ISB alum set to reap millions in WhatsApp acquisition

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Neeraj Arora, an alum of the Indian School of Business, India, is part of the core team at WhatsApp where he works as Vice-President, Business Development. With WhatsApp getting acquired for $16 Billion, he might soon be a very rich man.

Neeraj Arora says he is responsible for “all things business at WhatsApp” and considers himself “generally a good guy” on his website. His friends and batchmates agree, at Indian School of Business, where he earned a management degree.

From Times Internet to Google to WhatsApp, Arora has had an uncanny ability to identify opportunities, said Mohit Garg, co-founder of training software firm MindTickle and a batchmate at ISB. “He is well connected and this has helped him move up the ladder. He’s also very unassuming and down-to-earth.”

With Facebook buying WhatsApp for $19 billion, Arora, the vice-president for business development, is likely to be a very prosperous man indeed although everyone is tightlipped about just how prosperous.

“I feel great” was all that Arora, 35, would tell ET about the financial implications of the deal for him.

“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, who was also the president of the entrepreneurship and venture capital club at ISB.

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.

“It was not an engineering role and meant forging crucial connections with people in the Valley.” 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 most costly 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.

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