[Podcast] Neeraj Arora on what he learned from his WhatsApp journey

In this episode of the INSIGHTS podcast, Neeraj Arora, who played a pivotal role at WhatsApp as an early employee and then as the Chief Business Officer, discusses his career trajectory.

Neeraj talks about his early career days, making non-obvious career moves, his learning from the WhatsApp journey, the multi-billion dollar Facebook-WhatsApp deal, his experiences of investing in India, and finally, some advice for startup founders.

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In the podcast, Neeraj gives a glimpse into what made WhastApp stand out while choosing his next move after Google, and walks us through some of the key decisions they took at WhatsApp that shaped their success story.

To learn more about Neeraj’s story and the key founder traits that helped Jan and Brian scale WhatsApp to over a billion monthly active users with a team size of just 55 people, tune in to the latest episode of the Insights Podcast by Accel.

Notes

03:20 — Early life and career

13:00 — The WhatsApp journey

19:22 — Rapid Fire: first-time situations

24:39 — The Facebook-WhatsApp deal

28:49 — Winning traits of Jan and Brian

34:08 — Return to investing

42:08 — Rapid Fire: fun questions

Anand Daniel is a seed/early-stage venture investor with Accel Partners.