Flipkart, Snapdeal and Ola drive up demand for ‘experienced’ executives in startups

Experience counts. Indian start ups have realized the benefits of recruiting a seasoned executive in the team. The first three Indian startups with a valuation of $ 1 billion - Flipkart, Snapdeal and Ola having become giants in terms of revenue are relying largely on seasoned executives in key roles, as per a news report by The Economic Times.

Having brought Krishnendu Chaudhury and Ravi Garikipati on board from the Silicon Valley, Flipkart is aiming high in terms of employee’s satisfaction and ambition.

Meanwhile, Peeyush Ranjan, Flipkart's new head of engineering, has started a programme called F24 to fix any problem that engineers face within 24 hours, be it malfunctioning laptops, access to libraries or whatever. "As the organisation gets bigger it has an inherent challenge to stay nimble, and not get bogged down," Ranjan who previously led the engineering group for Google's Android One project told ET.

Aneesh Passi, cofounder of Basil Advisors, which hires for startups, said, "These people (seasoned executives) know massive distribution set ups. They have seen huge scale, managed huge turnovers... that's why companies want to hire them."

Passi, added that the unicorn startups, which have joined $1 billion club, "have the funding now, so they have pressed the accelerator". Ola Cabs too is betting on experienced hands as it looks to stay ahead of rival Uber that has started accepting cash payments in certain cities and is making deeper forays into tier two cities, says the news report by the financial daily.

To that end, Ola is relying on its head of new initiatives, Sundeep Sahni, to replicate his success in making Lazada the number one ecommerce portal in Indonesia in his previous stint. "Going deeper in existing markets and creating newer and wider use cases is going to be critical," said Sahni, who joined Ola in mid-July.

"On the functional side, Ola has got its rough edges. Since we are in the business of on demand, if you can remove a fraction of the second, it makes a big difference," Singh, who joined the firm after his five-year-stint at travel portal Cleartrip.com told ET.
Snapdeal has hired Jeyandran Venugopal, a former Yahoo India executive, to prepare its future technology roadmap and got on board experienced executives to head its strategy and product divisions.

"In ecommerce, only small strides have been made. There is a lot that they can learn from other industries in terms of customer service," Jayant Sood of Snapdeal told the financial daily. "True focus is now coming into digital commerce. My mandate is to transform customer experience and aim to be the best in customer service across industries."