When Neeraj Arora, Vice-President, Whatsapp, met the founders of the mobile messenger service for the first time, his first thought was that ‘they were crazy’. “But then I was convinced about it and they had a mission; which was to connect people in the world,” he said.
Interacting with students at the Indian School of Business (ISB) here on Tuesday at a programme, Mr. Arora recalled how he had to convince the founders of Whatsapp to hire him. “I was a business guy, and they are engineers. So my pitch to them was - ‘all the things you don’t want to do’, give it to me,” he mentioned, further stating that had his move to the company not worked out well, he would not have regretted it.
An alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology – Bombay (IIT-B) and ISB, Mr. Arora said that the first set of users are the most difficult to get for app developers. “Initially, the founders replied to every email they got about Whatsapp from customers. We get about 50,000 mails everyday, and there out of our 80 employees, 30 are for customer support,” he explained.
Mr. Arora said that social media giant Facebook’s acquisition of Whatsapp recently will not change the app much. “There is no plan to integrate it with social features, and not many people are asking for it. Also, we are conscious of what we ask, as we only know the phone numbers of customers. We don’t even store the messages that are sent across,” he stated.
That India has a huge presence on the internet and social media, means one can build a service only for users in the country, said Mr. Arora. “Five years ago, domestic consumption was not much. There is also no reason why the next Facebook can’t come out of India,” he observed.
