Kunal Bahl & Rohit Bansal on Crisis Management

Culture is the third pillar: he argues that team transparency builds trust, which in turn enables the candid conversations required to fix problems during hard times — a lesson sharpened by the wave of senior leadership exits at Snapdeal in 2016–17 when trust between the founders and the leadership team reportedly broke down.

In mid-2017 Snapdeal was being negotiated for sale to Flipkart at a firesale price of around $1 billion, less than one-sixth of its peak $6.5 billion valuation from early 2016 — meaning investors were recovering roughly fifteen cents on every dollar they had put in, an outcome that hardened the industry's suspicion of headline-valuations in Indian e-commerce.

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.

The piece reports SoftBank as the central actor in the failure: the Japanese investor pushed Snapdeal to spend aggressively, declined to make good on repeated promises of fresh capital, blocked other fundraising, and finally cornered the founders into a Flipkart merger — a portrait of how a single large investor can take operational control of an Indian startup's fate.

In August 2015 Bahl publicly told Economic Times that Snapdeal would overtake Flipkart on GMV by March 2016; Snapdeal's market share then stood at 26% against Flipkart's 45% and Amazon's 12%, but by mid-2017 its share had more than halved to roughly 12% as both rivals moved to 35–36% each — the bold claim that framed the bet and the underperformance that disproved it.

In hindsight, the report concludes the ecosystem-of-apps bet was audacious and foolish — the timing was wrong, the execution capability was missing, and Bahl was widely summarised as 'said all the right things but did all the wrong things,' an indictment of strategy that was right in theory but mistimed in practice.

Compounding the operational collapse was a string of senior exits — Saurabh Bansal (category head), Ashish Chitravanshi (SVP operations), Srinivas Murthy (marketing), Abhishek Kumar (corp dev), Farheen Akhtar (comms), Tony Navin (partnerships) and others left between 2016 and 2017 as the focus shifted repeatedly between GMV, order count and customer satisfaction.

The piece frames Nikesh Arora's abrupt June 2016 departure from SoftBank as the moment Snapdeal's safety net was cut: as Arora's mentor relationship with the founders ended, SoftBank's promised follow-on funding stopped, removing the bridge capital that Snapdeal's strategy had been banking on.