Entrepreneurial Business Leader (Mumbai)

Rajiv is an emerging markets business development professional with a twenty year career that tracks India’s liberalization journey since 1990.  His expertise lies in agile yet disciplined development of nascent opportunities, often in ambiguous environments, into market leading businesses. 

He has developed businesses and capabilities for Cisco, KPMG, Future Group (India’s leading retailer) and Andersen in sectors such as eCommerce, technology-enabled services, business consulting and merchant banking.  During this process, he has held P&L responsibilities for B2B and B2C businesses, built winning teams, acquired and integrated businesses, raised capital, and marketed and delivered solutions to clients in US, Europe, APAC and India.  As a management consultant, his focus has been working with senior leaders in financial services, retail, utilities and technology on topics of strategy, organization, global operating models,sector reform and performance improvement.

His present focus is entrepreneurship development and eCommerce. He presently mentors a portfolio of fast-growing start-ups that are emerging leaders in eCommerce platforms, solar-powered lighting and retail distribution, ethnic food services, multilingual solutions on mobile devicesand marketing services. He assists the firms in scaling up their business and organization and also mentors the founders. He is also engaged in domestic and cross-border partnership initiatives to develop support systems and resources for start-ups in India. 

In his previous role, he developed businesses for Future Group in three sectors – eCommerce, retail technologies and services and coalition loyalty.  In these roles, he reported to the Group’s founder, Mr.Kishore Biyani, a first generation entrepreneur, credited as the “father of modern retail in India”. Rajiv, as CEO of the eCommerce venture, co-funded by Kleiner Perkins and Sherpalo, relaunched the business with many innovations and grew revenues by 9x to take the business to a top 3 position in industry. In another Group role and just moving in from Cisco, he co-founded India’s first retail technologies and services venture and grew business to $25mm in revenues and 1000+ team in 2 years and spun off the business into a JV with a leading international firm.  He also developed a coalition loyalty business which resulted in a joint venture with American Express’ Payback.

Rajiv has ten years of strategy and operations consulting experience and has developed and led practices at Arthur Andersen, KPMG and Cisco’s strategy consulting arm – Internet Business Solutions.  In all these roles, through CXO-level, business consulting engagements, Rajiv developed valuable new geographical and industry markets for professional services and networking solutions. At KPMG, through stints in India and UK, Rajiv also helped build global sourcing advisory practices in India, UK and US. 

He commenced his career in merchant banking and has assisted several Indian businesses mobilise capital from public markets. During this phase, Rajiv co-founded a corporate finance start-up as an entrepreneur where he learnt lessons from rapid initial success and subsequent failure. 

He is a regular speaker at technology, eCommerce and retail industry forums and has conducted influential studies for the Ministry of IT in India and the Indian software industry association.   

Rajiv is a commerce graduate from the Bombay University and holds a post-graduate diploma in management from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad.