Aditya Awasthee
Angel Investor & Mentor

Aditya is passionate and excited about the confluence of business, technology and media , thereby the innovative opportunities that it offers.

Aditya, a seasoned people’s person with decade+ rich experience in entrepreneurship, strategy formulation, e-commerce- consulting and lean retail operations management. His professional stint at national profiles with some of largest public limited organizations globally across banking , FMCG, FMCD & luxury retail with brands - HSBC, Emami, HCL, Gitanjali Gems Ltd & Topps India.

Aditya at his personal capacity has also consulted 7 leading .com’s of repute www.pepperfry.com which lately raised $100million from Goldman Sachs. Post which the Entrepreneurship bug bit him and he turned an entrepreneur to build online- Specialty and International Gourmet store www.FoodTropis which also bagged the Top 10 Startups at IIT Bombay.

Aditya is fairly networked for more than 4 years in the StartUp ecosystem and works closely with 3 of the largest angel networks in India. He is an active angel investor and mentor to couple of promising early stage consumer tech companies on sweat-equity basis based out of Bombay.

He is involved with some large movements on Women Entrepreneurship in India, WEE Foundation which is IIT Delhi initative. Adityastrongly believes that one should give back to the community and invests significant time for guest-lectures at top management institutes and regular speaker at Entrepreneurship forums across categories. He is also regular at fashion shows of repute Lakme fashion week , IIFW , AIFW and now planning to build large IPs across genre – literature, entrepreneurship, fashion and music.

Annurag Batra
Chairman & Editor in Chief, BW Business world

Annurag Batra is a serial entrepreneur, media mogul, a journalist and an eternal optimist rolled into one. He is a first generation entrepreneur and after acquiring the iconic business media and magazine brand BW Businessworld, a 35 year strong media brand as well as most respected business publication in the country. Since taking over BW Businessworld 13 months back Annurag has expanded BW Businessworld into digital, events and BW communities and has taken into its fold www.digitalmarket.asia, asia a leading website on digital marketing ,www.everythingexperiential.com India s leading experiential marketing website and launch BW hotelier in partnership with hotelier international. BW smart cities an editorial platform in a 360 degree format is to be launched in mid February Annurag is building the BW Businessworld business aggressively

He is passionate about Magazines and is on the Executive Committee of the Association of Indian Magazines (AIM). He also wants to give back to the industry and his love for teaching comes into play in his position as the Chairman of the Advisory Board of FMCC (Futuristic Media Communication Centre), a leading Media and Communication School in India.

Annurag believes if you make your hobby your profession, you don’t have to work and life is a blessing.

Delna Avari
Mentor and Consultant

Delna has studied, lived and worked across the the sub-continents of India, Europe, United States and ASEAN managing relationships with over 12 nationalities. Her strong business leadership background has been built through experience in setting up greenfield projects, turning around weak operations and exiting certain markets.

Delna started her professional career as part of the Tata Administrative Services (TAS 2001) cadre; completing assignments with Tata Motors, Tata Steel, Tata Tea (TGBL), Tanishq and TMTC. She held several senior management positions with Tata Motors with her last assignment being as the Head of Marketing Communication & Services. She also served as a Director on Board for Concorde Motors Limited. She completed her Fulbright Fellowship for Leadership from Carnegie Mellon University in 2010 and is an economist at heart. She is the recipient of 100+ industry awards for excellence in marketing including being recognised as top 50 influential women leaders in the field.

Delna is credited with building centers of excellence for brand management, consumer insight, contemporary retail sales network, digital & mobile, media planning, visual merchandize, virtual reality and retail design technology. She is passionate about keeping people at the heart of business and developing a longer term strategy for profitable growth. She keenly believes that ‘what comes from the people must go back to the people many times over’ which has led her to start a new journey as a mentor and consultant to enterprises in the field of healthcare, education, emerging consumer technology, emerging automotive technology, sports management and consumer retail.

Hemal Vadera
Head - Advertising, Digital & Branding, Bajaj Electricals Ltd

Hemal heads the Advertising, Digital and Branding division at Bajaj Electricals. With over 15 year of work experience in advertising and branding, Hemal has been with Bajaj Electricals Ltd. since 2012. Hemal Vadera started his career in advertising as client servicing professional, his last stint was with R K SWAMY BBDO as GM- Client servicing. He has handled and serviced clients across various categories like Mercedes- Benz, VISA international, IndusInd Bank, Piaggio India, SBI, etc.

Jonathan Bill
‎co-founder and CEO, CreditMate

Jonathan is co-founder and CEO of CreditMate, a digital lender providing secured loans on used Motorbikes in India through technology.

He is also an advisory council member of the NGO The Digital Empowerment Foundation - empowering India and the region with Digital Connectivity and information democracy.

