K. Guru Gowrappan
Additional Director
Paytm
Mobile payment and commerce company, Paytm, recently announced that K. Guru Gowrappan, Global Managing Director of the Alibaba Group will join its board as an Additional Director.
Gowrappan is responsible for driving strong growth in Alibaba’s international markets. He is in charge of international product and business development strategy, which includes bringing all Alibaba products together into one final strategic plan and executing it in key markets. In his new role, Guru will be regularly engaging with business, product and tech teams to ensure strong and scalable growth for the company.
He has more than 15 years of experience in the Internet industry and is one of the top leaders in scaling mobile product and business execution globally. Prior to Alibaba, he was the Chief Operating Officer at mobile search engine Quixey. He led Product, Business, and Marketing-based organizations and played a major role in the company’s global development and financial strategy.
Gowrappan has served as the COO for emerging initiatives at Zynga, a social gaming company. He was elected the Head of Zynga Japan and drove the company to a successful IPO. He has also worked at Overture, where he helped define the multi-billion dollar search marketing industry. Once the firm was acquired by Yahoo, he held many leadership roles, most recently as Global Head of Product, Program Management and Operations at Yahoo.
He was a co-founder of two Indian startups and an active angel investor and adviser. He has deep experience in various areas including global management and scaling, M&A integration operations, mobile product and technology management.
