In 2007, Binny Bansal co-founded Flipkart, which began as an online bookstore and became India’s biggest e-commerce platform for everything including books, mobile phones, electronics, clothing, furniture, home appliances and grocery. His company was acquired in 2018 by US retail giant Walmart for a 77 per cent stake amounting to US$16 billion, reportedly the world’s largest deal for an internet firm.

“When we started Flipkart, we were really focusing on books, just one category, and focusing on getting the customer experience right for our books,” Bansal told CNBC’s Christine Tan in the feature programme Managing Asia. “I think the one takeaway for everybody was that technology is the way to scale. If you’re not using technology to solve a problem, you won’t be able to solve it at 100 times or 1,000 times when you scale.”

Now based in Singapore, Bansal is co-founder and executive chairman of xto10x Technologies, a Bengaluru-based start-up consulting and tech company launched in 2018. He has mentored more than 30 investments in the start-up ecosystem. Bansal, who studied computer science engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, previously worked at Amazon.