Flipkart eyes Silicon Valley expats; to hire Yahoo's Eric Lange and Amazon's Dan Rawson

Flipkart seems to be on hiring overdrive for senior talent.

India's largest e-commerce company has roped in two Silicon Valley expatriates, namely Eric Lange (former vice president of Yahoo's analytics wing) and Dan Rawson (ex- general manager at Amazon's fulfillment business).

The development was first reported by The Economic Times newspaper.

The appointment of Lange, who joins the e-commerce giant as the vice-president of product management for customer experiences, was confirmed by the Bangalore-based company. "We are very excited to welcome Eric to the Flipkart team. His deep and varied expertise will be tremendously useful in helping us connect even more closely with our growing customer base," Punit Soni, Flipkart's chief product officer said in a media statement.

Soni himself is a new face at Flipkart. He joined the company in March this year from Google where he was a product management executive. Both Lange and Rawson would relocate to Bangalore and report to Soni.

At Yahoo, Lange was managing analytics and publisher products for ad business. Lange also headed two of Yahoo's recent acquisitions - Flurry and BrightRoll. Previously, Lange was the founder and CEO of video content provider Flicket.tv.

Flipkart did not respond to an email from Techcircle.in on Rawson's appointment till the time of writing this report.

The Harvard and Kellogg-educated Rawson is a former marine captain. He has over 15 years of diverse leadership experience, includes management of multi-billion dollar P&L accounts along with strategic business and product management.

Flipkart and its closest rival Snapdeal have been strengthening their senior management teams over the last few months.

Earlier this week, Flipkart-owned lifestyle e-commerce venture Myntra Designs Pvt Ltd appointed former Google executive Ambarish Kenghe as its senior vice president and product head.

Recently, Flipkart appointed IT industry veteran Ravi Garikipati in a newly created position – entrepreneur in residence. In April, it roped in Hari Vasudev (Yahoo), Anand KV (Hathway) and Manish Maheshwari (txtWeb), to spearhead supply chain, customer experience and seller ecosystem verticals, respectively. Earlier, the firm had named Saikiran Krishnamurthy from McKinsey as the chief operating officer (COO) of its commerce division.

The organisation also re-jigged its top team with Sachin Bansal now looking after new initiatives and strategy. Binny Bansal is heading supply chain and logistics while Mukesh Bansal has been heading the day-to-day operations. Mukesh Bansal was inducted after Flipkart acquired Myntra, a venture co-founded by him, last year.

Flipkart is also building a four-member advisory board to accelerate its commerce platform's growth. Sudhir Sitapati, a vice president with consumer goods giant Unilever, was recently appointed as its first advisory board member. Its chief technology officer Amod Malviya had quit his full-time position with the company last week to be a part of the advisory board.

On the other hand, Snapdeal, run by Delhi-based Jasper Infotech Pvt Ltd, hired Bharti Airtel's former chief marketing officer Govind Rajan as its new chief strategy officer. This was the latest in a series of top level appointments by Snapdeal in the past 12 months and the third from Bharti Airtel. Recently, it roped in former Bharti Airtel senior executive Anand Chandrasekaran as chief product officer. Earlier this month, Snapdeal hired former Procter & Gamble (P&G) executive Amit Choudhary as its senior vice president – corporate finance. It also appointed Gaurav Gupta as VP of engineering. Prior to that, the company brought in Jeyandran Venugopal from Yahoo as technology advisor and Bhuvan Gupta as VP of engineering. In February, Snapdeal CTO Amitabh Misra had quit the company.

Snapdeal also hired Vivek Patankar as senior vice president – finance from Unilever .