Lufthansa
  • Runway to Success Season 3

About the Program

Runway to Success TV series is an unprece-
dented reality programme that celebrates the spirit of Indian entrepreneurship.

Gallery

As a curtain raiser to Season 3, we bring you glimpses of our previous seasons.

Business Development Manager

Arun Chandra Mohan,

Co-Founder at Jabong.com

Jabong.com is an Indian fashion and lifestyle e-commerce portal. A young and vibrant company that aims to provide good quality branded products, Jabong.com caters to the fashion needs of men, women and kids across footwear, apparel, jewellery and accessories. It strives to achieve the highest level of customer satisfaction possible with a cutting edge e-commerce platform, highly experienced buying team, agile warehouse systems and state of the art customer care centre. Together these provide its customer with a broader selection of products, superior buying experience, on-time delivery and quick resolution of concerns.

Mohan believes that the e-commerce industry in India is at an inflection point and that the best is yet to come. With the internet penetration increasing exponentially, and with the evolution of consumer choices, people are getting comfortable buying online. At Jabong.com, he is constantly looking at how to provide exceptional quality.

Before founding Jabong.com, he was a Venture Partner with Rocket Internet. Arun has worked across Central Europe, Middle East, and Africa as a Consultant for IDC, where he helped high tech companies devise and implement growth strategies for emerging markets.

Arun completed his bachelors in Commerce Honors from Loyola College and MBA from INSEAD.

Chief Public Relation Officer

GV Prasad

Co-Chairman & CEO at Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories

He leads the core team at Dr. Reddy’s that has contributed significantly to its transformation from a mid-sized domestic operation into a worldwide pharmaceutical conglomerate. He is the architect of Dr. Reddy’s successful Global Generics and Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient (API) strategies, as well as our foray into Biosimilars and Differentiated Formulations.

Prasad’s emphasis on innovation, transparency, business ethics and flatter corporate structures has helped shape Dr. Reddy’s into what it is today - an organisation of global repute, recognized industry-wide for our scientific innovation, progressive people practices and high standards of corporate governance. He is driving the necessary imperatives for Dr. Reddy’s to engage even more deeply with the human aspects of health. Towards this objective, he is engaged with strengthening the company’s research and development capabilities, supporting progressive people practices aligned with our goals and building a holistic culture of operational excellence. Prasad believes in sustainable manufacturing practices and it was under his leadership that Dr. Reddy’s pioneered the adoption of green technologies and processes. Today, environmental goals are built into operational approaches, thereby reducing the company’s ecological footprint.

Along with his responsibilities as Co-Chairman and CEO, Prasad finds the time and energy to work on other causes that he holds dear. He serves on the boards of the ‘Worldwide Fund for Nature’ (WWF) - India as well as the ‘Acumen Fund’, a non-profit venture that uses entrepreneurial approaches to eliminate global poverty. As the Chairman of Dr. Reddy’s Institute of Life Sciences and a board member of premier institutes like Indian School of Business and Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, Prasad also works to enhance higher education in India.

Prasad’s leadership has been widely recognized. He was declared India’s Best CEO in the Large Company category by Business Today in 2014 and India Business Leader of the Year by CNBC Asia in 2015. A Chemical Engineer from the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, Prasad also holds a Master’s degree in Industrial Administration from Purdue University, USA.

Marketing Executive

Aruna Jayanthi

Chief Executive Officer of Capgemini India

Capgemini India is one of the biggest business units of Capgemini group. Aruna oversees the operations across all the business units – Consulting, Technology services and Outsourcing services in India with a focus to increase the integration and performance of over 40,000 growing employee base.

Prior to assuming this role in January 2011, Aruna was the Global Delivery Officer for Capgemini Outsourcing, where she improved quality, productivity and profitability of Capgemini’s outsourcing operations worldwide. Aruna has over 2 decades experience in the IT services industry and has worked in both multinationals and pure-play companies. She has worked out of Europe and North America and continues to travel extensively meeting customers, analysts and Capgemini staff, getting a pulse of customer expectations and market direction.

Within a short period of being appointed CEO, Aruna has quickly made her mark in the world of Indian business. She was ranked 3rd in Fortune India’s list of 50 Most Powerful Women in Business 2012 and 4th in 2011. Aruna has also featured prominently in Business Today’s list of Most Powerful Women for two consecutive years 2011 and 2012.

Chief Executive Officer

Vijay Shekhar Sharma

Founder & CEO of One97/Paytm

One97, one of India’s largest growing mobile Internet & mobile commerce company, delivers mobile content and commerce services to millions of mobile consumers through India’s most widely deployed telecom applications cloud platform. Paytm, One97's flagship brand, is India's largest digital goods and mobile commerce platform - inspired and driven by a commitment to great consumer experience. Paytm is also a leading payment solutions provider to ecommerce merchants using its RBI approved semi-closed wallet.

Headquartered in New Delhi, One97 is more than 1200 people strong with regional offices in Mumbai, Pune, Chennai, Bangalore and Kolkata with global presence in Africa, Europe, Middle East and Southeast Asia. It is backed by marquee investors like SAIF Partners, Intel Capital, Sapphire Ventures and Silicon Valley Bank.

One97 and Paytm have received various awards and accolades. Among them, One97 was featured among Delhi/NCR’s Top 50 Brands and also on Inc. India Innovative100 list. Paytm in turn was Gold Winner at the MMA Smarties in the Mobile App category and Silver Winner in the mCommerce category. It has also been recognized as the ‘Most Innovative Startup of the Year’ in 2012.

