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Tag: Anand Chandrasekaran

  • Anand Chandrasekaran joins Celesta Capital as managing partner

    Anand Chandrasekaran joins Celesta Capital as managing partner

    MUMBAI: Anand Chandrasekaran’s  is quite a familiar face to those  in the media and entertainment tech industry. A geek to the core, he has also been recognised as a shrewd observer and investor in the evolution of tech. Recently, it was announced that he joined Celesta Capital in the Silicon Valley  as a managing partner. 
    Celesta was founded and is led by Nicholas Brathwaite, Sriram Viswanathan, and Michael Marks,  and primarily invests in early-stage deep tech, companies with high potential hardware and software technologies that have a clearly identified market application. 

    Anand knows how to pick winners. At one stage, he led Yahooi in its mobile and search division as senior director, a position he held for three years. He led product development at Airtel and created the Wynk music app for Airtel. 

    Soon thereafter,  he joined Snapdeal as chief product officer, a position he let go of within a year. He then went on to work with Facebook (now Meta) as director of platforms partnerships at messenger which he followed up with a sojourn at Five9. 

    He then went on to  go on board General Catlayst as an investor and partner. Along the way he seed invested in several start ups and has been recognised as one of India’s top seed investors for three years consecutively. 
    Most recently, he co-founded Celesta Capital portfolio company Crescendo, helping to incubate and grow the company to over $50M in revenue and a $500M valuation in less than a year.

    “We are fortunate to expand the firm’s team with such an accomplished investor, technologist, and operator. In getting to know Anand through the process of investing in his latest entrepreneurial venture Crescendo, it became clear that he shares Celesta’s passion for advancing important technologies, company creation, and the huge growth potential within the US  – India tech corridor,” said Viswanathan in a note welcoming him to the company on Linkedin.

  • Snapdeal’s top Silicon valley talent Anand Chandrasekaran quits as CPO

    Snapdeal’s top Silicon valley talent Anand Chandrasekaran quits as CPO

    MUMBAI: The eCommerce industry has seen some major tectonic shifts — Snapdeal engineering vp Bhuvan Gupta, Flipkart’s Sharat Singh, Flipkart’s product office Punit Soni, Flipakart’s Mukesh Bansal and Ankit Nagor; and now, most recently, Snapdeal’s Chief Product officer Anand Chandrasekaran.

    Snapdeal co-founder Rohit Bansal confirmed the news with his tweet on Tuesday that read,  “@anandc proud of the super work by you and the product team. Hard to believe that this was just 1 yr. Farewell, keep rocking!”

    Chandrasekaran soon replied back tweeting,  “@rohitkbansal thanks for the support. We did in 1 what would take 3 years anywhere.”

    While Chandrasekaran refrained from making any official comments on his future endeavors, word has it that he is looking to start his own business.

    A  former Yahoo executive, Chandrasekaran joined Snapdeal last June to integrate more services, like Uber, into the company’s flagship app, a model similar to China’s popular WeChat. This high profile Silicon Valley recruit quit the Indian startup within a year, adding to the increasingly long list of top hires from the valley by the Indian Unicorns who are moving on to start their own businesses. As per a leading daily the industry has witnessed close to 17 major movements between  Flipkart, Snapdeal, Ola, Zomato and Paytm to launch  their own startups.

    When asked to comment on it, Snapdeal’s spokesperson further shared, “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.” Snapdeal didn’t confirm any possible appointments to fill Chandrasekaran’s shoes any time soon.

  • Snapdeal’s top Silicon valley talent Anand Chandrasekaran quits as CPO

    Snapdeal’s top Silicon valley talent Anand Chandrasekaran quits as CPO

    MUMBAI: The eCommerce industry has seen some major tectonic shifts — Snapdeal engineering vp Bhuvan Gupta, Flipkart’s Sharat Singh, Flipkart’s product office Punit Soni, Flipakart’s Mukesh Bansal and Ankit Nagor; and now, most recently, Snapdeal’s Chief Product officer Anand Chandrasekaran.

    Snapdeal co-founder Rohit Bansal confirmed the news with his tweet on Tuesday that read,  “@anandc proud of the super work by you and the product team. Hard to believe that this was just 1 yr. Farewell, keep rocking!”

    Chandrasekaran soon replied back tweeting,  “@rohitkbansal thanks for the support. We did in 1 what would take 3 years anywhere.”

    While Chandrasekaran refrained from making any official comments on his future endeavors, word has it that he is looking to start his own business.

    A  former Yahoo executive, Chandrasekaran joined Snapdeal last June to integrate more services, like Uber, into the company’s flagship app, a model similar to China’s popular WeChat. This high profile Silicon Valley recruit quit the Indian startup within a year, adding to the increasingly long list of top hires from the valley by the Indian Unicorns who are moving on to start their own businesses. As per a leading daily the industry has witnessed close to 17 major movements between  Flipkart, Snapdeal, Ola, Zomato and Paytm to launch  their own startups.

    When asked to comment on it, Snapdeal’s spokesperson further shared, “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.” Snapdeal didn’t confirm any possible appointments to fill Chandrasekaran’s shoes any time soon.

  • Snapdeal names Harish Sivaramakrishnan as VP – design

    Snapdeal names Harish Sivaramakrishnan as VP – design

    MUMBAI: Snapdeal has appointed Harish Sivaramakrishnan as vice president-design. In his new role, Sivaramakrishnan will spearhead the design teams across the company’s portfolio of products and build a design studio across the Delhi and Bangalore offices.

