The commercial director of WhatsApp leaves – TechCrunch



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About a year after WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton makes its highly publicized Facebook exit, another executive and former employee of the messaging platform does the same. Neeraj Arora, commercial director of WhatsApp, announced today that it "will take time to recharge and spend time with his family."

Facebook acquired WhatsApp for $ 19 billion in 2014 and is committed to allowing the messaging giant to continue operating independently under Acton and its co-founder Jan Koum, who has been the CEO until then. In that he abruptly leaves his concerns about privacy and data in April. Arora, who joined WhatsApp in 2011 from Google, would have been the favorite to replace Koum as CEO. With him by the door, it's unclear who will be called to lead WhatsApp .

In his announcement today, Arora stated that he was "deeply indebted" to Acton and Koum, "who have entrusted me to be their companion. business for so many years ".

Facebook affiliates WhatsApp and Instagram are both in a time of change following the exits of their original founders, which would be due to arguments with the CEO of social media giant Mark Zuckerberg .

In what was one of the biggest technological stories of 2018, Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger have announced that they were leaving Facebook several years after the company had acquired their photo sharing application for $ 1 billion. They announced the news in September, just months after Koum's withdrawal from WhatsApp.

Systrom and Zuckerberg of Instagram also explained how the application should be executed. According to the New York Times, Zuckerberg has begun, over the past year, to exercise more control over Instagram, upsetting its leaders.

Koum, for his part, reportedly wrote in a suppressed WhatsApp blog post since Zuckerberg and Facebook no longer respected privacy: "Nowadays, businesses literally know everything about you, your friends, your interests, and use them to sell the ads. In every company that sells ads, a significant portion of its engineering team spends its days optimizing data mining, writing better code to collect your personal data … Do not Forget that when it's an advertisement, you're the product.

According to Josh Constine of TechCrunch, Koum was unhappy "about how Facebook would monetize its application and its impact on privacy." Acton and Koum have both left Facebook before being fully invested in the multibillion dollar acquisition, which means they've chosen to lose millions of dollars rather than staying employed on Facebook .

The release of Arora is further evidence that Facebook has entered a new era, in which the company's acquisition strategy could be seriously threatened with long-term damage.

You can read Arora's full post below.

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