Movers And Shakers Of The Week [26 December – 31 December]

In one of the last surprise movers of 2016, Mohit Goel, founder of Ringing Bells who promised a smartphone at the unbeatable price of INR 251 has quit the company. The one he floated to deliver on said promise. Mohit resigned from the position of MD, Ringing Bells, has started yet another venture – MDM Electronics.

His wife Dhaarna a Director at Ringing Bells, has also reportedly left the firm. According to an official statement, Mohit’s brother Anmol is now in charge of Ringing Bells and stated that he would take care of its liabilities.

The release did not give a clear indication of the way forward, leaving dealers who have taken an advance to distribute the phone, named Freedom 251, anxious. Mohit and Dhaarna have given no explanation for leaving arbitrarily.

Sundeep Sahni Quits As Ola’s VP Of New Initiatives

Cab hailing service Ola’s VP of New Initiatives Sundeep Sahni has reportedly resigned from his position. Sundeep had joined the core leadership team of Ola in 2015, and has departed after spending close to one and a half years with the company. In his position as VP, Sundeep was in charge of bus service Ola Shuttle, Ola Auto, Ola e-rikshaw and Ola Kaali-Peeli involving Mumbai’s ubiquitous black and yellow service taxis.

In his previous tenure, Sundeep was the former MD and co-founder of Rocket Internet-incubated ecommerce portal Lazada Indonesia. Before Lazada, he had worked with Egyptian PE firm Watheeqa Capital. He is now rumoured to be planning to start his own firm.

NowFloats Appoints Senior Leadership 

NowFloats, a location-based disruptive mobile technology-backed; online and offline discovery platform which helps businesses get discovered, today announced the appointment of Rajeev Goyal as the company’s Vice President
of Growth & Strategic Projects. Rajeev will assume the responsibility of growing the discovery platform’s business through the use of empirical and scalable methodology. He will be also be leading the company’s Digital Desh drive.

He brings with him over 17 years of experience in various fields. He is adept at running large teams and deliver on key organisational goals such as revenue, scale and operational efficiency. During his 7 year stint with Vodafone, he led the company’s VAS vertical (Including Internet (3G/2G business).

Prior to joining NowFloats, Rajeev was the Group Vice President for operations, strategy and go-to-market forAskMee. In this leadership role, he was primarily responsible for heading operations across business lines, incentive management across teams across business lines, managing go-to-market for all new launches and rollouts, providing strategic direction to the organisation in terms of geographical expansion, consolidation, rollouts, back-end efficiencies, customer Engagement and sales force management.

The company has also appointed Mukesh Lohar as the Business Head for India and Asia Emerging Markets; where he would be chiefly responsible for creating and managing business streams for NowFloats.

Mukesh comes with 15 years of rich experience in setting up SMB and SaaS businesses, pre-sales, and strategy working with multiple companies such as Knowlarity Cloud Telephony, Tata Communications Ltd. and Bharti Airtel Ltd and has several awards to his name, including the much coveted ProClub and Blue Ribbon award. He is an alum of IILM and IIM, Lucknow GMPE dropout.

CoinTribe On-boards Former Oxigen Wallet CTO Manish Gulati

CoinTribe, an online lending marketplace, has appointed Manish Gulati as its Chief Technology Officer. An NSIT graduate with over 18 years of industry experience, Manish has served several reputed tech-driven MNCs and startups including Yahoo, HCL, InfoEdge and Qwikcilver. In his last assignment, he was CTO at Oxigen online services where he built the engineering team from scratch and scaled it up to 100+ engineers. He was instrumental in launching widely successful Oxigen wallet and its merchant acceptance solution.

In his new role, Manish will be responsible for the development of CoinTribe’s tech strategy for its SME lending marketplace, for creating the next generation of products and services including the evolution of its Platform as a Service (PaaS) and delivery of its digital consumer experience.

Prior to Oxigen, Manish was Head of engineering at Qwikcilver. He has also worked as VP and Head of products & technology at Info Edge Ltd. and conceptualized Shiksha.com, an online classifieds education marketplace. During his stint at Yahoo in Sunnyvale and Bangalore, Manish delivered several features in the advertising, recruitment and mail products. He played a key role in driving search and big data projects.

Manish has also had a successful stint as an entrepreneur. He ran an online education platform – Prism Education for five years.  The platform provided video-based tutorials for competitive entrance exams. In addition, Manish has filed a patent in dynamic content caching.