4. • A graduate in economics from St Stephen's College,
Delhi
• Masters in finance and economics from London
School of Economics, UK
• Bachelor in arts specializing in economics and
mathematics from the University of Cambridge
EDUCATION
5. • Suchi Mukherjee belongs to a middle class family from
Haryana
• Suchi Mukherjee family now consists of her husband,
two kids and herself. Her parents must have played a
huge role in her success, and so must her husband,
Suchi Mukherjee family have contributed highly in what
she is today.
FAMILY BACKGROUND
6.
7. Lehman Brothers Inc in July 1998, as their new Senior Associate for
Corporate Finance( focused on Telecoms Media Technology and
Financial Institutions)
Virgin Media from June 2003 as a Director of Change and Business
Development.(consumer focused & member of Consumer Division
Management Team)
Suchi worked with them for almost 2 years and then took one of the
WISEST DECISIONS of her life; She quit Virgin Media and
joined “eBay”!
CAREER
8. She joined the company first as the Head of Business Seller
Programs & CS in the year 2006 and was the member of the
UK Operating Management Team as well. With the way she
performed, she was quickly promoted within a year, as the
Director and Member of Executive Management Team for
“Skype”, which back then was a part of eBay Inc.
CAREER
9. HER RESPONSIBILITIES
• included planning,
• product / UI design,
• payments of the product
Skype and also looking after its marketing including brand, channels incl. PR and
CS. This was altogether a different learning curve for Suchi. Being a part of the
executive management team; here is where she actually learned the powerful
leadership development skills
Suchi once again got the opportunity to get promoted as the new Managing
Director for “Gumtree,” which again was a part of eBay Inc.
CAREER
10. Now Gumtree required a TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP, and in her
whole stint with them, she spent most of the time scaling the team capabilities,
product, sales, marketing and CS functions, and at the same time Suchi also re-
structured the financials towards core revenue streams.
And with 13-million users, she went on to grow it to UK’s largest
horizontal classifieds business in just two years. She lifted the company from a No. 3
position to a market leading position in jobs and consumer-to-consumer car sales, and
also grew the visits by 35% YOY
she decided to move on and do something of her own!
CAREER
11. So, We can understand that she got very good
experience as an employee by working in different
organisations and then she acquired many skills and ready
to start her own start up
RESULT
12. Interesting facts about Suchi Mukherjee
• She lifted the company Gumtree from No.3 to No.1 in a matter of
few years.
• She started her working career at a young age of 22 in Lehman
Brothers Inc.
• She was one of the most promoted people in eBay Inc because of
her brilliant managerial and business skills.
FACTS
15. Surprisingly, the idea of LimeRoad.com was born out of a moment of
utter frustration – she was reading a glossy magazine in London and
found a piece of jewelry that she liked, and wanted to buy it, but
because it was from some small store in Mumbai, it obviously wouldn’t
have reached to her anytime soon.
Identified two things
1. no consumer technology
2. no platform from which one could access the list’s of products that
were manufactured and shipped out of India, one of the world’s
largest manufacturing hubs. Basically, India remained disconnected
from the virtual world.
IDEA
16. • She wanted to build a platform where one could find gorgeous,
affordable lifestyle products in an extremely easy to discover
interface. She being a woman, knew that women love the different
and out-of-the-box stuff, and that product discovery in lifestyle was
indeed a very hard problem to solve.
• What made her even more confident was that India back then
accounted for more than 21% manufacturing of lifestyle products
of world (that’s 21% of a nearly $1 trillion industry). And she
wanted to capitalize on this untapped opportunity. Her aim was to
simply bring all the vendors who produce high quality affordable
products under one roof, via an easy to use interface to enable the
discovery.
LIMEROAD
17. Ankush Mehra, Head of Supply Chain – Reliance Hypermarkets,
Prashant Mallik – Ex-Facebook, Microsoft & Siemens
Ahti Heinla as their Technical Advisor (past: Founding Architect of Skype)
Michael V Swaaij as their Advisor (past: ex-Chairman of Skype)
AND WITH THAT THEY HIT IT OFF! LIMEROAD WENT LIVE IN
OCTOBER 2012!
MEETING
18.
19.
20. Finding the right people to build a solid team which was a
combination of skill and can-do attitude was one of the biggest
challenges for LimeRoad
Getting the right kind of infrastructure with high- speed & reliable
internet.
