Of ecommerce firms and top-level appointments

Think start-ups and you visualise young enthusiastic 20-somethings with innovative ideas looking to make big in the cutthroat world of corporate. All they need is investors. But as the start-up strikes gold and scales up, it needs a batch of experienced individuals to balance the vibrancy of the younger lot.

Like in the case of the latest additions in the respective core teams of then-start-ups-now-leaders of ecommerce, namely Flipkart, Snapdeal, and Paytm. In the past few months or so, many experts from a gamut of fields have taken control of top positions in these major online marketplaces with an intention to sharpen the organisational structure and improve efficiency.

HR Head of Paytm, Amit Sinha rightly pointed out, “This is a new world and we won’t always find people with similar experiences. Instead, we have to find people who have or can build the right skill sets. The people we’re trying to bring on board are the smartest ones around and they won’t take much time to learn.”

Let’s take a quick look at these top level appointments.

Flipkart

• Appointed Saikiran Krishnamurthy as Chief Operating Officer- Commerce Platform. Krishnamurthy was Director of McKinsey, a global consulting firm.

• Hari Vasudev as Senior VP Engineering, IT & Analytics for Flipkart’s Supply Chain division. He is a former VP & Centre Head of Yahoo!

• For enhancing their customer experience, Flipkart roped in Anand KV as the Senior VP- Customer Experience for its commerce division. His CV boasts of 18 years of experience in the satellite broadcasting and DTH industry spread across India, Middle East and Hong Kong.

• The company also appointed Manish Maheshwari as VP & Head of Seller Ecosystem. He is the co-founder txtWeb, a global open platform for text-based applications.

• Flipkart created a new role ‘Entrepreneur in Residence’ and hired Ravi Garikipati for the same, who is known as an IT industry veteran.

Snapdeal

• Hired Amit Choudhary as senior VP- Corporate Finance. Choudhary worked in Procter & Gamble, one of the largest consumer products companies in India, prior to joining the ecommerce firm.

• Another honcho from consumer goods industry, Vivek Patankar, a former Unilever executive, joined as Snapdeal’s CFO.

• GlaxoSmithKline’s Idi Srinivas Murthy joined the team as Senior VP-Marketing

• High profile Anand Chandrasekaran who was associated with Bharti Airtel was appointed as the marketplace’s Chief Product Officer.

• Max India Limited’s Dharmendra Panwar joined Snapdeal as Vice-President – Internal Controls and Risk Assurance.

Paytm

• ‎Gold Medalist from IIM Ahmedabad, Nehul Malhotra will now help Paytm to bring onboard merchants and improve their mobile commerce platform.

• Neeraj Arora who earlier worked with Whatsapp and helped in global expansion, has joined Paytm’s

• Former Facebook engineer, Ruchi Sanghvi who took care of News Feed and Facebook Connect has joined the marketplace too.

• Founder of InMobi, Naveen Tiwari has been hired also.

Who were let go

While many big names joined the ecommerce industry, few left their positions too. Real estate search portal, Housing.com’s CEO Rahul Yadav was fired from his position by company investors. Fabfurnish founders, Vikram Chopra and Mehul Agrawal stepped down too from their respective positions. Ashish Garg and Ankita Dabas, Senior Directors of the online furniture portal will now replace co-founders.

These changes are obviously to better the online selling scenario, both for customer and seller. Whether it’ll tip more in favour of customer or seller will be interesting to see. Do share if there’s a change in your experience.