Chonira Sidu Ponnappa

Chonira Sidu Ponnappa from Kodagu is a tech entrepreneur who currently heads the Gojek India Engineering Centre. He has immense passion for technology, innovation, risk-taking, and entrepreneurship. He has deep experience creating high performance engineering and product organizations in India and SEA that can ship beautiful products at scale. His last start-up, C42 Engineering, was acquired in 2015 by GO-JEK Indonesia (now Pt. AKAB), one of the fastest growing start-ups in the world and Indonesia’s first unicorn, growing from ~500 orders/day to 3 million orders/day in 36 months and over $5B in GMV.

Education

• Schooling- The Frank Anthony Public School
• Engineering-Computer science- Vishveshvaraya Technological University

Achievements

A student of hypergrowth, and post acquisition by GO-JEK, helped grow his 35 member startup team into an 700 member product and engineering org across 3 countries that simultaneously:
* shipped 18 products in 18 months
* reduced downtimes by 1000X
* scaled the stack from 4K daily completed orders to 1M daily completed orders in 18 months
* Currently handles a stack that processes over 100M orders per months, which is over 500K completed orders per engineer

He is also a trustee of the Emerging Technology Trust, an non-profit he helped found in 2010 that supports the Indian open source community, and runs three of the largest tech conferences in the country.

Experience

GO-JEK

• He is the Member of Board of Directors-Serving on the Board of Directors of PT. AKAB, GO-JEK’s parent company.
• He was the Title Managing Director, GO-JEK India – Bangalore-Building and scaling GO-JEK’s delivery capabilities in India.
• Title SVP Engineering-Singapore
• Title Member, Office of the CTO
• Title Head Of Marketing,Bangalore, India-Building a strong employer brand in a market where we need attract the best talent without any of our products being live.
• TitleHead, People Operations (Tech)
• TitleHead, Data Engineering
• TitleHead, Software Engineering
• TitleHead, Global Talent Acquisition (Tech)

Trustee-Emerging Technology Trust

• The Emerging Technology Trust is a non-profit that focuses on creating opportunities and events to promote open source contribution, programming languages, tools and methodologies in India. Worked hard to bring in the best speakers and connect them with the Indian developer community.The ETT currently runs three national conferences and one regional conference:* RubyConf India (the national Ruby programming language conference, founded 2010)
  * DevOps Days India (the national DevOps conference, founded 2012)
  * GopherCon India (the national Go programming language conference, founded 2015)
  * DeccanRuby Pune (a regional Ruby programming language conference, founded 2012)

C42 Engineering

• Title Founder & CEO-C42 Engineering is a boutique software product engineering firm based out of Bangalore, India. It was acquired by Indonesian start-up GO-JEK in 2015, with the founding team joining GO-JEK’s board of directors. GO-JEK went on to grow 900X in 18 months and become Indonesia’s first unicorn. Worked with ambitious start-ups and enterprises to iteratively architect, develop, deploy and scale their core product offerings. Also coached teams to help them identify and adopt software engineering practices that enable them to deliver high quality software, continuously.Their clientele include a top management strategy firm, a top technology consulting firm and several noted start-ups in the Bay Area, India and South East Asia.
• Title Founder & Director-Apr 2010 – Sep 2015