Flipkart losing key executives as external hires enter the frame
Departures highlight a crucial challenge: retainingkeyemployees even as Flipkart spends massive amounts of money to recruit senior professionals from outside
Bengaluru: India’s largest online marketplace Flipkart Ltd is losing as many as three senior management executives a few months after it brought in senior professionals from Google Inc. and Bharti Airtel Ltd in technology and finance.
Sameer Nigam, senior vice-president of engineering, is leaving the company to start his own venture, and Vaibhav Gupta, senior vice-president of finance, has resigned to go on sabbatical for an unspecified period of time, according to two people familiar with the matter. Chief technology officer (CTO) Amod Malviya has also moved on to an advisory role at the company, the people said.
Flipkart confirmed Malviya’s new role and the exits of Nigam and Gupta.
The impending exits of Nigam and Gupta as well as the departure of Malviya from a day-to-day role come after the departures of Saran Chatterjee, former product head, in June, and Sujeet Kumar, who led WS Retail Pvt. Ltd, a key seller on Flipkart’s online marketplace and its logistics provider, in May.
The departures of all these executives highlight a crucial challenge for Flipkart: retaining key employees even as it spends massive amounts of money to recruit senior professionals from outside ahead of a possible initial public offering (IPO).
This is a familiar problem for any fast growing start-up such as Flipkart that is trying to make the transition to a professionally run, large company. Companies such as Infosys Ltd and Wipro Ltd and even US-based Amazon.com Inc. grappled with this issue when they were younger.
For Flipkart, however, retaining company veterans is a new, unfamiliar challenge. In the past, Flipkart was seen as a company that struggled to keep senior executives it recruited from outside because of its demanding work culture. Over the past year, it has worked on that.
Now though, with the influx of several senior leaders, it faces an uphill task of retaining company veterans who helped build Flipkart into one of India’s most valuable online start-up companies. Flipkart is close to raising a new round of financing at a valuation of $15 billion, Mint reported on 31 March.
The online marketplace hired Punit Soni as product head and Peeyush Ranjan as engineering head over the past two months; both came from Google. They were hired even though the senior tech roles were already occupied by Malviya, Nigam and Chatterjee. In the finance function, Flipkart hired Rajnish Baweja and Sanjay Baweja as finance controller and chief financial officer, respectively, in the second half of last year. This restricted Gupta’s role.
“Even one year ago, Flipkart was a much smaller company, and many people were reporting to Sachin and Binny Bansal (the co-founders of Flipkart). But now, so many new senior people have been hired and suddenly a lot of the older employees are reporting to the external hires. This creates a challenge because some see it as a demotion to not report directly to the Bansals,” one of the two people cited above said.
Bringing in new leaders and losing some established company executives is seen as a necessary, even healthy, process for a start-up, some analysts said.
“Though many of the older Flipkart guys got the company to where it is now, they may not have the skills to take it to the next level or even an IPO. So it’s not entirely a bad thing for Flipkart to lose some of the older executives. It just comes down to whether they can retain people who they really want to keep,” said a headhunter who has worked with Flipkart in the past. He spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Earlier this year, Flipkart formed an advisory board for its commerce platform. It added Sudhir Sitapati, a senior marketing executive at Hindustan Unilever Ltd, to the board and is looking for more executives.
CTO Malviya will join the advisory board of the commerce platform, Mukesh Bansal, head of the company’s commerce platform, said in an email to employees.
“The advisory board has been created to help manage and direct fast-paced growth at Flipkart with deep domain expertise in different areas. In his new role, (Malviya) will continue to guide Flipkart on technology aspects and be available to us for anything that we need help on,” Bansal said in the email, a copy of which has been reviewed by Mint.
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First Published:10 Jul 2015, 01:02 AM IST
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