On a personal level too, Vijay has received several accolades including being recognized among the ‘New Heroes of India Inc’ by CNBC, declared as ‘Mobile Entrepreneur of the Year’ at the WAT Awards, as well as ‘VAS Person of the Year’ at the IAMAI’s India Digital Awards.

Beyond his focus on building his own company, Vijay invests in early stage mobile Internet startups from the One97 Mobility Fund.

An avid admirer of great design, Vijay believes his ultimate moment is yet to arrive. He says and that too with a straight face, if not in his current job, he would have been singing along with Bono.

Chief Executive Officer

Jawed Habib

Founder of Jawed Habib Hair & Beauty

A renowned hair stylist known for his association with fashion and film celebrities, Jawed Habib is a hair expert, author of best-selling hair books, hair consultant, architect of a unique range of hair products and winner of numerous tresses awards.

Apart from his celebrity image, Habib is an entrepreneur and business pioneer who has 400 salons across 92 cities in India. He has set himself and ambitious goal of opening 2,500 more salons in another five years. In addition, Jawed Habib and Beauty offers varied products and services including professional hair styling salons, professional hair academy, hair styling tools and beauty products under diverse and exclusive brand names such as Jawed Habib Hair and Beauty, Hair Xpresso, Bevels, Hair Yoga and Jawed Habib Academy.

Chief Executive Officer

V.S.S. Mani

Founder & CEO of Just Dial

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A man brimming with ideas, grit and passion, VSS Mani has revolutionized the process of searching for information. While the western world was still waking up to the concept of internet, Mani, way back in 1989, foresaw a flourishing business of ‘search’ that was aided by technology.

Mani has evolved with the changing eco-system and has recognized and capitalized on market transitions before they happen and adapted the business model accordingly. Mani realised that with constant connectivity and major behavioural shifts from voice to computers to laptops and now with smartphones, users would soon want more out of a search engine. Simply disseminating information will not suffice; and he thus envisioned a platform to make search more relevant by making it more accessible and actionable by offering transaction-enabled tabs and launched the revolutionary new ‘Search Plus’ Engine. The idea is one of a kind across the globe and the entire concept is based on what Mani aptly calls ‘Online to Offline’.

Justdial is transitioning from being purely a provider of local search and related information to being an enabler of such transactions. These services are aimed at making several day-to-day tasks conveniently actionable and accessible to the users and provide an online platform to thousands of SME’s to get them discovered and transacted. Justdial hit the headlines last year with its successful IPO, which got subscribed over 12.7 times, making it the biggest IPO in the internet space in India. Today, Justdial is amongst the Top 100 valued companies.

Mani has been lauded with several awards, including ‘Entrepreneur of the Year’ in the Services segment (E&Y Entrepreneur Awards, 2013) and the ‘Digital Person of the Year’ by IAMAI (Internet & Mobile Association of India).

Chief Executive Officer

Raghav Bahl

Founder & Chairman of Quintillion Media

Often called the ‘Rupert Murdoch of India’, Raghav Bahl is a journalist, entrepreneur, media baron and among the most respected business leaders of India. He is also an author & editor on economic policy & global affairs and recognized as a media industry expert.

As the founder & former MD of Network 18, he built a highly diversified media company, which has news operations at its core, and layered with a rich assortment of entertainment and film properties.

Raghav began his media journey while still in college. As a student at St. Stephens College, his passion for news compelled him to create TV programmes and moderate debates for the state-owned network. Not seeing much opportunity for journalists in India then, he decided to pursue an MBA from the University of Delhi and work as a management consultant for AF Ferguson and American Express Bank.

The television bug, however, continued to spur him on and he kept making TV shows in his spare time. When satellite TV arrived in 1991, he invested USD 2,000 to make two pilot programmes, one in news and one entertainment, and sent them—via video cassette!—to the BBC and Star TV in Hong Kong. They both wanted them. He also began making shows for CNBC Asia, so when they decided to launch a 24-hour business news channel in India, Raghav was a natural partner for them.

In 1993, Raghav launched his own television production company, shortly after the Indian government privatised the industry as part of its push for economic growth. Today, Network 18 is one of India’s biggest media conglomerates, with nearly 35 TV channels, 13 websites, a portfolio of niche magazines, and a movie-production company. Its current market capitalisation is well over a billion dollars. The company has formed successful joint ventures with CNBC, Forbes, A&E Networks, Viacom, and Time Warner, with whom it runs India’s leading English news channel, CNN-IBN. It operates the country’s leading Hindi news channel, IBN7, and is growing in regional markets as well.

In an atypical move for an Indian business owner, Raghav recently sold his interests in Network 18 in an American style ‘founder’s exit’ and founded Quintillion Media, his dream project of digital content creation and distribution. The company’s first offering is The Quint – a mobile first digital news Platform - www.thequint.com. He also intends to spend more time in the public sphere—advocating right-of-center public policies, and writing books and op-eds.

Raghav has been felicitated at various national and international forums. In 1994, the World Economic Forum called him a Global Leader of Tomorrow and he won India’s Sanskriti Award for Journalism. Ernst & Young named Raghav the Entrepreneur of the Year for Business Transformation in 2007. And in 2011, he won the All India Management Association’s Media Person of the Year award, as well as the Bombay Management Association’s prize for Entrepreneur of the Year. He was also bestowed an honorary degree from Amity University in Uttar Pradesh.