Pooja Gupta

An HR Leader with over 15 years of experience, Pooja has played a variety of local and global roles through my career.  She has had the opportunity of driving the HR charter at scale in large multi-national environments as well as at a dynamic, hyper growth start-up and more recently in an advisory capacity to a portfolio of VC funded organizations. Through her career, she has seen a focus on organization, talent and culture lead to direct, tangible impact on business. 

At Myntra, this focus very early in the company’s life helped in making Myntra a preferred employer in E-commerce and nurture the right DNA for ownership and success. She was a part of Myntra’s leadership team from the early days of its foray into online fashion through the journey that saw it grow into a USD 0.5 billion GMV business that got successfully acquired by Flipkart in 2014. During this period, she helped the organization grow from a small team of 100 to a headcount of 8000+ employees across diverse verticals like Technology, Buying and Merchandising, Design, Sourcing, Marketing, Cataloging and set up country-wide operations teams across Customer Support, Warehousing, and Logistics.

She moved to Kalaari in 2016 as the VC industry in the country was evolving to add more professionalized services to portfolio companies. In her current role heading HR for Kalaari’s portfolio of ~75 companies, she continues being associated with high-growth, innovative, entrepreneurial set-ups helping them anticipate and effectively address their people challenges and help them devise their talent strategy. 

As a woman leader, she is passionate about seeing more women thrive at the workplace. Creating the right culture for nurturing diversity and establishing policy and programs to deliver on this mission have been important to me in every professional role she has played. She wants to see more women enter the workforce and grow to be effective managers and leaders. Having taken a break to raise her first daughter and having had her second daughter while she was in a demanding role, she appreciates first-hand the challenges of balancing multiple priorities and is always excited about any dialogue around how men and women alike can achieve this balance while enjoying an impactful and successful career.