Thursday, March 28

Rajan Anandan Quit Google, Joined Sequoia Capital

Google’s Vice President for South East Asia and India, Rajan Anandan quits Google India to join Sequoia Capital India as a Managing Director.

Serving at Google for 8 years, Rajan now move to Sequoia India where he will focus on developing “Surge” into the world’s top scale-up programme for startups, said Shailendra J. Singh, Managing Director at Sequoia.

Rajan will join the leadership team at the firm, in addition to the six current Managing Directors.

Anandan will continue at Google till the end of April and Vikas Agnihotri, Country Director, Sales will take on the responsibility in the interim for Google India, the company said in a statement on Tuesday.

After news break, Anandan tweets,

8 amazing years. 850million internet users across India and SEA. Many billions of revenue and fastest growing region in the world. incredible team that thinks big and executes superbly. Thank you @GoogleIndia #GoogleSEA. Loved every minute.— Rajan Anandan (@RajanAnandan) April 2, 2019

“Surge” aims to engineer rapid early progress for startups, by enabling disproportionate access to capital, talent, network and decades of company-building knowledge.

“Anandan’s deep understanding of technology, significant operating expertise and track record of growing tech businesses across the region will help ‘Surge’ founders scale and build the transformational businesses of tomorrow,” Singh said in a statement.

As head of Google India and Southeast Asia, Anandan played a key role in expanding the Internet ecosystem in the region and increasing adoption among consumers and businesses.

“We are grateful to Anandan for his huge contribution to Google over the past eight years. His entrepreneurial zeal and leadership has helped grow the overall Internet ecosystem in India and Southeast Asia, and we wish him all the best in his new adventures,” said Scott Beaumont, President, Google Asia Pacific.

Rajan Anandan is a big name in Indian startup market, where he backed large number of successful start-ups at the very early stages.

Before joining Google, Rajan also worked at Microsoft and Dell Indian operation team and was earlier a Partner at McKinsey & Co in Chicago.