Indian Startups Trying To Get Top Business And IT Leaders To Become Board Members

August 7, 2015

indian parlamentThere has been an explosive growth of start-up companies in India during the last few years and some of them have grown at an exponential pace. Companies like Paytm, Ola and Flipkart have raised enormous sums of money and are looking to expand their operations extensively in the coming years. These start-up companies are now looking to attract some of the top business and information technology leaders in the world, as they would like them to be a part of their board of directors.

Some of these global leaders include the likes of Sundar Pichai, who is the senior vice president at Google, Indra Nooyi who is the chief executive at PepsiCo and Gokul Rajaram who is the head of engineering at Square. During the last few months Paytm has managed to convince three top leaders to become a part of its board. The company brought on whatsapp global business head Neeraj Arora, the first female engineer at Facebook Ruchi Sanghvi and InMobi founder Naveen Tewari. Ola has brought on Arun Sarin in the capacity of an independent director. Sarin was the former chief executive at Vodafone.

A founder in one such startup made a statement on the condition of being anonymous. He said “It’s quite lonely at the top—investors are bringing more money with subtle expectations about big exits, and there aren’t many in the management who can be trusted for balanced advise. These names have been through cycles of growth pangs and can even help us balance investor pressures with day-to-day management.”