Taru comes with deep experience in product, growth strategy, business development, financial modelling and planning. Before this second stint at Paytm, Deepak was working at Times Internet. He also founded Vserv in 2010, and in 2015 he founded VMAX. He has also worked in management roles at various semiconductor startups and also in the space of product development. Founded in April 2000 by Deep Kalra, MakeMyTrip has been one of earliest Internet travel-based companies in the country. Products like route planner, travel advisor, recommendations for hotels, booking ease are some of the key innovations the team is currently making on the platform. The company is setting up a team of over 200 engineers, product managers and designers in the Bengaluru centre, which will have end-to-end ownership of product development and innovation. In terms of disruptive products in transportation, Anshuman adds that they are looking for partnerships, and developing other new products to help transform the way Indians travel. We want to change that and focus on desktop as a separate interface and mobile as a separate one. The focus isn't just on hotel bookings, though.
There has been a surge at building and usage of apps. Andreessen Horowitz has predicted that
global smartphone adoption will attain a global compound annual
growth rate of 10.41 percent in the next seven years. By 2020, 80
percent of the adults on earth will own a smartphone.
Our very own country has been leading the way in this smartphone
revolution, and we expect the 2016 edition of MobileSparks to be
bigger and better. The key speakers this year are:
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Rajiv Bansal – Joint Secretary,
Department of Electronics and Information Technology
Rajiv Bansal, (IAS 1998, Nagaland), has served as Secretary at
Central Electrical Regulatory Commission since April, 2013. He has
had an illustrious and long career, holding various key positions
like that of Director of HMT, Air India Limited, HMT Machine Tools
Limited. Bansal has also served as part-time Official Director of
Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd and has been the non-executive
director of Andrew Yule & Company. He also has been Joint Secretary
of Ministry of Heavy Industries and Public Enterprises at
Department of Heavy Industry.
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Deep Kalra – Chairman & Group CEO,
Make My Trip
Deep Kalra went to St. Stephens College, Delhi in 1987 to pursue
Bachelors in Economics, from where he went onto pursuing an MBA
degree at IIM-A.
He worked with ABN AMRO Bank and, as most of us are, was really
excited about his first job. But after three years, a sense of
incompleteness set in and he decided banking was not something he
wanted to do for the rest of his life. Deep quit ABN AMRO and took
a break for about a year to figure out what to do next.
While on his break, Deep got a number of well-paying marketing
jobs but he decided to pick the craziest of all.
“I wanted to do something touch-feel, on-the-ground kind of a
thing and hence I took up the job of bringing AMF Bowling Inc., to
India,” said Deep.
After AMF, Deep could have started up something else but he felt
he needed some more corporate experience before diving into it. The
year was 1999 and looking for opening up new avenues, the Internet
was the obvious answer. And after a little over a year with GE,
Deep felt he was ready to take the plunge. MakeMyTrip was born in
the year 2000. And the rest, as they say, is history.
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Kunal Shah – Founder & Chairman,
FreeCharge
Kunal Shah,
founder and Chairman of FreeCharge, is an unlikely
entrepreneur, if you go by usual parameters. He doesn’t come from
the regular MBA or engineering background. He in fact is a BA in
Philosophy from Wilson College, Mumbai, and dropped out of MBA from
Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies. He founded
FreeCharge in 2010, and in 2015, the company was acquired by
Snapdeal for a whooping $400 million, lauded as one of the highest
Internet acquisitions in India.
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Ritesh Agarwal – Founder & CEO, OYO
Rooms
The story of OYO Rooms and
its 23-year-old founder and CEO Ritesh Agarwal, is India’s very
own poster boy of a college dropout who went ahead to start a
successful company. Born in Odisha, Ritesh was a part of the Thiel
Fellowship for under 20 entrepreneurs. Started as Oravel in 2012,
OYO Rooms today is present across over 100 Indian cities and has
even expanded its presence in Southeast Asia.
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Mohit Bhatnagar – Managing Director,
Sequoia Capital
Presently, the Managing Director at Sequoia Capital India,
Mohit
Bhatnagar is on the board of Prizm Payments, Comviva, Micromax
Mobile, IMImobile, Prizm Payments, Ujjivan Microfinance, Comviva,
One Assist, Citrus Payments, Knowlarity, Near, Shuttl, Octro,
Zomato, Daily Hunt, Clever Tap and Nearbuy.
Mohit has also co-founded a wireless startup in the US – Bright
pod, and has served as Senior VP at Bharti Airtel.
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Taru Kapoor- India Head,
Tinder
Before becoming the head of Tinder India,
Taru was an investment analyst with Sequoia India. A graduate
from Harvard and IIT, Delhi, Taru was also a strategy consultant
with The Boston Consulting Group. Taru comes with deep experience
in product, growth strategy, business development, financial
modelling and planning.
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Jitendra Gupta- Founder, Citrus
Pay
The founder and MD of Citrus
Pay, Jitendra Gupta has over 12 years of experience in the
financial and banking service industry and is believed to be an
expert in the payments industry. Prior to founding Citrus,
Jitendra, was working at ICICI Bank and was part of the founding
team of the investment banking and retail cross-sell division.
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Deepak Abbot – SVP, Products Growth,
Paytm
Deepak Abbot has also served as the head of product marketing at
Paytm. He comes with over 17 years of experience in mobile
marketing, data analysis and growth hacking. Before this second
stint at Paytm, Deepak was working at Times Internet. He has also
worked with organisations like Reliance Entertainment Digital as
Chief Product Officer, Product Executive at CyberMedia, UX
consultant at Satyam Computers and General Product Manager at
Zapak.
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Varsha Tagare – Senior Director,
Qualcomm Ventures
A senior director at Qualcomm Ventures, Varsha Tagare was at
Intel Capital investing in both Indian and US companies. Her
current investments include Birds Eye Systems, Housing.com, Kirusa,
AppsDaily and Apalya. She has also invested in companies like
Pollex, Mobile365, JAMDAT, MCX and Canesta.
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Sanjay Sethi – CEO and co-founder,
Shop Clues
The founder and CEO of ShopClues, Sanjay Sethi is an IIT-BHU and
IIT-Delhi alumnus. He has worked at companies like Tradebeam and
eBay. Sanjay founded ShopClues along with Radhika Aggarwal and
Sandeep Aggarwal in November 2011.
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Dippak Khurana – co-founder & CEO,
VMAX
The co-founder and CEO of Vmax, Dippak for the past 18 years has
been focussed on new media and business models across mobile and
Internet technologies. He has over the years built cross-functional
understanding across products, tech and business models. He also
founded Vserv in 2010, and in 2015 he founded VMAX.
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Jon von Tetzchner – co-founder and
CEO, Vivaldi
A programmer and businessman, Jon Von Tetzchner, founded Vivaldi
Technologies and also launched Vivaldi.net,…
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