By Pankaj Mishra & Jayadevan PK, ET Bureau | 24 Jun, 2015 | NEW DELHI | BENGALURU
Paytm has made three high-profile appointments to its board – Ruchi Sanghvi, the first woman engineer at Facebook, WhatsApp global business head Neeraj Arora and InMobi founder Naveen Tewari – as the mobile commerce company adds strategic heft while it looks to compete with the big boys of online retail in India.
“We are a young company and need help in scaling Paytm to become India’s most dominant mobile Internet company,” said Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder and CEO of Paytm, which was started in 2010 and is backed by Alibaba.
“Ruchi brings a great tech and product background, Neeraj is one of the best-connected Silicon Valley Indians and Naveen knows how to build a world-class organisation from India.” In addition to Sharma, the Paytm board included Ravi Adusumalli and Vivek Mathur of Saif Partners .
Also on the Paytm board are Jai Das of Sapphire Ventures, Kunal Bajaj of Analysys Mason and venture investor Michael Levinthal.
Noida-based Paytm, which in February raised $575 million (Rs 3,600 crore) from Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba’s affiliate Ant Financial Services Group at an estimated valuation of over $1.5 billion, is looking to go headto-head with Flipkart, Snapdeal and Amazon – the top three players in the Indian online retail market.
Sharma is aiming to sell goods worth $1.5 billion this calendar year. In comparison, Flipkart expects its gross merchandise value, a proxy for sales, to top $12 billion in the year to March 2016.
“We look to bring global talent and best practices for scaling to half-a-billion Indians on the Paytm platform. I can see our very strong independent board helping us achieve that,” said Sharma, who has also been on the lookout for a chief technology officer.
After raising billions of dollars and poaching top talent from companies such as Google and Facebook, India’s fast-growing ecommerce companies are now beefing up their boards for technology strategy and execution.
NEED TO UPGRADE BOARD
Sanghvi’s husband Aditya Agarwal, who is a vice-president at Dropbox, has been an independent director at Flipkart since November 2014. Last week, the 7-year-old firm roped in senior Unilever executive Sudhir Sitapati to an advisory board for commerce business. Delhi-based Snapdeal has also been bulking up its board. Last year, it appointed Bharti Airtel veteran Akhil Gupta as an independent director.
“As companies grow, we start feeling the need to upgrade the board for experience. For instance, someone who has run a large company, set up teams in different geographies or handled 100 million concurrent users already can bring a lot of value to the company,” said Phanindra Sama, the cofounder of ticketing site redBus, which was sold to the Ibibo group.
Top ecommerce companies including Flipkart, Amazon, Snapdeal and Paytm are locked in a fierce battle for talent as well as market share in the country. The Indian Internet market is expected to grow to $137 billion by 2020, from $11 billion in 2013, according to Morgan Stanley.
“It’s a classic case of figuring out the broader strategy at Paytm over the next 4-5 years and finding out what it takes for Paytm, which is already the largest payments platform, to continue to win,” said Tewari of Bengaluru-based mobile ad network InMobi. Sanghvi and Arora, who are based in the US, did not immediately reply to emails seeking comment.
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