Sachin Kapur calls time on his Coupang decade, reflects on a decade of scale

LONDON: Most farewell posts on professional networks read like victory laps. Sachin Kapur’s reads more like an audit. After almost ten years, he has decided to hang up his boots at Coupang, and rather than simply listing wins, he has used the moment to work out what the decade actually taught him, a far rarer thing to see in a sign-off note.

Kapur arrived in Korea in 2017 expecting to join a company. He ended up, in his words, joining an institution. What followed was a decade of new businesses, new countries and, eventually, Farfetch, alongside what he calls incredible wins, hard problems and more lessons than he could probably write down. It is the kind of understatement that only makes sense once you read what he chose to distil from all of it.

The first lesson is refreshingly blunt for a marketer: move fast, ruthlessly prioritise, simplify, then simplify again. Kapur pushes back hard on the assumption that scale comes from doing more, arguing instead that it comes from the discipline to focus on what matters and the courage to let everything else go. Somewhere along the way, he notes, those principles stopped being borrowed wisdom and became his own, a distinction that matters more than it might first appear.

The second takeaway is more personal, and arguably the more interesting one. For years, Kapur writes, he thought of himself as a marketer. Looking back, he now sees marketing as simply the craft. What he actually enjoyed all along was building: taking on messy problems, creating clarity where there was none, bringing good people together and watching something grow. It is a neat reframing of an entire career, and one that reads less like a correction and more like a long-overdue recognition of an instinct he had all along.

Then comes the line that ties the whole post together: titles fade, people don’t. Kapur credits leaders who trusted him before he thought he was ready, and teams that kept pushing him to raise his own game, crediting everything built along the way to that collective effort rather than to himself alone.

And running quietly beneath all of it is Korea itself. What began as a career move became, in his telling, a second home, with friendships and memories his family will carry for the rest of their lives. It is a warm note to end a professional chapter on, and it gives the whole post a weight that pure career reflection rarely manages.

Kapur signs off without revealing what comes next, saying only that it is for another post. Given the clarity with which he has just closed this one, whatever he builds next is worth watching for.