Kalyan Krishnamurthy on why customer value keeps Flipkart hungry for more

Over fruit and avocado on sourdough toast, Kalyan Krishnamurthy tells Nivedita Mookerji and Udisha Srivastav why customer value keeps Flipkart hungry for more

It’s a humid afternoon and we arrive before time for the much-anticipated meeting with the man who has steered Flipkart, the big daddy of ecommerce, for close to a decade now. These are unusual times in New Delhi, and road blockades and diversions, triggered by the ongoing students’ agitation, could set anyone back by hours. Jantar Mantar — the scene of intense protests following examination paper leaks — is just about 5 kilometres away from The Oberoi, where we are waiting to speak to Kalyan Krishnamurthy, group chief executive officer (CEO) of Flipkart. 

Our conversation is supposed to be over lunch, but we are forewarned that Kalyan likes to have his meal early. He walks into The Belvedere, the invite-only business club at the hotel, and greets us warmly. He flew in from Bengaluru — the city where he lives and works — a day earlier and seems to have experienced Delhi’s traffic snarls in good measure already. Logically enough, travel travails, whether in Bengaluru or Delhi, happen to be our conversation starter. 

We skip starters of the other kind as Kalyan echoes what we already have an idea about. “No lunch for me, but you guys please go ahead and order... Just pretend I’m eating with you.” 

We insist that he should order as well, in keeping with the format. He asks for a fruit platter, which he declares has to be shared, and we settle for avocado on sourdough toast to keep it simple. 

We keep the menu card away and plunge into conversation without much ado. Since this is a rather different setting, with less food and hopefully more talk, we ask Kalyan to tell us about his early lunch. “There was a buffet in one of the restaurants and I picked up a few things from there while chatting with a colleague. I’m not very disciplined in exercising, so I try to make up with 

disciplined eating,” he explains.  Very disciplined, we learn. He has his meals at the same time every day and is specific about the kind of food. “I have millets and avoid gluten in general.” 

Kalyan’s approval of our choice is reassuring. “You can't go wrong with avocado, and sourdough is a very healthy bread,” he points out.  Once food is out of the way, thoughts go back to the early days of Flipkart and how it became a celebrity startup.  

The company, which was majority acquired by Walmart for $16 billion in 2018, still wears the startup tag in some ways, isn’t it?

Kalyan bends forward and explains in an animated manner why that’s the biggest compliment for him. “I want Flipkart to continue to be like a startup. That’s my personal objective as a CEO.” 

On this subject, he doesn’t want to hold himself back. “The company has to get bigger and bigger and bigger, but we have to be a startup, a big startup and an even bigger startup....” 

What does it take to remain a startup? “There has to be a culture of ownership among employees... The organisation 

has to have agility and problem-solving characteristics.” The rewards and initiatives are designed in a manner that a startup would, where risk-taking is institutionalised. 

The late afternoon sunlight filtering into the room, where we are seated around a long rectangular table, makes Kalyan’s wristbands glow. To start with, he bought them as a fashion statement, and then family and friends started gifting him those bands, he says, smiling, when asked about them. 

The fruit platter is here, looking rather colourful. Avocado on toast, with baby tomatoes, doesn’t disappoint either, as we concentrate on the subject of quick commerce — which is the big battleground for a large number of companies, including Blinkit, Instamart, Zepto, and Amazon, besides Flipkart. 

We are curious to know how much of the CEO’s time goes into getting quick commerce right in a fiercely competitive market. “I will give you a bigger picture of my time,” Kalyan tells us. 

“I would say a third (of my time) goes to make sure that there is good talent in the company. If we have better talent and better leadership strength, I will also get more time to think about bigger things, how to grow the company, how to make sure the customers are happy….” 

Another third of his time goes into reviewing the top priorities, strategic priorities of the company. A good part of his remaining time goes into stakeholder management. “As for quick commerce, it’s a subset of the middle bucket of strategic initiatives and projects,” he points out. He’s quick to clarify that quick commerce is just one of the things in the company. “We are not a quick commerce company. I don't even subscribe to this language of something called quick commerce. 

“There is commerce for the country. India has a very big base of consumers and it's by far the most distributed set of consumers across geographies, across demographics. The objective of the company is to make sure that we are able to offer the most relevant and the best value proposition to each of those customer segments,” Kalyan elaborates while stressing commerce for all of India. 