In addition he holds investment or advisory positions in the following Indian and Global Startups:

YonderBeyond – a listed digital product incubator, Global
OverCart – a ‘re-commerce’ business, India
Reverieinc – a language technology business, India
GoAbra.com – a peer to peer borderless money transfer service, USA
mPaani.com – a hyper local loyalty and CRM program, India
AstroBuddy – a digital Astrology service

He is a Mobile and Internet expert, having spent over a decade leading Vodafone’s mobile Internet operations and strategy in developing markets including India, the Middle East, Africa and Eastern Europe.

Before Vodafone he was Commercial Director at Internet advertising start-up Real Media (sold to WPP) and was Business Development Director for Reuters New Media.

He is originally from the UK but has lived in Mumbai for the past 7 years and Cairo for 3 years.

Juzer Tambawalla
‎Head Of Marketing, Franklin Templeton Investments

Coming soon...

Mahesh Israni
Chief Marketing Officer, Parag Milk Foods Ltd

Coming soon...

Manik Nangia
Director Marketing & Chief Digital Officer, Max Life Insurance

Manik leads Digital Transformation, E commerce sales, Marketing and Product Management for Max Life. Max Life is India’s 4 th largest Life Insurance Company and has been on a steady growth path for the last half decade (having grown at 28% in the fiscal FY 17).

Along with a passionate team, Manik works to understand consumer behavior and tailor intuitive journeys to create value in core business of life insurance. They deploy process and digital capabilities to improve how the company attracts and services customers for greater life time value. They are tasked to innovate to discover value from new frontiers through customer experience, Proposition design and a combination of these to tell compelling stories in the Indian marketplace.

Manik has 18+ years of experience of which the last 12 have been with Max Life. In these years he has worked in a variety of roles spanning from sales to product management. In his last role as the strategy leader, Manik set up Business Analytics as a center of excellence, contributing immensely to all areas of the business value chain.

Manik is passionate about attracting and developing talent and relentlessly pursues excellence in each part of the business that he has been responsible for. A management graduate from IMT Ghaziabad, he has worked in financial services with the ICICI group (consumer banking and Life Insurance), ABN AMRO Bank.

Manish Kalra
Chief Business Officer, Craftsvilla.com

Manish Kalra is the Chief Business Officer of Craftsvilla, one of the largest ethnic online store in India. He is responsible for managing the overall business at Craftsvilla while leading Marketing, product, technology, supply, operations, and category management functions and has been associated with the company since February, 2016.

Bringing over 15 years of experience, Manish is an e-commerce specialist having been associated with e-commerce giants like Makemytrip and Amazon where he has developed an expert understanding of the Indian consumer and the digital commercer industry.

Prior to Craftsvilla, Manish was the Integrated Marketing Director for Amazon in India and led marketing for Amazon, Junglee and Kindle businesses. He was involved in the launch of some of the most iconic campaigns such as Aur Dikhao, Kindle campaign and won three Effies for the marketing work done in 2015. Earlier he was the Marketing Head for MakeMyTrip.com, covering E-Commerce, Online marketing, Brand, PR, Channel marketing and Alliances between 2010 and 2014.

Manish was also associated with Dell, where he was a part of the SPEED Program- an accelerator program targeted at high potential Managers by providing multifunctional exposure. He won the Marketing Summit Award at Dell- Highest Marketing Recognition in the year 2010. At PepsiCo International he worked as a territory Development Manager in Kolkata, HP and Haryana and won the ASIA RING of HONOR for exceptional sales performance across Asia Region.

Recognizing his contribution, Manish won the "Marketer of the Year" Award for the Travel Category by International Advertising Association. He has also been awarded the Top 50 Most Talented Brand Leaders of India by CMO Asia in 2013.

Manish is also a keen photographer, fitness enthusiast, and avid reader. He is an alumnus of XLRI batch of 2001, with specialization in Marketing and Finance and a passion for growing businesses.

Shalabh Saxena
Chief Operating Officer, Canara HSBC Oriental Bank of Commerce Life Insurance Company Limited

Shalabh is a founder member & currently heads Marketing and Corporate Communication, Operations, Information Technology & Customer Retention. An MBA in Marketing, he has previously worked with Standard Chartered Bank and ING Life Insurance.

AHe brings with him a strong retail financial experience of 22+ years in Consumer Banking & Life Insurance Industry. Through his career, he has run large profit centre & SBU’s across various business lines in the Life Insurance & Retail Banking. Core competence & exposure revolves around Distribution set up & handling sales in large business environment, Marketing, Strategic Planning, Customer Retention, Alliances & Acquisitions, Channel Relationship Management, Market Expansion & Distribution Strategy, Customer Services & Operations.

Shalabh in his current role handles four key functions of the company. Marketing (Brand, Digital Marketing, Public Relations), Operations, IT and Customer Retention (Customer Engagement, Customer Experience & Satisfaction). The focus hence is on creating an enabling environment for the brand and working in parallel on various initiatives focused on the Customer. The belief also is that brand equity in business like Insurance can be created by positive customer experience pre and post sale of the product and it is hence critical that work on each of the customer touch point is refined.