At a time when Indian startups are seeing several major senior-level exits and shakeouts, it’s
Snapdeal co-founder Rohit Bansal announced the news of Chandrasekaran’s exit on Twitter earlier on Tuesday.
The company’s official statement reads, “Anand has done some stellar work on the product side at Snapdeal. His insights and attention to detail have helped us traverse quickly towards launching and improving products at Snapdeal. We wish Anand the very best for his entrepreneurial journey ahead.”
A Stanford alumni, Anand did his B.S. in Communications Engg. from PSG College of Technology and was awarded the title of Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.
Chandrasekaran was the Chief Product Officer at Airtel before he joined Snapdeal in June 2015. Before that, Anand was with Yahoo, where he held roles of Sr. Director for Mobile. Prior to Yahoo, Anand was Director of Product at Openwave.
On the entrepreneurial side, he co-founded Aeroprise Inc. Under Anand’s leadership, Aeroprise became the most-deployed solution worldwide for mobile service management, raised $7M in funding and was acquired by BMC Software. Anand maintained his entrepreneurial streak as an angel investor via his investment in many Indian startups.
Anand’s exit comes at a time when India’s three biggest e-commerce players – Amazon India, Flipkart and Snapdeal are struggling for supremacy in Indian retail, a market estimated to be worth $38 billion this year. The country’s FDI policy change has restricted the initial frenzied deep discounting by e-tailers to grow market share.
As things stand now, Snapdeal’s market share (in terms of volume of shipments) has slipped from 19% to 14% percent this year, while segment-leader Flipkart’s slipped from 43% in March 2015 to 37% in March 2016. The latter has also seen consecutive valuation markdowns by its investors Morgan Stanley, Fidelity Rutland Square Trust II and Valic Co. Only Amazon’s market share jumped to over 21% from 14%. There have also been news reports of Flipkart and Snapdeal facing trouble raising their next rounds of funding at their current valuation - $11 billion and $6.5 billion respectively. Amazon has infused Rs 6,700 crores into its India unit since January 2015.
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