Kalyan, 54, has been associated with Flipkart since 2016 in a variety of roles (after a brief stint as its interim chief financial officer in 2013). But it was in 2017 that he was made Flipkart CEO in a much-talked-about shift from his stint as managing director at Tiger Global Management. The following year saw Walmart’s buyout of Flipkart, where the US-based investment firm Tiger Global was a foundational investor. As group CEO since 2018 at the Bengaluru-headquartered ecommerce firm founded by Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal in 2007, Kalyan often gets firsthand feedback from customers while on delivery rounds himself. Startup founders typically like to be hands-on, whether it’s delivering products or driving a cab, but, as Kalyan says, his goal is to retain the startup DNA of Flipkart while driving the company’s growth. Kalyan is described by many as a numbers man with leadership and people skills. He’s accessible even to junior employees in the organisation and would consider their suggestions, according to his colleagues. 

Kalyan’s fruit platter is not even half empty yet while we enjoy the melt-in-the-mouth texture of the avocado. We read the room and ask the group CEO about the status of the initial public offering (IPO) of Flipkart, which recently completed the reverse flip of shifting its corporate headquarters domicile back to India from Singapore, thus paving the way for a domestic stock market listing. The buzz around a mega listing has been there for several years now, followed by recent reports of the IPO getting deferred to 2028. The reports suggest that Walmart may have decided to prioritise profitability over an immediate IPO. Kalyan does not give away anything in his answer to our question. 

“The decision on something like an IPO is not my decision. It’s a decision which will be led by the majority of investors and obviously will get discussed at the board. Right now, we’re not there. So we’ve not had these kinds of discussions right now.”

We try asking about the importance of profitability in an ecommerce company like Flipkart, which had a net loss of ₹5,189 crore in 2024-25. “There is a fairly formal process on this. There’s a strategy for the company, then there’s a resourcing plan for the strategy. We agree on all of these with our board, with our investors, and we follow those. So I can’t share anything specific.”

And who’s the real competition for Flipkart? Is it Blinkit, Zepto and the like, or is it Amazon? The MBA from the Asian Institute of Management in the Philippines dismisses such ideas about competition. “My job is to make sure I have the best value proposition and over time we will win because of that.” 

He explains the winning formula.  

“As long as customers are growing and the frequency with which they buy on Flipkart improves, I do believe across the board, competition will get covered. So I don’t have to look at a particular competitor, break it down, and compare everything; we don’t have to do that. This is the way we think about our business.” 

To change the mood, we talk about something lighter, away from business. What is Kalyan Krishnamurthy like in his personal life? He picks up a slice of apple distractedly and tells us: “I think this is a job which needs focus. So to me, the No. 1 thing in this job is focus. Identify those three, four things which you will do and be at it. Also, to me, you have to be obsessed about this job. If you’re not obsessed about this role, you cannot do this job.” 

Kalyan makes an important point: it’s difficult to divide one’s hours between work and personal life. Coming back to the world of commerce, or ecommerce, he says it’s among the most vibrant industries and you need more than just hard work.  

“It doesn’t matter whether one has worked for eight hours or 10 hours…. You should know how to cope with unpredictability. You have to be prepared for the unknown any time of the day or the week.” 

Any example? “Five a day,” he replies, adding: “We are truly a national business…. It’s an Indian business to the last level, to each and every level.” As for travel and free time, he says he goes by what his wife and daughters recommend. “I go where they want. The idea is to spend time with them.” 

Is he the theatre-going type, we ask, almost knowing the answer. “I prefer to catch movies and shows sometimes on OTT (over-the-top).” Any plan to watch the much-talked-about film The Odyssey made by Christopher Nolan? He laughs and says he would wait for it to come to OTT. Did he catch any of the Fifa matches recently? 

“I did watch some of them,” Kalyan, who can rattle off footballers’ names from previous tournaments with ease, says modestly. We talk a bit about his love for the Indian Premier League and the democratisation of talent before moving back to some of the hardcore business issues. 

We are getting signals from Kalyan’s team by now that we have to wind up the conversation. We squeeze in a question on the role of artificial intelligence (AI) at Flipkart. His answer is simple. “While there are infinite opportunities on AI use cases, what I care about the most is this. Whoever is able to use AI and technology to take products to customers before others will win. And I actually hope and wish that Flipkart is able to do it better than others… It’s the North Star for technology and for AI in general.” 

We are not done yet and want to know Kalyan’s thoughts on the complex regulatory landscape in ecommerce. 

“Regulators, I think, have a primary role to protect the country, to protect the customers of the country, the consumers of the country, and their primary stakeholders—the masses of the country. They have to do their job, and our job is to comply. I don't think there is a discussion or a debate to be had about this,” Kalyan replies candidly. 

As we prepare to part, sadly without a dessert or a coffee, Kalyan smiles and promises to meet over an early lunch next time.