their home in Koramangala. They pooled in Rs 4 lakh and started Flipkart.com by cataloguing books. They travelled 40 km every other day to pick up books. The first few orders came primarily from friends and family.In a tech blog post by Andhra Pradesh-based VVK Chandra, Sachin left a comment and a link of Flipkart.com. After looking at the website, Chandra ended up ordering John Wood’s memoir Leaving Microsoft to Change the World. He was Flipkart’s first customer.Slowly the platform got traction in the category. That was when Sachin met Abhishek Goyal, who had also worked at Amazon and was at venture capital firm Accel, at an event called Open Coffee Club Bangalore.“We had heard each other’s name from Amazon. We kept meeting both Sachin and Binny as both of them were also in Koramangala,” says Goyal, recalling that his initial impressions were that they were exceptionally bright, hardworking and extremely frugal.By the time Sachin started pitching to Accel for an investment, Flipkart had already broken even and had been making money for a few months. This extra capital was used to hire the first few employees in operations. By the end of 2008, the company had five employees. The first office was small, rented for Rs 8,000, and did not even have fans.While Accel was finalising its investment, it was decided that Sachin would be the CEO, focusing on the vision, strategy, product and technology driving the company’s customer centricity. Binny was in charge of operations, business planning and pricing of products on the platform.“In the early days, Sachin was single-handedly responsible for driving traffic on the website,” said a former Flipkart executive.Sachin was also responsible for most critical investor relations, as Flipkart needed an unlimited supply of capital to sustain its business. After the initial $1 million by Accel in the summer of 2009, the company came on the radar of several venture capital investors, including New York-based Tiger Global Management.Few months later, for its next funding, Flipkart had received over half-a-dozen term sheets from various venture capital investors, including Nexus Venture Partners, mostly at a valuation of around $20 million. But Tiger Global’s Lee Fixel snagged the deal, valuing the company at over $30 million and agreeing to invest $10 million.After that, capital was not an issue for Flipkart and the Bansal duo got down to work. By the end of 2009, the company had over 100 employees and offices in Bengaluru and Mumbai.Sachin was also clear about the business the company was building and how showing revenues was important. “Our business is not an innovation business, our business is an execution business,” he said, when asked about how his company raised funds at an event called Unplugged in March 2010.The execution started showing as Flipkart became the biggest bookseller in the country, accounting for a majority of sales of some of the publishers. A telling statistic: the company went from selling one book a minute in March 2010 to six books a minute by June 2011.Flipkart decided that selling mobile phones will be big business and got into the category, which till date remains its highest grossing segment.Meanwhile, Sachin, with the help of Tiger Global's Fixel, continued raising record amounts of capital for Flipkart, which was critical in the ecommerce business. While Flipkart’s attempt to raise money from General Atlantic failed in 2011, it managed to raise $150 million from South African media giant Naspers and existing backer Tiger Global in 2012. In 2013, the company was able to raise over $360 million, taking the total capital raised to $540 million, leaving behind peers like Snapdeal, which had raised less than $200 million by then.Flipkart, however, faced some other challenges, like an investigation by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) on FEMA violations. As Flipkart’s valuation mushroomed, so did expectations that it would deliver more value to investors, which started weighing on Sachin's mind.People who know Sachin say that it was around this time, in 2012 and 2013, that Sachin started changing, looking to take radical steps that could be game changers. At the start of 2014, the firm realised that an increasing number of its sales were coming from mobile internet. Another development was the upcoming public offering of Alibaba, whose advertisement-driven model was highly profitable.When Flipkart raised its historical $1 billion round in July 2014, it laid out the vision to become a $100 billion company and Sachin took inspiration from Alibaba. He thought of two major ideas -- one was an experiment to go for a mobile-application only sales model and the other was becoming an open marketplace from a controlled inventory model, relying on a few key sellers. Both required radical changes in the business model, and Flipkart got thousands of people as recruits and sellers.This was, however, done without figuring out its full implications -- Indian sellers were not ready to meet the standards of customer service already set, nor were third-party services available in areas like logistics.