Why Flipkart, Snapdeal, and Ola are hiring ‘Kenyans’ to run their race

Say you’re running the Bangalore marathon, and you start winning it year after year. Soon the marathon becomes popular, so the Kenyans arrive to participate in it. Suddenly, it’s 10 times tougher to win the marathon: you may be the best among the locals, but it’s different when Kenyans join the race.

Sharad Sharma, angel investor and co-founder of think tank iSPIRT (Indian Software Product Industry Round-Table), likes to explain things with analogies. We were talking about the spate of high-level appointments at Flipkart, Snapdeal, and Ola in recent months. To Sharma, the Indian ecommerce marketplaces and taxi app are like those Bangalore marathoners who were winning the local race comfortably – until the Kenyans arrived on the scene. The Kenyans, in this context, are American firms Amazon and Uber, of course.

Consider Ola, which got a head start in India, but now looks fearfully over its shoulder at late entrant Uber catching up fast. Ola still has the lead in number of rides, thanks to a presence in 100 cities compared to Uber’s 18, but its global rival appears way more efficient. Uber is running the show with less than 1,000 people globally, compared to Ola’s headcount of over 5,000 in its Bangalore HQ alone.

Flipkart and Snapdeal, similarly, have to raise their game with Amazon breathing down their necks. “Unless they do something drastic, they will lose. So they think – if some Kenyans come and join my team too, maybe I will win,” continues Sharma with his marathon analogy, alluding now to the top-rung Indian talent residing in the US whom the well-funded local players are bringing back to India.

The position Flipkart, Snapdeal, and Ola find themselves in is very different from that of a company like Freshdesk, a customer support software maker from Chennai which is among the top three in its class globally. Freshdesk set out from the beginning to compete in the global market, so they know how to run with the Kenyans. “InMobi (mobile ad network) and Freshdesk have always been running the New York marathon or the Silicon Valley marathon. It’s the other guys, who have only been running the Bangalore marathon, now saying, ‘oh my God! I need a Kenyan to raise my game’,” says Sharma.

Brain regained

So, who are these “Kenyans” Sharma and I have been going on about, anyway?

Let’s begin with Ambarish Kenghe, the new head of product at fashion store Myntra, acquired by Flipkart last year. This IIT Kanpur post-graduate went to the US in the late nineties for an MS in computer science from Purdue University, followed by an MBA from Berkeley. He then worked at Cisco, Bain, and Google, where he co-founded Google Chromecast. This month he moves from Mountain View, California, to Myntra headquarters in Bangalore to drive product innovation for the fashion app.

Flipkart also has been getting some very highly qualified Indians, well settled in the US, to migrate back home. Last month, it hired Krishnendu Chaudhury, who led computer vision projects for Google at Mountain View for 10 years. Before that, he was with the advanced technology group of Adobe Systems in San Jose for 10 years. This PhD in computer science from the University of Kentucky holds 20 odd patents in neural networks, artificial intelligence, and image processing.

He will be working with Flipkart’s head of engineering Peeyush Ranjan and product head Puneet Soni, who also moved to India a few months ago after working together for several years at Google, where they handled the Motorola mobility division.

‘Visual search’ is one of the current buzzwords in India. Recommendation systems on ecommerce sites have mostly relied on user data and tags, but now they’re factoring in the visual attributes of what you click to find similar or related products. This is complex because it involves converting images into numerical and symbolic data to enable computers to see things as humans do.

The heat and dust

The real reversal