This seems like a season of major shufflings in the startup world. Bhavish Aggarwal, the co-founder, and CEO of India’s largest cab network is all set to step down from his position. None other than the fellow co-founder and current CTO Ankit Bhati will occupy his throne.
The New Roles
Aggarwal will now become the group CEO and his major focus will be towards fundraising and scaling up Foodpanda while Ankit will be responsible for reorganizing Ola’s leadership structure.
Ola Going The Flipkart Way
These kind of swaps in CEO positions are becoming common we believe. The same kind of case happened when Sachin Bansal, the CEO of Flipkart had stepped aside and Binny Bansal had become the group CEO. These two Indian unicorns have other similarities too. Like Flipkart, Ola has also expanded beyond its initial mission and that has been one of the primary reasons for a group CEO.
Ola now runs its operations in several countries, Australia, UK, New Zealand included and also runs its food delivery app Foodpanda in India. Seems Bhavish would now be looking at the entire group business while Ankit’s focus would be on Ola’s cab business alone.
About Ankit
Like Aggarwal, Ankit is also an alumnus of IIT Bombay and had graduated in BTech and MTech in Mechanical Engineering. Right after his graduation, he founded Ola Cabs with Bhavish. This internal shuffling comes in as a big promotion for Ankit who had been missing from the limelight and only handled the backend functioning of the company. With his new role, it seems he would be more present to the public eye and also available to comment on the company’s progress.
The Future
Rest the time will tell, how this swap will benefit the company overall. We did list out some similarities between Ola and Flipkart, but we don’t wish the future of both these co-founders of Ola to be met in the same way as founders of Flipkart. Within two years of swapping roles, both the founders eventually stepped down from their roles in the company and none of them is with Flipkart any longer.
