Topline2020: Home Simon-Kucher

Neelie Kroes currently serves on various (inter)national company boards, a.o. Salesforce. Also, she holds non-business positions at Foundation LittleBitz, Rijksmuseum Foundation, Women’s Heart and AMREF Flying Doctors.

Previously Neelie Kroes was Special Envoy for start-ups in the Netherlands and headed the StartupDelta initiative that boosts the Dutch start-up ecosystem and aims to place it among the top 3 ranked competitive ecosystems in Europe. Before that, Neelie Kroes served 11 years as EU Commissioner, the first term as EU Commissioner for Competition Policy and the second term as Commissioner in charge of the Digital Agenda for Europe. The last term she was also Vice-President of the European Commission.

Before the European Commission, Neelie Kroes was President of Nyenrode University from 1991-2000, and served on various company boards, including Lucent Technologies, Volvo and P&O Nedlloyd. From 1982-1989 she served as Minister for Transport, Public Works and Telecommunication in the Netherlands.

Neelie Kroes is an international advocate for the position of women in the tech industry and female entrepreneurship.
In 2007 and 2008 she was listed in the Forbes 100 Most Powerful Women at the 59ste and 47ste position.

Vivek is currently leading Swiggy’s business operations as COO since Jul 2018. Prior to that, he led P&G’s business in East Africa based out of Nairobi. He had been with Procter and Gamble for 20 years in various capacities including Commercial Director in India, Regional Director for a pan Asia team (based in Singapore), Category Leader in the United Kingdom and Team Leader in Thailand.

In Swiggy he has led the effort to scale the company across cities (Swiggy is in 30x the # of cities vs 12 months ago!), and he is also leading the restructure for faster & better decisions so that the company continues to operate like a nimble startup while it scales. Doing this while preserving the good parts of the culture is a challenge that keeps Vivek busy 24x7.

Vivek is passionate about building organizational capability and has a long track record of creating better business results via more capable teams (the slower but better approach!). He has done so in diverse teams spanning >20 nationalities, and has done so in diverse roles (internal consulting assignments, new country startups as well as traditional business unit jobs). He also loves to play at the intersection of technology and business and has been an early adopter and innovator of big data/ analytics across many sales & marketing roles. He is equally wary of the pitfalls of reliance on quantitative data without understanding behavioural economics and cognitive biases. 

Vivek is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Calcutta, and prior to that studied Computer Engineering from Delhi University. He is a regular guest lecturer at his alma mater IIM-C, as well at other premier B-schools across the world where he teaches and shares business expertise.

He has a good view on cross-cultural working which he honed via working abroad and learning 3 foreign languages in addition to the 3 he learnt growing up in India.

Carsten Cramer, born on December 23, 1968 in Münster, began his professional career as Managing Director and Head of Marketing at the traditional football club “Preußen Münster”. He then moved to sports rights marketing agency "Ufa" (later "Sportfive"). There Cramer was first as a Sportfive team leader at Hamburger SV and from 2002 to 2007, finally in the same capacity, at BVB. From 2007 to 2010, Cramer was responsible for the nationwide marketing and sales business as Senior Vice-President at Sportfive headquarter in Hamburg (now "Lagardère Sports"), before joining Borussia Dortmund on October 1, 2010 as Director of Sales & Marketing. For some years, the digitization and internationalization strategy has also been a major focus of his work. His other functions at BVB include the co-management of BVB Merchandising GmbH and Sports & Bytes GmbH as well as the board activity in the BVB Foundation "Leuchte Auf". As of March 1, 2018, Carsten Cramer was appointed as managing director of Borussia Dortmund Geschäftsführungs-GmbH; he has joint representative authority with another managing director and is exempted from the restrictions of § 181 BGB.