The founder split and culture shift at Udaan

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Editor's note: For months now, two of the three co-founders at celebrated B2B e-commerce startup Udaan have been missing in action. According to four people in the know, former Flipkart executives Amod Malviya and Sujeet Kumar have entirely moved away from operations, though they remain on the board. The six-year-old Udaan is now completely being run by their co-founder, Vaibhav Gupta, another Flipkart alum. Gupta took over as CEO of Udaan in September last year, before which  the startup was jointly run by the three founders, with no one chief executive. By design, decision-making was meant to be decentralized, with Malviya leading technology, Kumar handling operations and Gupta in charge of overall business and finance. That didn’t last and “at the moment, Udaan is a one-man show now,” says one of the four people cited above, all of whom asked not to be named.  The absence of Malviya and Kumar from Udaan follows a prolonged and extensive disagreement between the founders over their plans for the company. A massive valuation, the pandemic and growing competition meant the company and its investors had …