Daybreak - Inside Kalyan Krishnamurthy’s fight to steady Flipkart as lieutenants flee

Episode Date: June 19, 2025

In this episode, we turn the spotlight on one of the most powerful yet elusive figures in Indian e-commerce: Kalyan Krishnamurthy, the everywhere-all-the-time CEO of Flipkart. Flipkart, backed by Walmart, was once India’s great e-commerce hope. But lately, the tides have been turning.Walmart is flying high, outperforming Amazon globally, dominating grocery delivery, and raking in ad dollars with a valuation that’s outshining even Apple. But six years after buying Flipkart, Walmart’s patience is wearing thin. Profits still remain elusive. And Krishnamurthy who has been recognised as a wartime CEO is starting to look more like a general losing his command. Flipkart’s getting squeezed from every side. Meesho, the social commerce platform, has captured the small cities. Amazon still owns the metros. And in the quick-commerce madness, it's all about Zepto, Blinkit, Instamart. Flipkart’s barely in the game. Now some of this chaos is kind of self-inflicted. For example, Flipkart’s foray into travel with the Cleartrip acquisition.Senior leaders are leaving, morale is shaken, and few inside the company believe the endgame is anywhere in sight. The Ken reporter Nuha Bubere went behind the scenes and the pressure was palpable.  Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.Want to attend The Ken's next event on health, fitness and wellness? Buy tickets here. Here's your chance to help us shape the conversation: https://theken.typeform.com/to/bZhqWl2g

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We are turning the spotlight on one of the most powerful yet elusive figures in Indian e-commerce. Kalyan Krishna-Murty, the Everywhere All the Time CEO of Flipkart. Flipkart, backed by Walmart, was once India's great e-commerce hope. But lately, the tides have been shifting. Walmart is flying high, outperforming Amazon globally, dominating grocery delivery and raking in ad dollars with a valuation that is outshining even Apple. But six years after buying Flipcott, Walmart's patience is wearing thin. Profits still remain elusive and Krishmurti, who has been recognized as a wartime CEO, is starting to look more like a general losing his command. Flipcott is getting squeezed from every side.

Misho, the social commerce platform has captured the small cities, Amazon still owns the metros and in the quick commerce madness, it's all about Zepto, Blinket and Instamart. Flipkart is barely in the game. Now, some of this chaos is kind of self-inflicted. For example, Flipkart's foray into travel with the clear trip acquisition. My colleague, the Ken reporter Noha Buberi, went behind the scenes, and turns out the pressure is palpable.

So senior leaders are leaving, the morale is shaken, and few inside the company believe that the endgame is anywhere inside. One executive even told me, like, you know, if imagine Flipcard as a person, so you would just like, you know, see a confused, a distracted kind of an individual in front of you. So today, I will be reading to you Nuha's incisive behind-the-scenes report on Flipkart's battle for relevance. Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host, Nidda Sharma, and I don't chase the news cycle. Instead, every day of the week, my colleague Rahal Philipos and I will come to you with one business story that is worth understanding and worth your time.

Today is Friday the 20th of June. I found out every morning Kaliang Krishnamuti wakes up and he makes six phone calls. And one by one, this would be like, you know, key executives inside the company. So he starts off with Haman, Padri in supply chain. then Sakeh Chaudhry in finance. Then we have Kunal Gupta from fashion. Kabir Biswas, who heads the quick commerce vertical from there for Flipkart, which is Flipkart Minutes.

Then Ajay Adav in mobiles and Ravi Krishnan in product, who has now left the company actually. And like, you know, it's not chit-chat or it's not like, you know, just catching up with them early morning. But it's about numbers, it's about deliverables. It's about what each of these verticals are doing. Take the recent slump and travel bookings on clear trips. whose boss, Anurati, exited in April.

Blame it on the India-Pakistan conflict, said his team. Krishna-Mutti did not completely buy it. He picked up the phone and called three competitors to confirm the trend himself. This is the flip-card boss in wartime mode, obsessive, omnipresent, and always a little skeptical. His wife asks if he is married to her or his business heads, joked one executive.

