From Bay Area to Bengaluru: How Abhijit Bose, WhatsApp CEO, changed his 'worst decision' to the best

WhatsApp India CEO Abhijit Bose left his parents amazed when he decided to move to India 14 years ago. At the time, Bose had quit a high-paying job at Oracle to join Nypay and eventually start his own mobile card payment company, Ezetap.

While Bose remembers leaving Oracle as the “worst financial decision” he ever made, he doesn’t regret the shift to India in the least. “ My wife and I left California 14 years ago because we genuinely believe that the next 100 years will be Asian and Indian-centric,” he said at an inter-collegiate fest in Bengaluru recently. “I thought I was going to be back in San Francisco 10 years ago, but I am still here.”

In an earlier interview, Bose had said, “Someone who lands up from the Bay Area and thinks they can build something disruptive without understanding what is required to scale a business here, will fail. The least resilient of those will be back on a plane within two years.”