Winner. Business Leader of the Year 2023

Ankur Goel

Position: Head of Business Strategy & Operations
Company: Confluent
City: Foster City, California
Country: USA
Economic/Business Sector: Software & IT Services

Ankur Goel holds a Master's degree in Management Science and Engineering (MS&E) with a major in Economics and Finance from Stanford University, CA, USA, and a Bachelor of Technology in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi, India.

He was selected as a Merit Scholarship Holder by the Government of France for one year of studies in France, being 1 of 5 out of 200 applicants.

While pursuing a Master’s degree in economics and finance, he founded "Brainstorming India" - a student body to promote policy discourse related to India on campus. Much of his work with Brainstorming India was a result of his summer internship with the Committee of Infrastructure, Planning Commission, Government of India, where Ankur worked to turn strategy into action.

He started his career in 2010 as a Consultant at McKinsey & Co, advising clients on various strategic and operational questions. He contributed a lot to the company's development, spearheading McKinsey's push into developing expertise in building/partnering with data-oriented solutions, and led the NA operations for one of their first investments.

In 2017, Ankur took a new role at LinkedIn as the Head of Business Operations supporting the 1000-person Global Customer Organization. He worked closely with the Chief Product Officer in rolling out uniform customer experience across various suites of products.

Since 2019, Ankur Goel has been working for Confluent, where he is responsible for the end-to-end execution of x-functional & highest-priority company-wide strategic initiatives, conceptualizing and implementing process efficiency & operational excellence-related initiatives.

Ankur Goel is an experienced growth executive who has helped scale multiple product led/SaaS companies in his 10+ years as an operator and advisor. He has outstanding business achievements, having made a great contribution to the development of the companies in which he worked.

Most recently, Ankur built and led the Go-to-Market (GTM)/ Product Strategy and Business Operations team at Confluent and helped scale the company 6x revenue growth leading multiple product and strategic initiatives. His work included incubating the self-serve business and leading Confluent's transformation from an on-premise to a cloud business model.

Ankur was the thought leader behind much of Confluent's international success in recent years. He successfully expanded the organization's international presence, taking its client partnerships portfolio from 5 to 20 countries and expanding into new markets.

In addition, he spearheaded Confluent's evolution in GTM strategy from being subscription-led to consumption-led business with hybrid product led and sales-assisted selling motion. Also, he has worked closely with the CFO and CEO to help Confluent transition from a private to a public company.