From Ezetap to WhatsApp: The story of a founder’s exit

To leave a company one co-founded for a top job at a leading tech company is a tricky thing. Does Abhijit Bose’s departure herald a new phase in the Indian startup world?

Ezetap raised $51 million to take payments to millions of merchants, and its founder leaving it midway for a better opportunity sends mixed signals externally

Abhijit Bose says the only reason he is quitting Ezetap is because WhatsApp is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity

Blue-blooded investors like Chamath Palihapitiya saw Ezetap as the coming together of superstar businesses like Stripe, AWS and Android

Ezetap though still has a lot of growing up to do

In what is already a tumultuous journey, founders leaving the companies they started are events that inevitably shake up startups. And the reason they choose to leave also says a lot about the state of the company. Based on why a founder chooses to go, one could say he or she pulled:

A ‘Travis Kalanick’ or a ‘Binny Bansal’: When a founder has been found guilty of misconduct as in the case of the Uber CEO or the Flipkart CEO

A ‘Jack Dorsey’: For non-performance, like when the Twitter CEO was fired in 2008 for spending too much time on his hobbies (he re-joined the company three years later as executive chairman) rather than running the company

An ‘Elizabeth Holmes’: A founder whose string of lies and web of fraud gets discovered, leading to their resignation, much like the Theranos CEO.

AUTHOR

Arundhati Ramanathan

Arundhati is Bengaluru-based. She is interested in how people use money in the digital age and how new economies will take shape based on that interaction. She has spent over 10 years reporting and writing on various subjects. Previous stints were at Mint, Outlook Business and Reuters.

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