Neerja Arora, WhatsApp's chief business officer, is the latest Facebook executive to step down the facebook cluster of companies in the last few months. In a Facebook post, Arora said he is "going to be taking some time off to recharge and spend time with family," and thanked WhatsApp co-founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton. Koum stepped down as WhatsApp CEO earlier this year over disagreements with Facebook executives over privacy and encryption. Acton had left WhatsApp a year ago, in September 2017, to start his own non-profit. However, a few months later, he urged people to #deletefacebook on his Twitter account. The co-founders' departure reportedly boiled down to disagreements over the monetization options for WhatsApp which has been anti-ads since the beginning. It is time. #deletefacebook — Brian Acton (@brianacton) March 20, 2018 Arora had been with WhatsApp since 2011, when the company was just two years old. He was with the corporate development team at Google and a part of several acquisitions, where he served for four years. Prior to that, he worked at Times Internet. Until earlier this year, he served on Paytm's board of directors for close to three years. Note that WhatsApp has just hired its first-ever India head — former Ezetap founder Abhijit Bose — after immense pressure from the Union Government to bring the spread of misinformation on WhatsApp under control. The India office will be based out of Gurgaon, and it will WhatsApp first office outside of the US.
