Flipkart

Zoom

Flipkart

Marketplace model — Flipkart connects third-party sellers with consumers and takes a commission on every transaction, typically 5% to 25% depending on the category. Also operates a first-party retail business buying and reselling products directly, particularly in electronics and fashion.

Revenue streams include seller commissions, advertising (brands pay to appear in search results and banners), logistics services (Flipkart's in-house delivery network, Ekart, also serves other companies), and Flipkart Plus (loyalty program). The company runs periodic mega-sales — Big Billion Days — that generate billions in GMV over a few days, essentially India's version of Prime Day.

Zoom

Zoom uses a freemium model. Free accounts get unlimited one-on-one meetings and 40-minute group meetings.

Paid plans start at $13.33/month per user for Pro (meetings up to 30 hours), $18.33/month for Business, and custom pricing for Enterprise. Zoom also charges for add-ons — Zoom Phone (cloud phone system), Zoom Rooms (conference room hardware), and Zoom Contact Center.

The free tier is the hook. The 40-minute limit on group calls creates just enough friction to push power users to pay.

And once one person in a company pays, the whole team follows because nobody wants to be the one whose meetings keep getting cut off.

Flipkart

Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal — not related despite the shared surname — both worked at Amazon in its early days. They moved back to India in 2007 and started Flipkart as an online bookstore, literally copying the Amazon playbook from 1994.

Their first order was a book called "Leaving Microsoft to Change the World," which is almost too on-the-nose. But India in 2007 was nothing like America in 1994.

Internet penetration was low, credit cards were rare, delivery infrastructure was nonexistent, and most people had never bought anything online. The Bansals had to invent solutions for problems Amazon never faced.

Cash-on-delivery became the default payment method. They built their own logistics network because India Post couldn't handle e-commerce volumes.

Every assumption that worked in the US had to be rebuilt from scratch for India.

Zoom

Eric Yuan grew up in Tai'an, a mining city in Shandong province, China. In the mid-1990s he was in his twenties and inspired by the internet boom happening in America.

He applied for a US visa. He was rejected.

He applied again. Rejected again.

Eight times in total over about two years before he was finally approved in 1997. He moved to Silicon Valley with barely any English and joined WebEx as one of its first engineers.

Yuan spent 14 years at WebEx, eventually becoming VP of Engineering. Cisco acquired WebEx in 2007 for $3.2 billion.

Yuan watched Cisco slowly bloat the product with enterprise features while the core video quality deteriorated. He kept telling Cisco leadership they needed to rebuild the product from scratch.

They kept saying no.

In 2011, Yuan quit and took 40 WebEx engineers with him. He founded Zoom Video Communications with a simple thesis: video meetings should just work.

No downloads. No lag.

No "can you hear me?" No IT department required. He built the product that Cisco refused to build.

Flipkart

Category expansion from books to electronics to fashion to groceries — each new category brought new customers and increased purchase frequency. Cash-on-delivery removed the trust barrier for first-time online shoppers.

Building Ekart logistics gave Flipkart delivery reach into tier-2 and tier-3 cities that no third-party carrier could serve. Big Billion Days mega-sale events trained Indian consumers to shop online with massive discounts.

Acquisition strategy — bought Myntra (fashion), Jabong (fashion), eBay India (marketplace), and PhonePe (payments) to consolidate the market. Walmart's $16 billion acquisition in 2018 provided unlimited capital to compete with Amazon India.

Mobile-first design because most Indian consumers access the internet through smartphones, not computers.

Zoom

Zoom grew on one thing: it worked. In a world where every video call started with five minutes of technical issues, Zoom calls just connected.

That reliability was the entire marketing strategy for the first five years.

The freemium model did the rest. Teachers, coaches, therapists, book clubs, and small teams all started on the free tier.

When they hit the 40-minute limit, enough of them converted to paid. And every free meeting was essentially a demo — everyone in the meeting saw how good Zoom was.

Yuan obsessed over simplicity. While competitors like WebEx and GoToMeeting required downloads, plugins, and IT involvement, Zoom worked in the browser with one click.

The learning curve was essentially zero. Your grandmother could figure it out.

That turned out to be extremely important when a pandemic suddenly required your grandmother to figure it out.

Then COVID happened. In March 2020, the world shut down.

Every meeting — work, school, family, doctor, church, happy hour — moved to video. Zoom was already the easiest option.

Daily participants exploded from 10 million to 300 million in four months. The stock went from $70 to $588.

Flipkart

Amazon India is a relentless competitor with Jeff Bezos publicly committing billions to win the market. Regulatory uncertainty — Indian e-commerce regulations around foreign ownership, deep discounting, and marketplace rules change frequently and can disrupt business models overnight.

Profitability has remained elusive despite massive scale — the combination of deep discounts, logistics costs, and competitive spending keeps margins thin. The Walmart acquisition created enormous pressure to demonstrate returns on a $16 billion investment.

Founder drama — Sachin Bansal was forced out after the Walmart deal over allegations of personal misconduct, creating leadership turbulence. And the fundamental challenge of e-commerce in India: a price-sensitive market where consumers will switch platforms for a 50-rupee discount.

Zoom

The post-pandemic hangover has been severe. Zoom's stock peaked at $588 in October 2020 and crashed to under $70 by 2022 — an 88% drop.

The company went from the most exciting tech stock on the planet to a cautionary tale about pandemic valuations. Revenue growth slowed from 300%+ to single digits as people returned to offices and competitors caught up.

Security and "Zoombombing" were early crises. In early 2020, as millions of new users flooded in, trolls discovered they could join open Zoom meetings and share offensive content.

Schools, churches, and AA meetings were disrupted. It turned out Zoom's encryption wasn't truly end-to-end as advertised.

Yuan had to halt all feature development for 90 days and focus exclusively on security fixes. It was a near-death reputational crisis.

Competition from Microsoft Teams and Google Meet intensified. Both companies bundled video calling for free into products that hundreds of millions of people already used.

Microsoft Teams integrated directly into Office 365. Google Meet was built into Gmail.

Zoom had to compete against free products from two of the richest companies on Earth.

Flipkart

Flipkart marketplace — India's largest e-commerce platform with 150+ million products across dozens of categories. Myntra — fashion and lifestyle subsidiary, India's leading online fashion retailer.

Ekart logistics — in-house delivery network covering 90%+ of India's pin codes. Flipkart Wholesale — B2B platform for kiranas (mom-and-pop shops) to source inventory.

PhonePe — originally a Flipkart subsidiary, now independent, one of India's largest digital payments platforms processing billions of transactions. Flipkart Plus — loyalty program offering free shipping and early sale access.

Flipkart Quick — hyperlocal delivery for groceries and essentials.

Zoom

Zoom Meetings is the core — video calls that actually work. Zoom Webinars handles large-scale events with up to 50,000 attendees.

Zoom Phone is a full cloud-based phone system replacing traditional office phones. Zoom Rooms turns physical conference rooms into one-click video meeting spaces.

Zoom Contact Center competes with established call center software. Zoom Team Chat is their Slack/Teams competitor.

Zoom Whiteboard is a collaborative digital canvas. Zoom Revenue Accelerator uses AI to analyze sales calls.

And Zoom AI Companion summarizes meetings and drafts messages.

Flipkart

Key investors before the Walmart acquisition included Tiger Global Management, SoftBank Vision Fund, Accel Partners, Naspers, and Tencent. Walmart acquired 77% of Flipkart for $16 billion in 2018, the largest e-commerce acquisition in history at the time.

Zoom

Sequoia Capital, Emergence Capital, Horizons Ventures (Li Ka-shing), Qualcomm Ventures