Sachin Bansal had made a billion dollars after Walmart had acquired Flipkart in 2018, but he’s now revealed that it wasn’t the outcome he had hoped for.
Sachin Bansal has said that he was extremely unhappy after he’d exited Flipkart. His displeasure at how things turned out was so apparent to others that Paytm CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma had called him the unhappiest billionaire he’d ever seen.
“Vijay and I talked extensively after I exited Flipkart, and he jokingly said that you are the unhappiest billionaire I’ve ever seen,” Bansal said at the Startup Mahakumbh. “I was extremely unhappy after the exit, because it was not something that I had planned. I think it just happened. So essentially, that’s the unfinished business, where the goal was to take the platform that I had created or helped create, to a billion people, eventually, right to serve a billion people at large scale, even globally over time. That was kind of the unfinished business that I still pursue,” he added.
Sachin Bansal had exited Flipkart when Walmart had acquired the company for a record $21 billion. He’d sold his entire 5.5 percent stake at the acquisition, unlike co-founder Binny Bansal, who remained with the company for several years after Walmart had taken it over. After Sachin Bansal’s exit, he hadn’t publicly made it apparent that he was unhappy with the outcome — he’d instead said that he’d spend his time playing computer games and brushing up his coding skills.
But Bansal hadn’t just sat back and played computer games. He’d begun investing his wealth — he’d put in $100 million into Ola. He’d then also launched Navi, which was a fintech play that aimed to make it easier for people to get loans. Navi expanded quickly and became profitable, but has run into some issues in the recent past — its application to get a banking license was denied, and it was even banned by the Reserve Bank from giving out loans before the ban was later revoked. Sachin Bansal is still young — he’s just 43 — and he might end up fulfilling his wish of again impacting billions of people in the coming years.