The head of WhatsApp India, Abhijit Bose, and Director of Public Policy Meta, Rajiv Agarwal, quit on Tuesday. This comes a week after the former head of Meta, Ajit Mohan, announced that he is quitting to head India operations for Snap Inc. Shivnath Thukral, who serves as the Director of Public Policy, WhatsApp, will now be the Director of Public Policy Meta from Tuesday.
The spate of resignations at the top CXO levels at Meta comes at a time when Meta globally laid off 11,000 employees worldwide as part of the great tech layoffs that have gripped the tech industry worldwide. However, the company said the exits are not linked to the layoffs.
In his farewell post on Linkedin, Bose said: “It has been a tough week for all our team at WhatsApp, as we had to say goodbyes to many amazing teammates last week. Amid all of this, I just shared some news with our WhatsApp and India teams. It has been planned for a while, but given the events last week, we wanted to hold this back so we could focus on supporting those impacted last week.”
Bose added that after four years at WhatsApp, he has taken a call to move on from Meta to further pursue entrepreneurial ambitions after a break.
“On the business side, the team delivered significant revenue and volume growth in our business, we launched Payments and also helped evolve our API-based business strategy with news use cases like JioMart. The combination of the Business API on the Cloud with Payments can transform the small business economy, and I hope that the early use cases that have been lit up in India, will continue to serve as a template for many sectors within India and across the globe,” Bose concluded.
“Rajiv Aggarwal has decided to step down from his role at Meta to pursue another opportunity. Over the last year, he has played an important role in leading our policy-led initiatives in areas such as user-safety, privacy and scaling up programs like GOAL to drive digital inclusion in the country. He has also been leading proactive engagement with critical policy and regulatory stakeholders. We are grateful for his contributions and wish him very best for the future,” said Manish Chopra, Director, Partnerships, India, Meta
“We are also announcing the appointment of Shivnath Thukral as our Director, Public Policy for Meta in India. Shivnath has been an integral part of our Public Policy team since 2017. In his new role, Shivnath will define and lead important policy development initiatives across our apps – Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp – in India,” added Chopra.