But there is a thing about wartime scene. They need an army. And Krishmurti is running out of commanders. So earlier in May, Ankid Jain, who used to head grocery and large supply chain for Flipkart, he left to join the rival Instamart or Swiggy. Then we saw like an exodus of people right from HR to business operations to people across like, you know, verticals in Flipkart leaving. And if I have to like, you know, sum it all up, this would be the third major leadership

shake-up for Flipcard in, say, six months. The timing also is very, like, it's an ill timing for the company in a way because right now they want people to stay, they want their different verticals to become profitable because the IPO is something which, like, you know, they want to be done with in the next year. And for that, they need a stable leadership. They need people who have seen different turns of Flipkart, people who were there with Kaliang, like, you know, when he became the CEO back in 2019, which is not. happening now because people themselves don't believe in the company as such and they are leaving

the lieutenants of Kalyan Krishna-Mud, they are leaving one by one. Walmart, once seen as a lumbering big box relic, is now out Amazoning Amazon. Its market cap has searched 50%. Its valuation multiple now higher than apples. Its e-commerce engine is humming, ad revenue is climbing and even its U.S. stores have rebooted as distribution powerhouses. The contrast is brutal. So Kalyan as a leader has always been someone

who relies on his second in command. And like, you know, during trouble times, he deploys his trusted lieutenants across, like, you know, these businesses which he sees struggling. One of them, like, you know, is Smriti Ravichandran, who, as one also defined or described her, is a sharpshooter. And she was ping-ponged, like, you know,

from grocery to mobiles to appliances, whenever Kalian feels like, oh, this, core business for Flipcard is failing. She has gone around and tried to change that and stabilize the company. But what we're seeing now is a lot of these trusted executors for Kaliang who he could just like, you know, shift around are also reducing a number. We had Arif Mohamed from Fashion who is now left. He's at Angel 1.

Then among others, the main ones like Amitya Jha is now at rival Instamart where he's like, you know, the CEO there. We have Ayyapun who has left Clear Trip and now he's started his own company. So we are seeing like, you know, in trouble times when Flipcard needs leadership to step up, the most loyal ones are just like leaving or running away from the battlefield. This divergence is not lost on Walmart. The Bentonville Baymit has poured billions into Flipcard since acquiring a majority stake in 2018. But its patience is wearing thin.

While Walmart Plus and Vizio-powered ads raked in billion stateside, Flipcott missed the quick commerce boom. Blinkets, Zepto and Instamort doubled their daily orders in a year. The industry grew to $6.5 billion in four years. Flipkart was not even in the race. I've seen Kalyan deployed different tactics in wartime to use different people for different things. And sometimes, I've also seen him create a war in the company for sports. specific purposes, said a former Flipcott executive. And that is the paradox of Krishna-Murty.

He's everywhere in everything and still somehow cannot stop the drift. Former and current employees speak with admiration of his relentlessness, sure, but also with a mix of exhaustion and disbelief. The company, they say, feels more clueless than ever. If you have to imagine Kalyan's working space and write off the bat. It is not some corner office type, like, you know, where there's a fancy coffee machine right there. He actually sits, like, on the first floor of Flipkarts Belander office, which is, like, also called a C block. And all the category teams beat electronics, fashion. Everyone is like, you know,

within shouting distance from Kalyan right there. And he is just like, you know, the floor plan is open. So he just sits right there since the morning, takes his calls and like meeting rooms around the flow. and the flow plan is such that they made it all yellow for the first floor. So the room names are also based out of like things which are yellow. So one room, as I was told, it's called Peelie Taxi. Then there's another room which is called Mango Mastani, orange would you be the likes of that. Kalyan's personal wallroom though, it's called magical manjul. And naturally, that one is off limit for most people in the organization, even senior leadership.

Unless Kalyan wants to have a meeting with you, then of course you have to be with him in the He's essentially a finance guy, said a former executive. He's able to get down to the brass tax. Most former and current execs who spoke with the ken did not want to be named to avoid any repercussions. Krishnamurti was Tiger Global's man in India. Back in 2013, 2014, the VC Giants sent him in as Flipkart's CFO, and he did what finance guys sometimes do. He ran categories, oversaw operations, and basically got into everything.

