Ex-entrepreneurs, the ready-to-hire assets for start-ups

Start-ups are increasingly tapping talent among founders and leadership teams of other start-ups.

In May, e-commerce firm Shopclues hired Animesh Kumar, a founding member of Fashionara, to scale up and add categories. On Monday,

Alok Goel, former chief executive officer (CEO) of Freecharge that was sold to Snapdeal in April, joined private equity firm SAIF Partner as its managing director. Goel got Mohit Mittal, a co-founder of Preburn, when they acquired the ad network, to join Freecharge to complement the existing business of the company.

“Anyone who is an entrepreneur and (has) had an exit would be looking at a stable opportunity. A start-up with a similar work culture provides the individual work in the same domain,” said Amit Ranjan, a lead product architect at the information technology department’s national e-governance division.

Ranjan is founder of Slideshare, a social network where people share presentations, which he sold to professional social network LinkedIn.

Start-ups look at professionals with specific skills, such as marketing, technology, people process, and scaling up. Mostly they find a match in people who have been entrepreneurs or have worked in other start-ups.

“Start-ups need a balanced team of specialists. When team members are former entrepreneurs, it improves the odds. Former entrepreneurs help establish a stronger start-up culture. They also tend to move faster and with fewer resources,” said Sharad Sharma, co-founder of start-up think tank iSPIRT.

According to Radhika Aggarwal, co-founder and chief marketing officer of Shopclues, the sense of ownership comes effortlessly to them. “This is because their stint with entrepreneurship has made sure they have got their hands dirty in almost everything, from being the janitor to chief financial officer or CEO or in marketing. They think out of the box.”

Nitish Bhushan, country manager at Tripda.in, said, “One, the importance of quick execution — executing decisions faster than waiting to achieve perfection is imperative for a start-up. Second, target meeting.”

An IIT Delhi post-graduate in chemical engineering, Bhushan co-founded Glitstreet.com, an online fashion discovery platform, after working for Bain & Company for three years. Though Bhushan eventually moved out of Glitstreet, it provided him hands-on experience of how a firm is operated.

Apoorv Jain, vice-president, business development, at Urbanclap, who terms his stint in the company a roller-coaster ride, said his takeaways included “being receptive of the negative points” as well as a lot of managerial lessons. “UrbanClap taught me that it is actually possible to solve the real pain points,” said Jain.

Jain, an IIT Delhi graduate of 2011, started his own venture, Witcraft Marketing, while still in college.

He shut the company and worked with Rocket Internet Ventures, OfficeYes and Lazada.com before joining UrbanClap in 2015.

While a role in a start-up helps these individuals grow faster in their careers, they treat these companies as their own firms. “An entrepreneur is an entrepreneur. Whatever department you are put in, that is your baby,” Jain added.