     

    This is an expansion of his current role at Freecharge, where he is currently heading the UX, Design and the front end engineering teams. Sivaramakrishnan will now play a key role in product design as Snapdeal turns its focus to building a technology platform with intuitive web and mobile interface.

     

    Prior to Snapdeal, Sivaramakrishnan was with FreeCharge where he joined as head of design & UI engineering in 2013. Previously, he has also worked at Myntra as user experience architect. 

     

    Prior to joining Myntra, he spent a decade in Adobe in Bangalore and San Francisco working on a diverse set of products in engineering, product and design capacities.

     

    Sivaramakrishnan said, “Snapdeal’s growth in the technology space has been unprecedented and it gives me great pleasure to be a part of this young and energetic team. Over the years I have been extremely passionate about building great consumer experiences in the Indian e-commerce space. I was fortunate to have gotten the opportunity to bootstrap the FreeCharge Design team and now look forward to building a uniform design sensibility across Snapdeal’s entire digital commerce ecosystem.”

     

    Snapdeal chief product officer Anand Chandrasekaran added, “Great design is as much form as it is function. At Snapdeal, we strive to deliver the best buyer and seller experiences and are thrilled to make design an integral part of our approach to product development. In India design is yet to get its due recognition. We are extremely excited to have Harish onboard and wish him a great journey ahead with the Snapdeal family. Our consumers and sellers will be the beneficiaries of our endless debates as we endeavor to get to pixel perfection.”

  • Snapdeal appoints Anand Chandrasekaran as chief product officer

    Snapdeal appoints Anand Chandrasekaran as chief product officer

    MUMBAI: Online marketplace Snapdeal has appointed Anand Chandrasekaran as chief product officer.

     

    Chandrasekaran most recently served as chief product officer at Bharti Airtel, where he was responsible for product conceptualization, design and delivery as well as driving strategic technology partnerships and product strategy.

     

    Snapdeal co-founder Rohit Bansal said, “We are very excited to have Anand on-board. He comes with 15 years of rich experience in building world class products for at scale digital businesses. Snapdeal is in a phase of hyper growth and I believe under Anand’s leadership we will set new benchmarks for intuitive and highly engaging products not just within India but globally as well.”

     

    Previously Chandrasekaran was with Yahoo, where he held roles of senior director of search products and member of search leadership as well as senior director for mobile.

     

    Chandrasekaran added, “I am truly excited to be a part of the young and dynamic team at Snapdeal. The company’s vision to solve a real and existing challenge in the country – that of access for consumers and of reach for small and medium businesses is very inspiring. I look forward to working towards building a highly scalable, sustainable, innovative and future ready technology platform that will be seen as an example for others to emulate in the years to come.”

     

    Prior to Yahoo, he worked with Openwave. Earlier, he co-founded Aeroprise Inc, which became the most-deployed solution worldwide for mobile service management, raised $7 million in funding and was later acquired by BMC Software.

  • Crystal Ball gazing: The biggies give their view

    Crystal Ball gazing: The biggies give their view

    MUMBAI: With the digital ecosystem evolving since the last few years, the next three to five years are seen as the years of ‘quantum leap’. These were the views of a panel at the Crystal Ball session on the second day of Mix Radio Music Connects (MRMC).

    The panel comprised of Gaana.com VP and business head Pawan Agarwal, HMV Saregama India head music business Adarsh Gupta, Bharti Airtel chief product officer Anand Chandrasekaran, Sony MAX and Sony MIX senior executive VP and  business head Neeraj Vyas and Samsung South West Asia director and head, media and  cloud services Tarun Malik.

    With a rise in music streaming services, visual content streaming services and music channels and companies competing for content will give more traction to these services felt the experts.

    Commenting on the digital eco system, Gupta said, “It is going to take a quantum leap in the next three years; there has been immense mobile penetration and data digitisation in recent times and many digital services have been launched.”

    “Since most music channels are free to air and the revenue comes only through ads, music channels have 20-25 minutes of advertisement/ trailers per hour. We need to focus on bringing music back to the audience but the music channels are here to stay,” according to Vyas.

     “Music channels have a base of around 400 million people and that is the number covered by TAM. We need a lot of changes like digitization, it is the future.” he emphasized.

    Agarwal added, “There are two big things that are happening right now – availability of content and a lot more awareness of the industry going faster. The number of downloads are increasing and digital is the future.”

    Talking about the music industry, Chandrasekaran added, “This is the best time for the music industry.”

    Malik further explained, “Personalisation is the key and differentiation should go beyond just music. The services must be more centric and personalised in terms of what the users want to consume.”
    “What we need to focus on in the coming future is ‘convergence of devices’. The volume of consumption is increasing and they need to be accessible easily across all users’ devices,” he added.

    Chandrasekharan expressed his opinions on what is the need of the hour saying, “Only 1/5 of the overall smartphone using population has the data capability to use apps. We all need to cater to what users want. User problems need to be solved and there must be transparency. For example, when a user is using a music streaming app, they do not know how much data is going to be consumed. That is why we have introduced Freedom subscription in Wynk, which includes bundled data.”

    The biggest challenge that the music industry faces is piracy, especially in India, where users download illegal music for convenience. Agarwal said, “The entire industry is trying very hard to curb piracy by introducing many services. Apps should introduce subscriptions which allow the users to download music when they have Wi-Fi and later listen, without data usage.”

    The panellists agreed that the mid-term goal is to get at least a hundred million people to stream music, which will help reduce the piracy. With healthy smartphone consumption in the country, they believe, that hundred million is a reasonable number to expect in the next two years.