When Indiagames' Founder Was Offered A Job At Nazara & He Passed It On

It's been only a few months (or weeks, assuming it took some time for the actual transfer of holding) since Vishal Gondal, the founder & CEO of the country's largest digital games developer Indiagames, sold his remaining stake in the company to Disney-controlled UTV Software, and job offers have started flowing in!

Gondal has apparently received a job offer from an executive search firm for the role of a COO at Nazara Technologies, another mobile gaming company. To be fair, we can't fault the person making the job pitch to Gondal with due diligence as she connected through a professional social networking site (so she knew who he is, after all).

We have no doubt that Nazara, as a profit-making and VC-funded company, would have the cash to hire and pay Gondal but we have serious doubts whether the marathon runner (that Gondal is) would like to leave his creation (where he is still the boss, although as an employee of another owner of the company) to switch over to another player in a similar business.

So it was not a surprise that he passed on the offer to Alok Kejriwal, CEO & co-founder of Games2win.

UPDATE: Nazara Technologies now informs us that the executive search firm approached Gondal without any mandate from Nazara. In an e-mail message, the executive search firm told Nazara:

"We were in preliminary discussions only with Nazara regarding the COO role, and no mandate was given to us. We apologise immediately and unconditionally for the error."

This essentially means it's not actually Nazara which offered the job to Gondal (our readers would have already guessed so). Such instances are common in the M&A space with investment bankers running around with sale offers, even without a mandate from the company purportedly up for sale. Having said that, for those who are still eager to try their luck, Nazara is actually looking to hire some senior people for its management team (but not a COO, apparently)!