Kunal Bahl & Rohit Bansal on Cash-Flow Discipline

He champions what he calls 'Indicorns' — profitable, sustainable Indian companies — over massive, loss-making unicorns, an explicit reframing of the success metric away from headline valuation and toward durable unit economics, a position shaped directly by Snapdeal's own experience of being valued at $6.5 billion and then collapsing.

Bahl distills entrepreneurial success into three pillars — Focus, Economics and Culture — arguing that founders must resist the temptation to chase the next trend and instead concentrate on building one successful business, a stance clearly shaped by Snapdeal's own loss of focus during its failed ecosystem-of-apps phase.

Under Economics, he advocates for a profitable business model, deep market understanding, opportunistic seizing of openings, and financial prudence — a markedly different emphasis from the growth-at-all-costs playbook he had run during Snapdeal's $6.5 billion peak, and an explicit course-correction in his public messaging.

He prioritises long holding periods: Titan Capital exited Ola after a 12-year holding period and Urban Company after nine — evidence that he treats early-stage investing as patient capital, the inverse of the short-cycle model that defined his own Snapdeal experience where the board pushed for quick outcomes.

Employee headcount had collapsed to under 2,000 from roughly 6,000 a year earlier; the office spa, creche and gym were shut and the library was the only amenity still functioning — physical evidence of the cash crunch that had taken hold inside a firm that, only twenty months before, had been seen as a credible rival to Flipkart.

Morgan Stanley had rated Snapdeal in 2015 as one of India's most capital-efficient startups on a GMV-to-capital-raised ratio of 3.2 — second only to ShopClues at 3.8 and ahead of Flipkart at 2.4 and Amazon India at 1.0 — a metric that flattered the firm at peak but did not anticipate the model's exposure when funding dried up.

The article flags that Bahl and Bansal were paid Rs 46.5 crore each in FY 2014-15 including stock options — unusually high for founders of a loss-making startup — and that both sold Rs 80 crore of stock each to Ontario Pension Fund in late 2015, a move that did not go down well with the leadership team, particularly since other senior employees were not allowed to liquidate.