He had been with Tiger Global for over five years. After the big billion-day debacle in 2014, when Flipcott's servers melted like a popsicle in the sun, he left. Quietly. Two years later, with Amazon closing in, he came back. Less as a finance whiz, more as a wartime fixer. And wartime meetings with Krishna-Mutti aren't about freewheeling, brainstorming or design thinking,

or whatever the buzzword de Jure is. It is more what are the top three things you need to do. He obsesses over aspiration levels. If your goals aren't ambitious enough, don't even bring them to him. If they are, expect him to sign off on every detail anyway, said a former executive. Everything has to be metrified, tracked, compared to the plan. Which is great if things are going well. But if they are not, Krishna'smurti gets involved.

And when he is involved, his team will be crawling all over my book. body, said another former executive. For a brief period, my key customer experience metrics were actually not going too well. I was on a weekly review with him for almost three months. In fact, Krishna-Murti's tone had shifted in 2022. He started grilling business teams more. We agreed we would do this, he'd say, you haven't done it, what stopped you, what's the course correction? All fair questions, but also stressful ones. And the kind of questions that lead people to polish their resumes. And when senior folks began leaving,

Flipkart started tightening costs. Plus, the new hires weren't exactly battle tested. This does not feel like the Flipkart we joined, was a sentiment shared by the executives. Someone who has, like, you know, actually tried changing things around tells me that the problem isn't tech. Flipkart is a haven for, like, you know,

people who love tech. They have built all those operations, all those, back-end processes way back, like when Sachin and Binnie were there. So the problem isn't tech for them. The problem today is execution and more than that expectation. You can't expect to grow at 30% when the entire category is just not growing. And as another executive firm, a different function, which is the health vertical health plus, told me that after COVID particularly, the expectations across categories were sky high.

because pandemic gave a kind of a boost to Flipkart which was unprecedented. Everything was like shut down, people were shopping online more. And Flipkart thought that run would just even extend beyond the pandemic. But that was not the case. Outside the battlefield, though, Krishna-Murty can actually be charming. He jokes with a tight circle of execs. He attends alumni parties where people like Samir Nigam phone-paced CEO would arrive. Flipkart's co-founder, Bin Ladenz, would host them in five-scent.

star hotels in Bangaluru. No work talk allowed. Flipkart nostalgia? Yes. Jokes, drinks, camaraderie, said an executive who was invited to a few such hangouts in 2022. But there was no such in Bansal, the other co-founder. He skipped those. That jolly version of Krishamurty did not show up for most of Flipkart's 30 to 35 senior vice presidents. Krishnamurti is making them a lot more accountable, said the executive. His trust, once ironclad, is showing signs of rust. And to be fair, Flipkart has been getting punched from all sides. Mishu took two tier cities while no one was looking. Amazon never budged from tier one. Then came the quick commerce land grab, Zepto, blinket, Instamart, Flipkart was not even in the same conversation. Some of this the executives believe was self-inflicted.

Hyper-local, missed. Shopsie, the Misho rival, forgettable. Travel, a disaster. Right now, if I were Kalyan, I would be asking, what happened to grocery? Why couldn't we be the number one player in the country? I'm also not sure if I'd be impressed with what Clear Trip delivered. It is a disaster, said a former executive at Flipcott. Ayyap and R was the man in charge at Clear Trip. The Mintra alumni supposedly did a spectacular job with mobiles, said a former executive. At Flipkot, he was known for his swag, We used to joke about him, said another executive. We'd come into meetings with books and notes.

He'd just walk in, say it'll get done, and then he didn't. Clear Trip then posted an 800-crawru-ru-ru-re-re-lose in financial year 2024. That is against 97-crow-rupees in revenue. Flip-cart did not respond to the Gens's detailed questions for the story. So Flip-Card's problem is not that they don't have people coming up with ideas which are unlike, you know, their competition. But it's about they don't know what to do when these ideas do come up to them. Because in terms of execution, they are either very slow or they don't have a clear roadmap of how to go about things.

For example, long back, you know, when Flipcard tried doing hyperlocal delivery for the very first time, Krishna-Murti had been like, you know, mentioned to his executives that I can only give you the idea. After that, when I give you the idea, what to do with it is in terms of like, you know, the people in the people in the, in the team, like with Flipkart, hyperlocal as well. But if the people don't believe in it themselves and don't have a clear strategy around it, the idea will fall flat, which is what happened with Flipkart minutes in its first two iterations. That might be true. But Flipkart's track record with innovation is a graveyard of half-hearted attempts and bad bets,

said multiple executives who spoke with again. Take Me Show, an entire category of social commerce that grew up in Flipkart's blind spot. Executives say the company had two options, counter or acquire. It did neither. This stands in contrast to Walmart. Like Krishna-Murti, Walmart chief Doug McMillan fended off Amazon years ago. But that is where the similarities end. Walmart eventually cracked grocery delivery, a logistics-heavy business that Flip-Card could not master.

