How to build a giant: Amit Agarwal’s Amazon India story

When a company has a presence in 190 countries, and its chief executive visits this one at every year, you can safely bet that the country is significant to that company. Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services (AWS), has visited India 13 times in the past 12 years. This is the story of AWS in India, and of Amit Agarwal, now head of Amazon India, but long-time AWS hand. It’s also the story of how Agarwal is leveraging his AWS experience to put Amazon in pole position in the Indian e-commerce industry.

“We came here to tap the talent base of engineers,” Jassy tells me on his last trip to India (in June). That was in 2004, when Amit Agarwal, Stanford grad and five years old with Amazon in Seattle, was sent to India to head Amazon’s development centre.

I met Agarwal last June, and he had told me that the move to a small team that was put in place to “think about how we can help developers” was “very tangential”. He was sceptical about how this would help anyone, since it was not Amazon’s core business. “But it taught me the true meaning of being the world’s most customer-centric company,” he said.

In 2004, there were several experiments going on in Amazon’s Seattle headquarters—including the very concept of AWS. And in India, Agarwal and his team were building the most forward-thinking piece of the AWS puzzle: payments.

AWS decided to build an infrastructure platform that any coder could access from a desktop browser. Every application that AWS hosted could avail of facilities such as computation, storage, and databases. This is what startups need, and AWS wanted to give it as a variable cost rather than the traditional way of buying each of these ‘products’ as a capital expenditure.

Payments, which Agarwal was building out of Bengaluru, was the least mission-critical of AWS’s requirements then. “It was probably the most unusual—in scope and ambition—of what we were trying to do with that service,” says Jassy. AWS sought to enable any two parties (even if they are computers) to transact with each other along with all modes of payments. “It was a forward-thinking idea, one whose time was yet to come,” Jassy says, adding that several mechanisms and processes that Amazon uses for product development in the U.S. came from working with this team in Bengaluru.

Agarwal said that his team created the initial set of web services while starting the development centre in India. “The computation team was in South Africa, the storage team was in Seattle, and the payments team was in India. That is the beauty of web services, the further you are, the stronger the application programming interface [API] you build,” he added. His 50-member payments team in 2004 included Gaurav Kushwaha and Sachin Bansal (before they each founded e-commerce companies BlueStone and Flipkart, respectively).

Agarwal evangelised the Amazon approach in India. It was decided that before the code was written, the press release and the FAQ document for the product should be kept ready. The aim was to make sure that the coders had a clear idea about the product they were designing, which would then make it free of glitches. They were to build something that would matter to customers.

Agarwal says this approach flows from Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos. “I realised this person [Bezos] is stubborn on the vision, and flexible when it came to the details. It is easy to be the other way around. We have only invested more. We have only invented more. We have only focussed on customer experience.”

Currently, Amazon employs more than 45,000 people across Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, Delhi-National Capital Region, Mumbai, and Pune. In June, Bezos committed to invest $3 billion (Rs 18,951 crore) in Amazon’s India operations. This comes on the heels of his $2 billion investment in 2014.

The present workforce is proof of how Agarwal’s impact spans beyond the e-commerce company he heads. He brought in an innovation culture from Amazon that has outlived web-based companies such as Hotmail, Yahoo, and Netscape, and outclassed the likes of eBay. Agarwal is even influencing the venture ecosystem here. Amazon has been investing in and growing ventures like BankBazaar, an online marketplace that gives consumers access to customised rates on loans, credit cards, and other personal finance products.

Adhil Shetty, co-founder and CEO of BankBazaar, says he travels to Bengaluru regularly to meet the Amazon team (his company is headquartered in Chennai). “Amit has great people working for him. They have long-term experience, with some even straight from Silicon Valley. The maturity begins with Amit, and flows across the system,” says Shetty. Amazon’s top team in India comprises, among others, Raghava Rao (finance director and chief financial officer), Raj Raghavan (director and human resources leader), and Akhil Saxena (vice president customer fulfilment).

Now that Agarwal has built one of Amazon’s fastest-growing businesses and a team that evokes envy among his peers, he can hardly remain in the shadows anymore. All eyes will be on how he steers Amazon India ahead from here.