E-Paper
Chetan Kalyan: A techie's journey through India's E-commerce revolution
Chetan realized that social commerce could bridge the gap between physical stores and pure e-commerce, and joined Meesho as Vice President of Engineering.
How do you bring 17% of the world’s population from a hyperlocal village economy into a globalized world? How does one build enough trust to do business when the seller is sitting 1000 km away? These are the problems that Chetan Kalyan finds fascinating, and what he has been working on for the last decade.
Chetan earned a master’s degree in artificial intelligence from Stanford University and worked in the US for 3 years before joining Flipkart in 2013. At the time, e-commerce in India was a fledgling business and had less than 50 million consumers. However, the timing was just right and India was going online in a big way through mobile channels. In a period of 10 months, the company grew from about 100K users to more than 2.5M. This put a lot of pressure on Flipkart’s tech systems. As a lead engineer on Flipkart’s mobile platform, Chetan was able to build software that could handle the extra load without complete system failure. The framework that he and his team built, known as widget composer, is still used to power all apps on Flipkart today, and forms the core of Flipkart’s tech infrastructure. Today, these systems serve over 100 million users with 99% uptime, a tool that very few companies in the world have at their disposal.
By 2016, e-commerce in India was in a dominant position, and the next big problem to solve was that of trust. How does a person know if the product listed on the website is good, bad, or, worst of all, fake? Chetan realized that product reviews from users were a great source of data for this. He led the user reviews team at Flipkart to get 10 times more reviews than before into the system, and also used novel AI techniques to moderate and rank them on the app. The work done here led to publications in ACM RecSys 2017 and other leading conferences in the world.
After 4 years in Flipkart, Chetan took a bold leap into entrepreneurship and started Klassifai to address the need for AI and data science expertise in India’s Silicon Valley. At Klassifai, Chetan and his team worked with agri-tech and fin-tech startups, building AI models that could predict demand for farmers, predict churn in consumer companies and prevent fraud in banks. Klassifai was acquired by Circles.Life, a singaporean telecom company and Chetan took on the role of director of engineering to build up their data teams.
By early 2020, a new field of e-commerce had come to the fore - social commerce. Chetan realized that social commerce could bridge the gap between physical stores and pure e-commerce, and joined Meesho as Vice President of Engineering. While pure e-commerce works great for branded products and some categories like electronics, the largest volumes are in fashion, apparel and household goods. This space has great quality at great prices, but asking someone to type in a specific search query to get to the product is impossible in a country like India. That’s where the entrepreneurs of Meesho come into play. They can discover good products on the platform, share them within their communities through Whatsapp or Facebook, and place orders on behalf of the customers. The best part is that these entrepreneurs can also earn money for themselves in this process through pricing arbitrage. Meesho has seen phenomenal growth since its inception in 2017, and Chetan leads a team of engineers here to build systems for the next 100 million users to come online. The big change from the early 2010s is that this new generation is digitally fluent but would like to consume content in non-textual ways. Gone are the days of ebay-like product pages and 10-click payment funnels. Everything needs to be done fast, and in a way where language is not a barrier for commerce. These and other challenges are what keep Chetan excited about the future.