So every time Walmart climbs, Flipkart's struggle sting. Take Mishu again. Flipkart's refurbished goods platform Too Good was an early attempt to play in that market. But it fizzled out. Shopsy, its response to Micho, did not deliver either. Now, Flipkart has waived commissions for products priced under $300, hoping to lure more sellers. That change in April triggered a 10 to 15% GMV bump, a senior manager said.

Yet, cracks were already visible internally. Around the same time, Flipkart HR conducted focus group discussion, to understand why people were leaving. As much as we point our fingers towards the CEO, the bigger factor is that you had heavy-hitting senior vice-presidents and vice-presidents. I would rather hold the next-in-line accountable who was supposed to deliver but fell short, added a third executive. One example, Jha, who was handed one of Flipkart's most strategic verticals, grocery.

Within a year, he quit after spending 13 years at the company. Flipka then brought in Biswas, the former Danzo founder, to lead the quick commerce vertical, Minutes. He is supported by Badri and Kanchan Mishra. While Biswas wants to drive growth in existing stores, Badri is pushing expansion. That push, however, was paused. In April, Badri asked the Minutes team to stop launching new dark stores in city where the service wasn't live yet. The Ken learnt. That directive came from Krishmurti himself, according to those for the minutes.

familiar with this. New stores would only be set up in locations where minutes already had a presence. The timing coincided with a new mandate from Walmart. Cut Flipkarts cash burn in half. Kalyan is not Superman. He needs a strong next in line. There were a couple of blue-eyed boys, but they were not able to pull any magic, said an executive. They let him down. Who were those boys? Ayyapan and Ranjit Boyana Palli. who now runs an AI startup called Flash. Even Flipkart's entry into pharmacy went nowhere. It acquired a 75% stake in Sastas Sundar for $1,000 crore rupees in 2022

and created a new vertical called Health Plus. But the partnership was wound down this January. The pharmacy business will now be folded under minutes. We wanted full control over fulfillment. But Sastas Sundar managed that end and things kept getting stuck, said our former Health Plus manager. If fulfillment was in-house, we could have scaled much faster. That problem, external bets failing, is a pattern.

Anything built outside core commerce didn't work. Another executive said. There was pressure to grow from Kalyan, but no one knew how. For six months, they would wake up with their legs shaking. Discounts were the only liver, but even the market did not respond. Eventually, cost pressures mounted. You cannot bleed for it. forever, said a former executive of Flipkart.

Krishna-Murti, known for keeping his school publicly, kept growing impatient. If a leader does not deliver, he is replaced, one executive said. It happened in the electronics division, for instance. Executives say Krishna-Murti hasn't changed his leadership style since 2016 when he took over from Binnie Bunsul during a crisis, said multiple executives. But that is also the problem. Then Flipkart had one big enemy, Amazon. Krishna Murti made it survive.

But now it is under siege from all directions. Kalyan is a strong business leader, said a former senior vice president. But he is not a tech leader, someone who can bring disruption in the face of growing competition. Which shows. Every recent expansion, clear trip for travel, Sastas Sundar for Pharmacy was an acquisition. Nothing new has been built organically since 2016-17, a manager said. The string of high-level exits hasn't helped morale either. The phone payout added to the disillusionment.

It mostly benefited senior leaders, said another executive. When you liquidate a lot of stake, you eventually feel settled and comfortable. You are not as invested anymore in driving or turning around those results. Yet, none of the people. that the Ken spoke to said Krishna Murthy has to be the one to go. Most agree, Flipkart needs a confident leader.

Yet, most also agree that he is the best person for the job. Krishnamurti still calls his six generals every morning, but more than ever, he, and by extension, Flipkart, needs someone. Daybreak is produced

from the newsroom of the Ken India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of our subscriber-only offerings. A full subscription unlocks daily long-form feature stories, newsletters and podcast extras. To subscribe, head to the ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on top of the Ken website.

Today's episode was hosted by Snigda Sharma and edited by Rajiv CN.