The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Grex Alternative Investments Market has stepped down after a squabble among the founders of this Pune-based start-up.
Backed by a few investors, three of the four co-founders of Grex asked Manish Kumar to step down as the CEO and continue only as the managing director.
Abhijeet Bhandari, who is one of the co-founders and heads market development at the start-up which provides a platform for its peers to raise money through equity issuances, assumed the role of CEO.
Mr. Kumar, while confirming his resignation, said the company now had a dual working structure wherein he focused on long-term strategies related to products, solutions and overall governance.
“… People thought that we were pursuing too disruptive and almost impossible goals until it began to happen of late. However, the difficult nature of this probably had the better of my co-founders’ patience and they asked for a directional change in leadership at Grex.
I resigned from the CEO part of my role the very next day (when we had this internal discussion) as I believe that one must give way for such change to happen should my co-founders really believe in it,” said Mr. Manish Kumar in response to an e-mail query.
Mr.Surojit Nandy, a co-founder who heads operations at Grex, said the change did not happen abruptly though there were divergent views on the focus areas of the company and who should lead it.
Dissenting views “There were dissenting views but just like in any company the majority view was taken into account. There was commonality in the views of three co-founders and the natural choice for the CEO’s chair was Abhijeet.
In the new structure, Manish would focus on the long-term direction for the company while Abhijeet will look at the deliverables in the near term. I do not see any impact of this on the working of Grex,” he said.
Grex was started in 2014 by Surojit Nandy, Sanjay Nishank along with Mr. Kumar and Mr. Bhandari with an aim to provide an organised platform for start-ups to raise early-stage funding.
