“I can’t wear my badge and walk around the stalls anymore”, Snapdeal’s founder Rohit Bansal had wistfully sighed while speaking at a startup conference in Bangalore, and the adoring crowd had laughed. “I get mobbed by people coming up to me with their startup pitches.” But as things have turned out less than 2 days later, Bansal shouldn’t wear his badge around his Snapdeal’s Sarita Vihar office either, because he risks being mobbed in a very real way.
Ever since Snapdeal had put 200 employees on the chopping block, chants of “Rohit Bansal haye haye” and “Kunal Bahl haye haye” have been ringing across its New Delhi campus. Bahl and Bansal are Snapdeal’s founders, and having built one of India’s highest valued companies, are venerated by most of the startup industry. But their former employees haven’t been holding back while trying to cut them down to size.
While on the first day of the agitation saw sloganeering against the founders, things took an ugly turn the next day when protesters drew a crude picture of Kunal Bahl and smeared black paint over it.
The poster shows remarkable likeness of Kunal Bahl throwing little puppet sized employees into the fire (get it? get it?) as they scream PIP. Online commentators were even more brutal.
A Product Care (Operations) employee had this to say.
And here’s what another employee said about his former CEO.
Ouch.
Snapdeal, curiously, has been mum on the protests. On 26th February, as employees had laid siege to its Sarita Vihar office, Rohit Bansal had tweeted about how great products were those that come without manuals. Its Chief Product Officer, Anand Chandrasekaran, who normally tweets quite regularly about the goings on at Snapdeal, is currently tweeting about the US Presidential election.