After resigning from Flipkart over allegations of ‘personal misconduct’, co-founder Binny Bansal, along with Saikiran Krishnamurthy with stints in Flipkart and Ola are floating a new consultancy venture, ‘xto10x’. This is being described as a “mix of SAP, Coursera and McKinsey for startups”, reports Economic Times.
Binny Bansal exited Flipkart last month, but holds around 5% in the ecommerce venture plus a place on its Board as well. Saikiran is an ex McKinsey executive who was with Flipkart for around 2 years and was last heading the logistics arm Ekart. He later spent less than a year at Ola and is said to be working on this new venture xto10x with Bansal ever since.
The business model being evolved by the two for their venture will cover new grounds currently untapped for the startup founders in the country. From assisting promoters in developing the correct product-market fit to ensure scaling up occurs without any hitch, there will be a host of products and services available. The venture is still on the drawing board and recruitments may start in the new year. Actual operations may commence thereafter.
The premise on which the duo is trying to build their company is that funding is not the only difficulty faced by startups in the Indian ecosystem and conventional consulting firms don’t offer all the solutions that founders of these startups need. Challenges such as making wrong decisions can be corrected through tools like data science, strategy and even education via curated courseware and case-studies, all of which will equip promoters of startups to cope with issues in their respective companies.
Some amount of hand-holding is currently happening with VCs or angel investors offering support. But those are not structured enough to offer precise solutions and not so easy to access as well for various reasons. Many entrepreneurs seem to have welcomed this move by Binny Bansal and Krishnamurthy.
Meanwhile the other Bansal, Sachin Bansal who was the Flipkart co-founder is also busy establishing his own venture, which will be more of an investment spearhead. It is being rumoured that Binny Bansal will be the Executive Chairman of xto10x and Krishnamurthy the CEO.