TechCircle presents Fireside with Qunar and Yatra
At Technopreneur Circle, we’re happy to bring you another big quarterly event (yes! we do them every quarter). This time we’ve got the founders of Qunar and Yatra coming over to visit us. If you haven’t registered already, feel free to click here to register.
In the meantime, we thought we’d take a closer look at who these two founders are: CC Zhuang and Dhruv Shringi.
CC Zhuang, cofounder of Qunar, along with Douglas Khoo and Fritz Demopoulus, was CEO up until January this year. CC has now moved onto his own new venture capital firm called Zebra Global Capital, which he’ll be talking more about at the event.
CC built multiple startups over his startup career, starting first with a web crawler that he sold when he was much younger. He went on to start multiple companies along the way before getting to Qunar. In the video below, Fritz, his cofounder for Qunar and interviewer, refers to him as “the engineer”, that’s because he’s built everything he’s started since his first web crawler startup.
CC’s got a strong sense of aggressive business tactics and it can be summed up in this quote, as he describes Qunar’s approach to competition:
“Each and every business unit has to find a competitor which is much stronger than them. And find the people who are willing to take the challenge and put them in the pilot seats. So that’s how we do it. In every business unit in Qunar, they have to find a competitor, if they are very strong, then they have to narrow down the focus.”
You can hear more in the video below:
And just for another side to the Qunar story, we thought we’d embed Douglas Khoo’s talk too. As a cofounder, he gives a unique insight into China from a Malaysian’s perspective.
Moving onto Dhruv Shringi, founder of Yatra. Although the company is considerably smaller than Qunar, which is publicly listed as over $5 billion in valuation, Yatra is still a major player in the Indian online travel space. Its total disclosed funding is over $120 million and is currently a leading player in travel tech in India.
Years ago, Dhruv reminisced on how he started with some early troubles, especially dealing with Kingfisher Airlines shutting down, which set back the online travel industry in India. But Yatra has survived from 100 to 200 people and now growing to over 2,000 employees. Dhruv says this transformation is profound:
“Over the time when business grows, there comes a scenario where you have both old and new people in the company. Assimilating both together in a team was a challenge for us. Particularly in areas like technology where people you hired initially are from diverse background and jugaadu in nature to solve problems against new people who are increasingly process-oriented and have a good work experience. We were a bit slow to recognise this, which led to a high degree of attrition. Hence we realised the importance of forming cross-functional teams and focusing more on the skills of people instead of their backgrounds.”
At our event next week, we’ll cover these topics and more. We hope you guys will also bring questions for these awesome founders. Please let us know in the comments or email us at techcircle(at)vertexholdings.com.
Also, big thanks to our community partners, General Assembly and The Hub. 🙂