In this episode of the INSIGHTS podcast, we have with us Neeraj Arora, who played a pivotal role at Whatsapp as an early employee and then as the Chief Business Officer.
We hear from Neeraj on his early career days, non-obvious career moves, learnings from the Whatsapp journey, the multi-billion dollar Facebook- Whatsapp deal, his experiences from investing in India, and finally some advice for startup founders.
In the podcast, Neeraj gives us a glimpse into what made Whastapp stand out as he chose 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 fifty-five 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
We’re looking for the next generation of successful Indian marketplaces. If you’re an early-stage marketplace founder, apply now here or learn more about the #DecodingMarketplaces Startup Hunt.
We’d love to hear about your experiences with marketplaces. Let us share our learnings and build a better and stronger ecosystem. Write to us at seedtoscale@accel.com to be a part of the Accel family.
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We’re building Passionfroot 1, an operating system for creators to manage their business.
We’re based in Europe and raised our $ 3.4m pre-seed round from Creandum and US angels such as Vlad (Webflow) and creators like Ali Abdaal.As we’re creating a new category and as the creator economy is global and mostly online, we’re building from Day 1 a global company and product that helps creators monetize around the world.
This brings a lot of complexities especially in terms of payments and taxes as our early users are based both in Europe and the US and deal with cross-border transactions.What are Do’s and Dont’s for European startups who have a global ambition and build products for a global customer base from Day 1. Anything you would do differently?
Thanks @pjbouten! Love how you’ve thought about incrementally shaping a category with a focus on product and service, and only then thinking about getting the message out there vs the other way around.
And totally agree on the distinctions and overlaps both self-serve and enterprise motions share.
Thanks, PJ, for taking the time to address questions from the great vantage of shaping Showpad into a global, enterprise SaaS brand!