“Sachin started talking more about the fact that Flipkart is a technology company but did not completely understand the complexities of areas like supply chain and category management,” said another person.While to the outside world, it appeared things were going well, Flipkart had a terrible 2015. It lost most of the top management who had built the company as it started making expensive hires from big corporates, including McKinsey and Google. Most of the new hires also left by the start of 2017 and were not able to blend into the culture and execute the way Flipkart had wanted.Back in 2014 and 2015, Sachin’s star was on the rise, and the board did not critically analyse these decisions. Some people who know Sachin blame the board and the investors, saying they should have made sure he had mentors to guide him at that critical time.“No other company in India has witnessed the kind of rapid scale-up that Flipkart had. In such a hyper-competitive environment, the board should have got the right mentors from maybe China or the US for Sachin,” said the former employee mentioned above.The mobile-application only model and open marketplace backfired. The company’s losses piled up, the quality of customer service slipped and the gross merchandise value (GMV) stopped growing for nearly 18 months between 2015 and 2016. This gave Amazon India the headroom to take away market share, when many inside the company and investors had thought Flipkart had a chance to take 70-80% market share.As 2015 drew to a close, the company board decided to name Binny as the group CEO handling day-to-day affairs while Sachin became the executive chairman. At a company town hall in August 2016, he made a disclosure that he was replaced as chief executive “because of performance,” as ET had reported then.“Look at the top level around you. Everyone has changed. In fact, even I am gone,” Sachin had said at that time. “Some of our targets have been missed and everyone, including the top management, has paid the price.”As executive chairman, Sachin had been leading government relations, where he has been instrumental in setting up the lobby group IndiaTech, becoming its founding president and chairman. He had also talked about “capital dumping” by rivals like Amazon. He was building a private label called Billion and playing a more active role in hiring talent, especially in artificial intelligence (AI).As talks progressed, Walmart did not see a role for both the founders on the board, and one person familiar with Sachin’s thinking said that Binny is likely to take a step back after the deal.But Walmart also really wanted to retain Flipkart CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy, to whom most of the company’s middle to senior management owe their loyalty. Neither Fipkart’s existing board nor Walmart wanted to disturb the balance of things, said people involved in the discussions.“The stability of the leadership team under Binny and Kalyan has been very good. Both have been driving better accountability,” said a person familiar with the thinking of the Flipkart board and Walmart.Sachin decided it was time for him to move on, as Walmart would be driving the strategic direction of the company.Many entrepreneurs say Sachin has valid reasons to be upset. A section of founders feels that they should negotiate better rights with investors and look at structures where they can have dual-class voting, especially in companies where higher amounts of funding is required and promoter shareholding is expected to reach single digits.“I would be really angry, to say the least, if I have to take a backseat in the company I had built for 10 years. There is a vision -- that you have to build one of the largest ecommerce companies by going against global giants -- and it's not a happy situation when I am not part of the next level of the journey,” says Sampad Swain, cofounder & CEO of payments startup Instamojo.To many who are closely tracking the developments, Sachin’s exit was not a surprise. It was just a matter of when he would leave. People who know Sachin say that this is the best thing that could happen to him as he can start afresh.“For him, it is good that he got his liquidity which is better today than tomorrow. For him it is a blessing in disguise,” says Goyal.Sachin has also backed over half a dozen startups, including electric bike maker Ather Energy, but has been going slow in making new investments, according to data from Tracxn. With capital in hand, he may step up his investments in existing and new companies.Sachin, who will rake in returns of $1 billion from the deal, is expected to be back for a second innings, but not in the ecommerce space for now. One reason is that he has a non-compete agreement with Walmart as part of his exit. But it is likely to be big, and Sachin will have enough capital to steer it in the direction he wants.“The ET Awards for Corporate Excellence is really really important, there is nothing else of this stature in India. I have seen entrepreneurs who actually live for this award. I have one too! One day, I hope to win the Business Leader of the Year award that Mr Mukesh Ambani received. I am working towards that now,” he told ET in October.