Building Exceptional Leaders — Wharton

Alka Gupta

Board Director, Former Tech Entrepreneur, President, and Fortune 500 Exec

Alka Gupta is a public company board director, venture investor, former tech entrepreneur, and Fortune 500 exec with deep experience in digital transformation, fintech, marketplaces, regtech, and identity. She has been at the beginning of some of the most significant disruptions and platforms — including blockchain, digital payments, ecommerce, mobile, digital advertising, and search — at both early stage and public companies globally. Gupta has operated and built revenue in B2B and B2C markets across more than 10 countries in Asia, Europe, and Latin America, building an understanding of internationalization and localization success strategies and tactics.

She is a venture partner at 8vdX, a venture fund focused on the Y Combinator incubator, and was previously with Fin Capital, a $1.2B fintech B2B-focused global fund. Gupta is also a limited partner and on the Investment Committee at Penn’s own Chestnut Ventures. Before venture, she was co-founder and president of GlobaliD, a venture-backed, portable, and interoperable identity platform leveraging blockchain. She built the company from inception and led its growth, building the team; releasing the first product; establishing an eastern European product-development center; and signing digital wallet customers working with the likes of Ripple, Uphold, and TransferGo. Prior to this, she was with eBay/PayPal (Nasdaq: EBAY) as head of strategy for eBay Marketplaces. She led the development of strategy — including moves in fulfillment, local delivery, expanded payment systems, large retail omni-channel with GSI Commerce and Magento, small business onboarding, and cross-border transactions — contributing to revenue growth of $9B in 2010 to $16B in 2013 and user growth rates of more than 40 percent. She developed market strategies for select Asian markets and Latin America, including partnership and ecosystem strategies in those countries.

Gupta’s initial entrepreneurial journey started at Norwest Ventures-funded, Retrevo (Acq. BN), an e-commerce business focused on the consumer-electronics buying experience. As VP of business development, she brought in the first revenue and strategic partnerships, working with the likes of PCWorld and Yahoo Shopping, during which time users increased by more than 400 percent. Retrevo was recognized by Time magazine as the Best Shopping Website at the time and was acquired by Barnes & Noble. Her formative years were at Lycos (Nasdaq: LCOS, Acq.: Telefonica,) one of the first and fastest search engines to IPO. Gupta was general manager of a global suite of products, during which time the company grew revenue from $50M to $800M over four years and grew users by more than 300 percent. Eventually, as VP of corporate development and strategy, she led strategy and acquisitions, and she guided Lycos through its divestments and $12.5B acquisition by Telefonica.

Gupta is driven by a commitment to democratization of access and empowering populations via technology. She earned an MBA from the Wharton School and a BS (cum laude) from Case Western Reserve University. She is board-directorship certified by the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD.) Gupta serves on the board of directors for National Bank Holdings Corporation (Nyse: NBHC, Risk & Audit, Comp, and Tech Committees), Dwolla Payments (Foundry and Union Square Ventures), and Digital Frontiers (chairperson), and previously served on the board of MoneyGram (Nasdaq: MGI, Compliance and Ethics Committee, Acq: MDP). She speaks frequently on digital transformation, fintech, blockchain, globalization, and her journey scaling technologies. Gupta serves as an advisor at University of California, Berkeley’s SkyDeck; advisory board member at Case Western Reserve University’s xLab; and expert in resident at the Wharton School’s Venture Lab at the University of Pennsylvania.