Hyderabad: T-Hub is reorganizing its top leadership three years after its inception, with the appointment of Mr Ravi Narayan, former director at Microsoft Ventures India, as its chief executive officer.
Mr Narayan succeeds Mr Srinivas Kollipara, the chief operating operator who was acting CEO from September following the resignation of the first CEO, Mr Jay Krishnan, who joined the investment firm Sri Capital. Mr Kollipara has also resigned.
Known to be a pioneer in the venture catalyst and start-up accelerator space prior to joining T-Hub, Mr Narayan was adviser to Zinnov and global director for Microsoft for start-ups. He was associated with Microsoft for five years and founded the venture catalyst firm Mentor Partners. Mr Narayan holds a Bachelor’s degree from IIT Madras in chemical engineering, Masters from the University of Southern California and MBA from the Marshall School of Business.
Many programmes including T-Fund and Lab-32 among others have taken a back seat over the past few months at T-Hub because of the lack of a fulltime CEO. One of the key initiatives T-Fund, with a '100-crore fund to invest in start-ups across the state took a backseat due to operational deadlocks.
The Lab-32 programme which started in May was supposed to be a six-month programme after which the startups had to graduate from the incubator, but it got extended.
Meanwhile the resignation of Mr Kollipara has raised an eyebrow as it comes a couple of months after Mr Krishnan resigned. Mr Kollipara who is also the founding member of T-Hub, is yet to divulge details of his resignation.
An IT department official said that Mr Kollipara would be playing a larger picture in the Hyderabad start-up eco-system. According to sources, there will be lot of restructuring in the start-up initiative as it gears up for Phase-2 which is bigger than the first phase.
