Chennakeshav (Keshav) Adya is a versatile and resourceful business and technology professional with 20+ years of international corporate and entrepreneurial experience in building firms across sectors from a concept and leading global teams of 200+ spanning corporate finance advisory, international growth, M&A, technology delivery and fund-raising for top-flight firms such as Morgan Stanley, Lloyds Banking Group, HSBC, Marks and Spencer, Sainsbury’s, IMS Health, TCS, and Hitachi Rail in 25+ countries globally.
Currently, Keshav is the founding Managing Partner of Adan Corporate, a global Corporate Advisory firm with a team of 45+ senior corporate professionals in 18 countries, focusing on mid-market firms(SMEs) and Private Equity(PE) funds, for their continuous needs of cross-border fund-raising, prospecting investments, M&A, corporate strategy, IPO, risk management, technology and other corporate services.
A decalingual, multi-talented zymurgist, Keshav formulates the vision and converts it into strategy and reality through disciplined execution. He is quite resourceful with a wide variety of personal and professional skills; has a strong and vast industry network at all levels globally; a penchant and reputation for getting things done with empathy, creativity, discipline and humour. He adeptly handles conversations with C-level execs about the 30,000-foot view of the business-technology-operations interface and also easily gets down into the trenches with hands-on development work to ensure delivery
Keshav began his entrepreneurial journey at the age of 9 at school, where he formed a library and by lending out books and reinvesting the returns, managed to put together about 8000 books in 7 years. Subsequently, over the next 20 years, he gained experience across a wide range of industries, geographies, business functions, transactions, deal-types, deal-sizes and in the process, has developed a leadership style of an agile-athlete to handle ambiguity by constantly learning from successes and failures; setting up processes and systems to scale; building multi-tiered leadership teams; revising risk appetite; resolving multiple constraints and dependencies creatively and frugally; and using effective planning, organizing, prioritising and communication skills.
As a leader, he has grown teams from 2 to 200+ and is skilled in directing teams through the "Unknown"; by instilling a common vision in complex multi-disciplinary matrix structures, uniting diverse agendas to achieve common goals, defusing difficult interpersonal situations and creating a trust-based relationship. He has scouted, built and trained global high-performing teams and introduced sustainable governance structures to ensure transparency, accountability and growth.
Keshav is also an Entrepreneur Mentor in Residence (EMiR) at London Business School and is supporting the school's experiential entrepreneurship activities for students and alumni who are interested in pursuing a career in entrepreneurship, whether launching or growing their own ventures. He is a board advisor to a number of businesses and is an active angel investor and offers unique insights into what it takes to start businesses from a concept and scale them to the next level.
Keshav holds an MBA from London Business School and a Bachelor's degree in Mechanical engineering from Visveswaraya Technological University, India.