After the exit of Jan Koum as Whatsapp CEO on April 30, the market is buzzing with the news regarding the new CEO of the tech giant.
Reports are being rumored that an Indian employee working at WhatsApp, who’s also a former Google corporate development manager “Neeraj Arora” is being considered for the top position. According to a report by TechCrunch, “One possible candidate for the CEO role would be WhatsApp business executive Neeraj Arora, a former Google corporate development manager who’s been with WhatsApp since 2011 — well before the Facebook acquisition.” The source described him as the #4 person in the company’s hierarchy.
Neeraj Arora is currently “All Things Business Guy” at WhatsApp and based in San Francisco Bay Area. He began his career with Accellion, a cloud solutions company in 2000, soon after graduating from IIT. Arora was one of the earliest engineers at the company, building pieces of the core technology. Arora previously worked with Paytm, Google and Times Internet.
He is a mergers-and-acquisitions veteran who joined WhatsApp from Google in 2011, where he largely managed the business side of the mobile-messaging app, according to a report by news agency Press Trust of India.
If Arora is chosen for the hot seat as CEO of WhatsApp, he would join other prominent Indians who secured big tech jobs like Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Google’s Sundar Pichai, and Adobe’s Shantanu Narayen.
The news about the new CEO of WhatsApp floated after the exit of the tech giant Co-founder Mr. Koum, who announced his exit from WhatsApp on April 30, said on social network Facebook:
“I’m leaving at a time when people are using WhatsApp in more ways than I could have imagined. The team is stronger than ever and it’ll continue to do amazing things. I’m taking some time off to do things I enjoy outside of technology, such as collecting rare air-cooled Porsches, working on my cars and playing ultimate Frisbee.”
Startups from 2014: What have tech founders learned whilst hustling for the past four years?