Chose flipkart because at $8,it sounded cool & affordable: COO

“We searched for a domain name for our website for two days,and eventually chose Flipkart because at just eight US dollars,it sounded cool and was affordable,” Bansal,originally from Chandigarh,said.

The young entrepreneur kept the students of the Management Development Institute (MDI) in Gurgaon spellbound as he shared anecdotes at the Idea Exchange organised by The Indian Express at the college campus on Tuesday.

Bansal is the chief operating officer and a co-founder of flipkart.com,a popular online store for books and mobile phones that operates from six Indian cities and has at least 3,000 employees.

Looking for a cheap domain name was not the only problem Bansal faced while launching his start-up. “We started out from an apartment,so the banks wouldn’t give us a business account. That was quite a problem,” he said.

Both Binny Bansal and and co-founder Sachin Bansal,who is also from Chandigarh,passed out from the Indian Institute of Technology in 2005 as computer science graduates.

They both worked at amazon.com but quit and decided to start an e-commerce company after research on the market space.

“Working for big companies wasn’t making sense. Sachin is from a business family,so we decided that we should start a business together. Our vision was to build a large e-commerce company,” Bansal said.

Responding to questions by management students,Bansal stressed on how starting the right venture at the right time is critical for its success. “If we had started the same thing (flipkart.com) in 2002,it may not have worked at all,” he said.