While a majority of the departing executives are going back into the ecosystem and starting a new business, a small portion of them have chosen to simply change their sectors. The remaining are going back to safety.
“From a senior vice president (SVP) to a CEO it has not been very easy…but not every time you will be offered everything on a platter. Flipkart was a great brand and I had that comfort but I’m ready to take the risk…,” said Anil Goteti, founder of Scapia, a fintech company started in January 2022.
Goteti isn’t the only one, a slew of senior executives are leaving top startups to start their own businesses and venture capitalists love it. What gives? Their experience in cutting teeth across divisions, the pedigree that comes from working at large brands, scaling operations from 0-1 and attracting talent makes several investors want them.
Over the past several months, Moneycontrol has reported that Karthik Gurumurthy and Dale Vaz, both from Swiggy, Utkrishta Kumar from Meesho and several others are venturing out on their own. For them, raising capital has not been difficult – Vaz has already brought in Accel as an investor while Gurumurthy is in the advanced stages of raising money from Matrix and others, as reported earlier.
Even Sharechat co-founders Farid Ahsan and Bhanu Singh parted ways with their company and started their own business. Earlier this month, the duo raised $3 million in seed funding from India Quotient, Elevation Capital and others for their robotics startup General Autonomy.
“It is much easier for a top executive from a large startup to raise VC money for their own venture. For one, they know how to build a business from scratch because they have done it for someone else previously. Also remember, it’s easy for them to attract the right talent because they have this halo effect around them,” Vinod Murali, Managing Partner, Alteria Capital, a venture debt provider, said.