Tarun Davda

Managing Director at Matrix Partners India

Speaker

Tarun has operating experience across a variety of functional areas including strategy, operations, marketing, business development and product management. He's been around the block a few times and this has given him a deep appreciation of what it takes to create and run a successful Internet business in India.

Prior to joining Matrix, Tarun was the India Country Manager and Board Member at StepOut.com, a venture-backed startup. Under his leadership, StepOut became India's #1 online dating site with over 4 Million users. He setup the India operations, built the team, transformed the product and brand to suit the Indian market and eventually took it to a stage where it could be monetized. StepOut was acquired by IAC / Match.com (NASDAQ:IACI) in September 2013.

Before that, Tarun established BigRock.com (incubated by the Directi group) - India's #1 provider of domain name registration and other web services. As business head, he built the business ground-up including setting up the product, striking important offline partnerships, running a hugely successful TV-ad campaign and scaling the team. BigRock and other Directi entities were acquired by Endurance International (NASDAQ:EIGI) for $100M in January 2014.

Tarun started his career as a developer at Infosys where he was responsible for providing IT consulting and outsourcing services to Fortune-100 US clients. During this time, he gained extensive business development experience in the North American market and was instrumental in winning and executing a $25 Million deal. Tarun is an MBA from the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad and an Engineer from VJTI, Bombay. When he's not working with entrepreneurs or answering his son's endless questions, Tarun likes to read, spend time with his friends, sketch and occasionally enjoys a game of table-tennis. You can follow him on twitter @tarun_davda