India’s most respected and loved E-commerce site, Flipkart founded by two college friends who studied together at IIT-Delhi and worked together in Amazon. It’s revenue is estimated to be somewhere between $500 million to $1 billion, to create which it has had to pull in around $200 million in venture funding over four rounds till now.
But since February this year, Flipkart been unable to find a Chief Financial Officer after its erstwhile CFO Karandeep Singh resigned unexpectedly. Singh, an experienced professional had joined Flipkart just over a year before his resignation. He was widely regarded as sort of the “grown up” hired to steer Flipkart towards a successful IPO, akin to, say, Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook.
Needless to say Singh’s exit came as a huge shock to entrepreneurs, investors and keen observers of the E-commerce sector in India.
Worse, Flipkart has been unable to find a capable replacement for Singh as CFO in the ensuing months. And yesterday it appointed Kalyan Krishnamurthy, an employee of Tiger Global – arguably Flipkart’s biggest, if not majority investor – as interim CFO. While co-founder and COO Binny Bansal told VC Circle that “in the meantime, the company has already started the search for a full-time CFO”, the fact that an interim CFO needed to be appointed nearly 4 months after the previous one’s resignation means that Flipkart estimates it might be some more months before it can fill such a critical position. A well-funded, market-leading and much-loved firm not being able to find a good candidate in what is currently a buyer’s market isn’t ever good news. Moreover, Flipkart’s stupendous growth has always been accompanied by rumours and news about its less-than-stellar organizational culture where who-you-knew mattered more than what-you-were.
For a company that generates and utilizes enormous amounts of money (its monthly losses, though falling, are privately estimated to be a few million dollars), the Finance function ought to be super critical. And yet, it has never managed to retain people who led that function.
For nearly a year before Karandeep Singh’s appointment, Flipkart didn’t have a formal head for its Finance function. And Tapan Kumar Das, the person who led the function prior to that, resigned after just over a year, after expressing his unwillingness to sign the company’s financial statements.