Choletti was in the role for less than four months. 

In a LinkedIn post announcing his exit, he called WhatApp a “critical lifeline that India runs on” and expressed his belief that WhatsApp had the power to transform digital payments and financial inclusion in the country. 

He probably got the idea from his ex-boss, Abhijit Bose, who’d quit as head of WhatsApp India the previous month. Bose’s LinkedIn post was longer and more rambling, but he also believed in WhatsApp. He wrote that “WhatsApp has the potential and opportunity to change the world”. 

Back in September, Choletti’s predecessor, Manesh Mahatme had also resigned. WhatsApp in a statement said that he’d played a key role in expanding access to WhatsApp payments in India. Mahatme had joined WhatsApp from Amazon, and in a little over a year, decided to quit and go back to… Amazon. Mercifully, he doesn’t seem to be too active on LinkedIn, so I have no idea what he believes. But it appears that he has some significant achievements. 

All of this is damaging, but the big bombshell fell in November, when Ajit Mohan, the head of Meta India, quit his job. Four years ago, Ajit Mohan arrived at Meta from Hotstar—which he’d practically created from scratch. He’s a legend. And last month, he left Meta to take up a position at Snap. Look, I like Snap. But for perspective, last year, Meta’s overall revenues were around US$118 billion. Snap’s corresponding figure was US$4 billion. Of that, Snap’s India unit reported a grand total revenue of Rs 32 crore. That’s a little over US$4 million dollars. 

Meta’s India leaders aren’t just quitting, they are practically fleeing. They are going online and writing epic, passionate prose about how much they believe in the company they are running away from. Some are going back to where they came from. Others are leaving to lead companies a fraction of its size. 

These are smart, accomplished people who appear to be making rational decisions. It feels like they’ve all recently understood something about Meta, WhatsApp, and India. And once they discover this, they decide that despite Meta’s scale, revenue, and potential, it’s not worth staying on any longer. It feels like an uncomfortable secret, which only Meta’s India leaders know. 

We may never know what it is for certain, but I have a theory. 

There are two ways for Meta to succeed in India. It can either invest time and do it slowly, sustainably at a rapid pace. Or it can invest money and er… move fast and break things. 

Meta has chosen the first option. It has opted for time over money. 

And I think India’s leaders believe that Meta has made the wrong choice. 

Let’s dive in.

In fact, the most important person at Meta understands how critical it is for the company.

A lot has been written about Meta’s Icarus-like obsession with the metaverse, but the company has also been talking about WhatsApp’s monetisation for the last few quarters in their earnings calls. They’ve been a bit cagey with the exact numbers though, so chances are it’s not significant yet. But they expect it to be soon. 

People haven’t been paying too much attention to this for a reason, though. It’s been nearly a decade since Meta bought WhatsApp for US$19 billion, and despite a range of half-hearted efforts, they’ve still not figured out how to make money off it. In the past, monetising WhatsApp was optional. Now, there’s greater urgency. The stakes are higher. Apple is slowly killing Meta’s advertising business. Core product growth is flatlining. And the metaverse needs more time and resources. 

The question has always been—how to make money off WhatsApp? First there were subscriptions, then an attempt to insert advertising, then a focus on privacy and encrypted messaging. 

Right now, they have three clear paths. 

And all of them run through India—WhatsApp’s largest market.

First, WhatsApp can make money using payments. 

Well, you know this story. For years and years, as UPI became more persuasive, companies like PhonePe, Amazon, and Google jumped in to build payment apps. Winning market share was expensive. And all of them had one nightmare scenario. They were convinced that WhatsApp was the sleeping giant, and if it woke up and enabled UPI payments—a relatively simple integration—there would be just one winner. 

In fact, and I’m sure this is a coincidence, when WhatsApp started to integrate payments in India, a complicated regulatory obstacle course appeared seemingly out of nowhere. For the last few years, I’ve written about their progress across this course. 

It took them five years to do it. 

Earlier this year, they finally made it to the other side, and could now integrate UPI.

All of their major competitors had had a five-year head start, and yet, many smart people were convinced that WhatsApp would still emerge as a significant player.

All of this probably gives you some sense of what’s going on. To win in payments, WhatsApp needs to invest a ton of money to acquire customers. Which it started, and then scaled back. To win in shopping, well, that also needs a ton of investments, to find all the stores and to integrate them. And WhatsApp for Business needs money to subsidise pricing to claw market share away from SMS in the cheapest telecom market in the world.

Money. Money. Money. 

And right now, Meta does not seem inclined to up its investments in India. Meta has the mindspace to make just one heavy expenditure bet—and that’s the metaverse. 

It has chosen time over money. Slow over fast. Sustainability over growth.

And while we don’t know yet if this is the right call, we know what Meta’s leaders in India believe.