Upon graduating in 2005, neither was interested in finding work abroad, unlike many of their peers. Bansal wanted to stay in India, and was determined to make a living from online work.

A year later, their paths would cross again while working for Amazon in India, where they specialized in building web services like Amazon S3, an online storage system used by many startups in the United States.

Recognizing the huge potential for e-commerce in India, both knew the time was right to try to tap into the market.

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In September 2007, Flipkart began in a two-room apartment in Bengaluru, the capital of India's southern state of Karnataka.

Raising capital from investors "wasn't easy" to begin with, Bansal confesses. "From convincing our family and friends about the idea, to getting publishers to work with us - everything took time Everything depended on word-of-mouth."

In the beginning, most attempts at seeking venture capital were rejected. "We had to work doubly hard on our proof of concept, showcase a proper business plan and the results we had been getting before they started taking us seriously and we landed our first funding of $1 million," he says.

But when the company began to take off, and turnover increased from 300,000 rupees ($5,000) from 2007 to 2008 to 750 million rupees in 2010-11, there was every reason for detractors to sit up and take note.

Last year, Flipkart raised $360 million alone in funding from investors - the largest by any Indian Internet company.

The secret to the company's success lies in the Bansals' plan to create a new shopping experience for Indian customers.

"Our earlier idea had been to build a comparison site for shopping portals," Sachin Bansal says. "Only when we realized that there is a dearth of good online shopping platforms in India did we start thinking of Flipkart."

He took note of how Chinese Internet companies operate, citing Alibaba's Ma as an influence "because of the way he competed with international competition and also built the Alibaba Group - not just as an e-commerce company, but as an entire Internet ecosystem".