Complex bank process
Getting the company registered with the RoC (Registrar of
Companies) process
Legal formalities were also something that turned out to be very
different from what they had seen.
CHALLENGES
“Life goes on!”
21. The company has raised a total of whopping $50 Million
from Tiger Global,
Light speed Venture Partners,
Matrix Partners India and a few others.
Their most recent funding includes the series C round of
$30 Million, before which they had raised $15 Million and
$5 Million, in series B & series A respectively
FUNDING'S
22. Their revenue model was pretty much simple: they made money when
vendors sell i.e. commission revenue (% of sales).
They also went out of their comfort zone to build strong partnerships with a
really rich selection of brands and with categories like apparel, accessories,
home and food.
They launched with many brands, out of which nearly half were exclusively
available with them.. These included national and international mega brands
in their flagship form
The platform has grown from — 250,000+ units of unique user generated
visual content per month, and 600+ vendors; to posting of 200,000+ unique
products and looks per month by the users, and becoming India’s leading
discovery platform for lifestyle products with 18 million products.
GROWTH AND
DEVELOPMENT
23. • LimeRoad stands tall with 1.5 million scrapbooks posted by users so far,
and 100,000 scrapbooks made per day
• The company now aims to reach out to 400m+ smartphones by around in
2016, out of which 30-50% belonging to women
24. Voted 1 of 15 ‘Rising Talent – global
leaders under 40′ at World Women’s
Forum Global Women’s Forum
ACHIEVEMENTS
25. Manish Saxena: While Suchi is happy with the progress the site has made,
there are some key areas of focus for Limeroad in the coming days.
These include their capital light model, vendor relationships, better
curation, more exclusivity and building more traffic.
Reply: The capital light model means Limeroad doesn’t have any
inventory and therefore doesn’t require any capital commitment from a
brand. Limeroad is also depending on its online customer community to
do the curation of products. “This not only increases customer
engagement with the brand, but also is a key aspect of cost control.
Besides generating community-led content which most brands pay for, it
also generates community-led ‘freshness’ for the brand,” explains Suchi.
SUGGESTIONS AND REPLY
26. SO WHAT IS IT LIKE BEING AN ENTREPRENEUR IN INDIA ?
“Entrepreneurship is hard; for men and women alike. In India three factors
heighten the challenges
• The lack of a strong set of mentors / ecosystem to fall back on for guidance,
brainstorming and help along the entrepreneurial journey
• Relatively low risk appetite among the venture capital community : a
preference for higher degrees of certainty; we were very fortunate to have a
strong product-centric set of investors
• High cash compensation expectations of the relatively hard to find high-
quality talent”
says Suchi.
ROLE AS AN ENTREPRENEUR
27. WHAT DOES SUCHI FEEL ABOUT THE CLIMATE FOR
ENTREPRENEURSHIP FOR WOMEN IN INDIA?
“Liberalization of the economy has opened up many more avenues for
women, so has privatization, proving to be hugely beneficial to women
entrepreneurs. Today, the policy and institutional framework for
developing entrepreneurial skills, providing vocation education and
training has widened the horizon for economic empowerment of women.”
WOMEN ENTREPRENEURSHIP
28. A word of advice to other women trying to take the entrepreneurship path or
trying to break the glass ceiling.
“To overcome challenges one needs to be highly deliberate. I was in many ways
fortunate – though as they say fortune too is an outcome of perseverance.
I worked very hard to ensure
– we surrounded ourselves with a strong set of investors and advisors
– we fought hard and scanned the country to find highly motivated talent who
would throw themselves at problems
– I dug out all the people who had ever worked with my extended network of
friends and families to find a set of reliable domestic staff
– This one was just a lot of luck — at home a highly supportive partner, parents
and in-laws“
ADVICE FOR WOMEN
29. • Middle class parents
• Father and or mother in independent business
• College educated
• Married
• Early 30’s for the first significant venture
• Pervious experience in new venture
• Desires independence
• Motivated by desire for independence and job satisfaction
• Small and young business
• Self confident
• Moderate risk taker
• High tolerance for ambiguity (perseverance)
• Acquired skills of business
• High energy level
HER PROFILE
30.
31. • Picking up right people
• the scrapbook, which enables them unleash
their creativity. 60% products that you see on the
website are exclusively available on LimeRoad.com
and the looks curated by our Scrapbookers are 100%
unique to LimeRoad.com.
• Tapping the new market tha tis filling the gsp
SUCHI DID RIGHT THINGS LIKE