Ex-foodpanda CEO to speak at SBR's Industry Insights Series

Chinmay Malaviya will talk about the biggest issues in the F&B industry.

Chinmay is a motivated entrepreneur and start-up go-getter at heart. He has lived in a number of countries – Europe and North America –and worked in a venture capital firm before joining Rocket Internet GmbH, leading European venture capital incubator .

After a stint at Lazada, he was part of the founding team foronline food ordering platform foodpanda as the CEO andManaging Director of foodpanda Singapore. He also started one more market for foodpanda, with the launch of Hong Kong in May 2014.

Currently he holds the position of Vice President, Business Development in the global managment team for foodpanda overseeing 40+ markets. His mantra on his success is that learning from mistakes allows him to grow. He is determined for foodpanda to cultivate a culture that sees eating in a different light – essentially a grand plan for foodpanda’s quick, fast, and tasty food to reach every home, to give families more time to make meaningful connections at home over a nice delivered meal.

Chinmay attended Nanyang Technological University on SIA-NOL scholarship and earned a degree in Computer Engineering as a major and with a minor in Business.

We spoke with Chinmay to find out his thoughts about speaking at the upcoming SBR Industry Insights Series.

What are your previous experiences and positions held that contributed to who you are as an entrepreneur today?
I did short stints in the corporate world including research and banking that did get me exposed to the structure and management styles but I couldn't see myself having a major impact in any big institution and their respective customers.

Thus I was led to the entrepreneurial world more by my drive and ambition to have some sort of dent in this world. It all kickstarted when I joined Lazada's regional team as part of Rocket Internet and went on to be a founding member of the foodpanda team.

What are your key business philosophies?
I am a strong believer of consumer first strategy. There are times when many concerns such as revenue, growth, profitability do challenge the Ultima focus, but I would always go back to the end consumer.

I would attack the innovator's dilemma by every time given the opportunity of biting the bullet and going for disruption of the industry through innovation if that is better for the consumer, which in many cases can cause a shortfall in revenue, growth and other KPIs.

Can you give us a glimpse of what you will talk about at the SBR Industry Insights Series?
I would like to share my learnings and insights on the F&B industry through my experience building foodpanda for the past 3 years. Just like what we have seen in the travel industry, I really feel that F&B has multiple avenues to improve that can totally disrupt how the respective people involved look at it.

It's an industry which involves every challenge that around the world every firm/startup is trying to solve from logistics, to sales, to customer retention, distribution channels, to sourcing and financial management. Many of these areas are still run in more of an old school way, which is more based on luck than anything.

With this being a multi-million dollar industry, I expect to see many changes to optimise every process involved both qualitatively and more importantly quantitively.