Flipkart, the homegrown e-commerce platform, is aggressively competing with Amazon India for the pole position in the market. While it is arguable that currently who is leading the race but Flipkart has emerged as a leader in another area. Flipkart has seen the highest number of senior level exits this year.
Not only that. The company also leads in most executives leaving the company in shortest tenure. The senior level exits from the company include CFO Sanjay Baweja, CTO Peeyush Ranjan, along with Mukesh Bansal, Lalit Sarna, Sunil Gopinath, Anand KV, Prakash Tilwani, Punit Soni and Satyam Bansal.
While Flipkart has been able to rope-in high-profile and talented people, the company failed miserably in retaining them. According to the data compiled by startup tracker Xeler8, the exits were about not being able to perform to potential and internal headwinds.
The average tenure of senior executives at Flipkart was just 11.5 months. In comparison, average tenure at Snapdeal is 38 months, while at ShopClues, it is 27.5 months. At Ola, the average executive tenure is 23 months, while the number is 25.5 at Mu Sigma. The data has been collated by Xeler8 based on hires and exits over the past five years.
As per Rahul Khanna, in countries like US, professionals from established companies took a pay cut to join startups, while in India things are different. He said to ToI:
When folks from established corporates moved to startups in the last two years in India, they were paid a premium. Businesses are still founder-centric here and finding someone who comes from a structured environment to culturally fit into a high growth startup is a challenge. As investors, we definitely look at incentive alignment and depth of the management team and its ability to scale.
Compared to Flipkart, other unicorn startups in India such as Zomato, InMobi and Quikr are far better than Flipkart when it comes to retaining senior level executives. Data for Paytm is not available as of yet.
Apart from senior executives leaving the company, Flipkart also has few other things to worry about, such as not being able to raising new funding when its rival Amazon’s warchest is increasing significantly; valuation markdown from its investors; among others. Flipkart’s valuation has been decreased from $15.2 billion to around $5.56 billion this year after series of valuation markdowns. If the markdown continues, Flipkart could also lose its unicorn status.
