Neeraj Arora describes himself on Linkedin as "all things business at WhatsApp!". He could soon change that description. Arora is said to be in the reckoning for the top job at WhatsApp after its co-founder and CEO Jan Koum resigned on April 30 from Facebook, which owns the world's largest messaging app.
"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. A source described him as the #4 at WhatsApp," techcrunch.com reported a day after Koum's resignation.
If Arora is made the CEO of WhatsApp, he would join a league of Indians at the top of world's biggest tech companies such as Sunder Pichai at Google and Satya Nadella at Microsoft.
Arora, an IIT Delhi graduate, who studied management at the Indian School of Business (ISB), considers himself "generally a good guy" on a website. His friends and batchmates at Indian School of Business, where he earned a management degree, agree.
From Times Internet to Google to WhatsApp, Arora has had an uncanny ability to identify opportunities, Mohit Garg, co-founder of training software firm MindTickle and a batchmate at ISB, told ET in an interview in 2016. "He is well-connected and this has helped him move up the ladder. He's also very unassuming and down-to-earth."
"His career really took off with Google, where he was also thinking of either launching a startup or funding one," said Shameek Chakravarty, director of product management at Yahoo. When Arora went to Mountain View, his role involved hunting down startups for Google and that meant meeting and connecting with numerous people in the Silicon Valley to understand what was happening in the market, Chakravarty said.
He joined WhatsApp in November 2011 when it had about 10 employees. He was specifically recruited for his corporate development background at Google. Text messages are the costliest form of data transfer and his role meant travelling to different geographies to connect with phone firms to negotiate SMS rates (users get an SMS after downloading WhatsApp; 450 million users means 450 million SMSes) and striking distribution arrangements and partnerships with them.
According to a report, Arora played a big role in WhatsApp’s success in India. He reportedly convinced Reliance Communications and Tata Docomo to bundle unlimited use of WhatsApp for a monthly charge.
Arora was also on the board of directors of digital wallet company Paytm for nearly three years before he joined WhatsApp.