While WhatsApp’s co-founder Brian Acton’s much-hyped exit from Facebook has just marked one year, another executive and old employee of the IM platform has announced his exit just now.
This time, it is Neeraj Arora, the chief business officer of WhatsApp, who made the announcement of his exit today. He said that he would be “taking some time off to recharge and spend time with family.”
He also said that he was ‘deeply indebted’ to both Brian Acton and Jan Koum, “who entrusted me to be their business companion for so many years.”
Arora came to WhatsApp in 2011, leaving Google and was believed to be the replacement of Koum as CEO. However, now given his exit, the situation is uncertain as to who will lead WhatsApp.
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Facebook had acquired the messaging platform in 2014 and promised that the company will continue operating independently under Acton and co-founder Jan Koum, who remained its chief executive officer till this April. Koum had left the company amid disagreement with Facebook over privacy and data concerns.
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Moreover, Instagram, another Facebook subsidiary, is also facing uncertainty with its original founder gone amid the alleged quarrel with the Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Instagram’s co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger also left Facebook in September 2018, a few months after Koum left WhatsApp.
According to a media report, Zuckerberg had begun to assert more control over Instagram, which its cofounders resented.
Koum, in a WhatsApp blog post, wrote that Zuckerberg had no respect for privacy. He said,
These days companies know literally everything about you, your friends, your interests, and they use it all to sell ads. At every company that sells ads, a significant portion of their engineering team spends the day tuning data mining, writing better code to collect your personal data… remember, when advertising is involved, you the user are the product.
Via TechCrunch
