Flipkart sees Silicon Valley talent quit
Flipkart, the country’s largest e-commerce marketplace, continues to shed top talent as it undertakes a massive rejig of its business to focus on profitability.
Two more senior executives, Lalit Sarna and Sunil Gopinath, quit the company last week. Sarna headed the transactions and payments business; Gopinath was a senior director of product and user experience design. Both were prized hires from Silicon Valley, joining during Flipkart's high-growth phase a little over a year ago. The Economic Times has first reported the departure of both. Flipkart confirmed these to Business Standard, while not divulging further details.
Flipkart, which saw a toplevel management rejig at the start of this year, has shed plenty of top talent. Punit Soni, star hire from Google, quit in April after the company decided to roll back its mobile-only plan which he was spearheading. Mukesh Bansal, a key aide of founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal (not related), quit with chief business officer Ankit Nagori to start a health technology firm.
Joining after his start-up, Myntra, was acquired by Flipkart, Mukesh Bansal held a key position as head of the commerce platform.
To some extent, the exits could be due to a shift away from being mobile-only. Flipkart is now focused on serving customers on both web and mobile, after its experiment with Myntra failed. The company also shut products such as image search.
The series of exits are in contrast to the joining of Kalyan Krishnamurthy, a key hand at Tiger Global, who is among the biggest investors in Flipkart. Having served a previous stint at Flipkart as its chief financial officer, he has been deputed to streamline its several businesses, along with Chief Executive Binny Bansal.
Krishnamurthy and Binny Bansal, one a numbers person and the other a fanatic for efficiency, are at the helm when global rival Amazon is fast closing the gap between itself and Flipkart. Armed with funds totalling $5 billion since 2014, the India arm of Amazon aims to become the country's leading e-commerce player before China’s Alibaba makes a big entry.
Smaller Indian rival Snapdeal says the country’s e-commerce market will not see a winner-take-all player, unlike what Amazon is in America. Instead, it would be more like Indian telecom, where there are a highly competitive trio at the top.
“The telecom sector in India is also very large and has an acute amount of competition, more than in ecommerce. About 20 years after telecom came into prominence, there are three flourishing companies in that space — one very large foreign player and two successful Indian ones. I do not see why the same will not happen in our space,” said Kunal Bahl, co-founder and chief executive officer of Snapdeal.