The PGPX batch of IIM Ahmedabad recently held its next chapter of the Speaker Series, which was attended by Selvam Velmurugan, CTO of Groupon. Attended by a gathering of about 350, the talk was held in association with TIE Ahmedabad & ezDI.
Selvam in his talk inspired the students through his career journey that began from Intel and is presently stationed at Groupon. In between he spent 10 years at Amazon where he shaped his views, founded a non-profit organisation - eMoksha focused on enabling citizen awareness using the internet and mobile technologies, worked at Disney and learnt about inspired leadership at Netflix. Selvam is presently leading technological changes at Groupon.
During his tenure at Amazon, he saw the company grow at a rapid pace of "30x", something he attributes to the inspired leadership of Jeff Bezos and the 'virtuous loop' Jeff created for Amazon. This 'virtuous loop' is the core of all decision making at Amazon and include more selection for customers; most competitive price in the industry; and great customer experience whether in purchasing or delivery.
Even though, Amazon went from retailing of books to apparel to retailing of other physical products. Selvam considers Amazon to be a technology company in the retail business. This focus of Amazon has helped it come up with the hugely successful AWS services that surprised the entire industry. Selvam was the first official person designated to set up Amazon's Chennai Development Centre where they developed innovative practices in automated pricing.
After founding eMoksha, working on it for two years and acknowledging his limitation in raising funds, Selvam attracted to the visionary leadership of Reed Hastings joined Netflix. The culture of 'freedom and responsibility' at Netflix outlined in the 'Netflix culture deck' - a presentation that's legendary in Silicon Valley, changed Selvam's perception of HR practices.
He also spoke about how even the greatest business leaders can make mistakes where one bad decision of Reed almost wiped out Netflix only to rise like a phoenix after a few painful years.
For Selvam, the journey of Groupon started when he rejected local online deals as a fad but later was convinced about the bigger picture of the business. Groupon, an organisation that connects the virtual to the real world, is the fastest company to reach $1 billion in sales.
Besides speaking about the challenges at Groupon and the ways they plan to counter it, Selvam spoke about the future technologies he feels will shape the world that includes quantified self, wireless electricity, IOT and innovative payment technology.
Selvam interacted with the audience and answered their queries in great detail. He spoke about the power of simple solutions to complex problems. Also, he stressed on the balance of time and agility with perfection in business decision making.