Facebook Messenger to be headed by Indian-origin exec

Chandrasekaran’s India ties are of import as Facebook is now locked out of China, making India a crucial market for growth.

Facebook has roped him to give its Messenger a push in India.

In the past, Chandrasekaran has worked in the capacity of chief product officer at Snapdeal, he was also the chief product officer at Bharti Airtel. Chandrasekaran joined Yahoo in 2011 as senior director for mobile products and worked on mobile search and Yahoo Answers. He departed the company in recent months. He was hired by Snapdeal a year later, where he was behind the revamped version of its website and app, as well as the integration of Freecharge – the mobile payments firm Snapdeal had acquired in April 2015, according to Mint. Anand, on a post mentioned that, I am super excited to share that building on learning and experiences. Terming his stint in India as “most intense, humbling and incredible periods”, Chandrasekaran drew parallels between the Silicon Valley and the Indian start-up ecosystem.

Chandrasekaran holds a M.S.in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and a B.S.in Communications Engineering from PSG College of Technology, India. This initiative of Facebook has been taken as they believe India is the second largest user base country and it has maximum numbers of users of Facebook. Majority of these users access the platform from their mobile phones.

Facebook, which is working on ways to further enhance the Messenger offering on the mobile platform, is also looking for avenues of monetisation through the product.

Recently, Facebook had announced bots for Messenger, allowing businesses to automate responses and some services.