Kunal Bahl & Rohit Bansal on Technology Pivot

Bahl and his school friend Rohit Bansal co-founded Snapdeal in 2010 — originally as a coupon-based discount venture — a product they would later abandon for a full marketplace model as the Indian online retail opportunity revealed itself.

The founders' big strategic bet was to build an ecosystem of apps and services around the core marketplace — FreeCharge ($400M acquired April 2015), Shoppo, Unicommerce, Exclusively, lending and a WeChat-style messenger — modelled on Facebook's bundling of WhatsApp and Instagram, with Bahl arguing that social was the leading indicator for how Indian e-commerce would evolve.

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.