Online marketplace Flipkart has seen a handful of its top leadership bidding good bye in 2016. But what do you do after you leave one of the country’s most coveted internet companies? Read on to find out.
Anything happening in Flipkart is news in India. The country’s largest online marketplace is closely watched for its sales, valuations, markdowns, hires, layoffs – you name it. When Binny Bansal took over as CEO replacing Sachin Bansal, who became executive chairman at the beginning of 2016, the media was on fire for weeks – decoding the possible repercussions of the move.
And it’s a no-brainer why. Out of all Internet companies in India, only Flipkart has reached such a large scale. A lot of its leadership team come from Silicon Valley and Ivy League universities. Other unicorns have also seen their share of exits– but unless those are mass layoffs, Flipkart still takes the soggy cake, with stories on office politics, poor performance, unmatched interests etc., spreading like wild fire, at least on Twitter.
In 2016, Flipkart saw quite a few of its top brass members leaving the team for good, moving onto different things – in other jobs, in entrepreneurship, or just chilling. (Of course, they have no trouble finding a better job, but some have to face compromises – as Flipkart pay packages are renowned to be the industry’s highest.) Find out what happened, and is happening, to them.
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Mukesh Bansal Mukesh Bansal (exited in February)
The co-founder of Myntra became Head of Commerce at Flipkart after its acquisition in 2014. Having worked with four startups in Silicon Valley earlier, his desire for entrepreneurship surfaced hardly two months after he left Flipkart. Mukesh and ex-colleague Ankit Nagori have announced ‘Curefit’, a health tech startup, to be launched in 2017. Curefit has bought a major stake in Bengaluru-based fitness startup CULT, which Mukesh had invested in. He is also an advisory board member at food delivery startup Swiggy and logistics startup Rivigo. His title in LinkedIn profile is ‘Work In Progress’ – whatever progress he has achieved, we will find out in 2017. - Ankit Nagori (exited in February)
After six years in Flipkart, this engineer from IIT-Guwahati was Chief Business Officer at the time of his exit. As mentioned above, Ankit left to start up in health tech with Mukesh Bansal, and is also one of the directors at photography-focussed online marketplace Picsdream. At Flipkart, where he joined when he was 24, he played a key role in building new categories, including fashion (in 2012) and electronics, both of which went on to become the largest revenue makers for Flipkart. Ankit and Mukesh raised $15 million from Accel Partners, Kalaari Capital and IDG Ventures for Curefit recently. - Punit Soni (exited in April)
Flipkart’s most high profile hire from Silicon Valley, Punit joined as Chief Product Officer in March 2015, leaving Motorola where he was Vice President. The former Google executive is an engineering graduate from NIT-Kurukshetra, and has MBA from Wharton Business School. He was behind Flipkart’s app-only move, which never materialised. His exit came after months of speculation that he was not working with the system. Punit had stated that he is launching a startup along with Anshu Sharma (of Storm Ventures), who has invested in Razor Pay along with him. Another Google hire, Surojit Chatterjee, who came in after Punit, had taken over even before his exit.
Punit Soni
- Manish Maheshwari (exited in April)
After 13 months as Head of Seller Business, Manish left Flipkart to become the CEO of Web18, which controls FirstPost, BookMyShow, MoneyControl, and Burrp among others. An MBA graduate from the prestigious Wharton Business School, Manish is also an investor with Ivy League Alumni Angel Network. He had also co-founded txtWeb,…