The new face of Facebook
Facebook is transforming into a more local, more Indian company focussed on connecting friends and family, and small businesses, Mohan tells Vanita
Ajit Mohan is looking relaxed, albeit older. Maybe it is the pepper beard he’s added. The 45-year old head of Facebook’s India business is at home in Gurugram when we connect on Zoom one Monday morning for coffee. We chat about our last meeting at a conference in Mumbai when he was heading Hotstar. It is 18 months since he moved to Facebook. What’s it like heading the India arm of the world’s largest social media company? Mohan smiles. “Pretty satisfying,” says he. My tea, brewing in the pot before I logged in, arrives. Mohan raises his cup of coffee in camaraderie.
For all its problems in the US, Facebook India has been on a roll. Soon after Mohan joined in January 2019, it became a country unit. That means “all products, all functions, come together in a standalone operation that reports to Menlo Park (in California) directly”, says Mohan.
Globally, more than 2.6 billion people use Facebook every month. Then there are Whatsapp (2 billion users), Instagram (1 billion users) and others. Put it all together and the $71 billion Facebook, Inc’s brands are used by more than 3 billion people across the world every month. A bulk of its revenues come from the US and Europe. In 2018-19, India brought in just under ~2,900 crore or about $387 million in revenues. Why then, of the 60-plus countries it operates in, did Facebook, Inc choose to change the reporting structure for India?
As I take my first few sips of tea, Mohan paints the big picture in a way only he can. “The largest communities on Facebook are in India,” says he. In 2019, more than 328 million Indians used Facebook every month and about 400 million are on Whatsapp. “India is a third pillar of the open internet ecosystem (after the US and EU), especially in the context of the large numbers. It is also going through a digital and economical transition. There was a sense that there is a once-in-alifetime opportunity to create an impact in India. It is also a signal that we are building this business for the long term,” says Mohan leaning back a bit to savour his coffee. He puts his cup down before pointing out “It is also the first country we have made minority investments in”.
In 2019, Facebook invested a reported $20-25 million in Meesho (a social commerce platform), an undisclosed amount in
Unacademy (a learning platform) and also joined hands with SAIF Partners, Fireside Ventures and others to be part of a VC Brand Incubator initiative to accelerate the growth of early-stage small and medium businesses in India. In April this year, came the $5.7-billion investment in Reliance Industries’ Jio Platforms. One of the ideas is to facilitate shopping on Whatsapp. “More than 140 million small businesses use Facebook every month, only a fraction advertise with us. It is clear that we play a vital role in their growth and sustenance,” says Mohan. I smile.
This new Facebook is a far cry from the one in 2016. Then it wanted to muscle in on the market with Free Basics, a subsidised mobile internet service bundled with Facebook. While it succeeded in parts of Africa and other countries, it raised regulatory hackles here in India and had to be dropped. This Facebook seems to be fashioning itself on the lines of multinationals like Hindustan Unilever or Star India that Indianised themselves completely to win this market.
At many levels, Mohan represents this new face of Facebook. He’s a small-town boy who has studied and worked on telecom, media and policy in different parts of the world for over 20 years. Facebook is where all the dots from his past are connecting, at breakneck speed. I organise a nimbu paani for myself before we deep dive into his past.
Mohan grew up in Eloor, a cosy township about 13 kilometres north of Kochi. In 1993, at 18, he went to the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore for his undergraduate studies. After the four-year course, he stayed back for another five to work as a consultant in the telecom practice of Arthur D Little. One of the reports he put together in 2001, Understanding the Emerging Mobile Commerce Marketplace, “predicted in many ways, the central role mobile could play across industries, if data was lit on it”, says Mohan. More than a decade later, it became, along with all the other things he learnt, the inspiration for starsports.com and then Hotstar.
A stint at Johns Hopkins University studying economics and policy and an MBA in finance from Wharton followed. Then came a longish stint working in the media and entertainment practice at Mckinsey in New York. When the Mckinsey Global Institute was looking for someone to lead the work on sustainable cities in India, Mohan grabbed the chance to come back. He spent the next two years discovering post-liberalisation India and co-authored, India’s Urban Awakening: Building Inclusive Cities, Sustaining Economic Growth. In 2010, soon after quitting Mckinsey, he was a columnist for The Wall Street Journal for a bit.
During this phase, he met Uday Shankar, then CEO of Star India and Ronnie Screwvala, founder of UTV. “I hit it off with Uday. In an Indian context I, was unemployable at that time because I had only the Mckinsey experience in India. Everything that made me unattractive for other people made me attractive for Uday,” laughs Mohan. Shankar, who was trying to remake Star, firmly believed in bringing in non-media talent. Mohan joined Star in the summer of 2012.
Star had just bought the media rights to all international and domestic cricket played in India till 2018. A lot of Mohan’s work in the first year was figuring out the sports business. In June 2013, came Starsports.com, a pay site. “The first chapter in the Hotstar story was Starsports.com,” says Mohan. Hotstar, Star’s ambitious online bet which he launched in 2015, was a globally-noted success. It is now among the three largest streaming apps in India. “The exit from Hotstar (in 2018) was difficult. I was walking away from something I founded. While it did not have the usual start-up pangs, we had built a challenger brand from an incumbent media firm,” says Mohan.
It has been more than an hour since we started talking. I have been through one tea and a nimbu paani and Mohan finished his coffee long back. We decide to take a fiveminute break. When I log in again with my second cup of tea we tackle the question of what this new Facebook is all about? Is it beefing up on video to get stickiness and traffic? What are the tie-ups with the International Cricket Council and Saregama about?
“Our fundamental growth comes from connecting friends and family. All the deals we do are from that prism. We look at content genres not to get traffic. A lot of communities on Facebook are interested in cricket. This (ICC content) allows them to have conversations, engage. And if they then switch to TV or OT T, no problem,” says he. Another glimpse of the new, wiser Facebook.
However, back home in the US, Facebook is increasingly blamed for polarisation. And here in India, Whatsapp is a synonym for fake news. How does Mohan feel about the firm being seen as the “naughty boy” of social media. “Whatsapp is a private encrypted platform. What you can do in the context of messages you can’t see is limited. Ninety per cent of the messages sent on Whatsapp are between two people. The vast majority of groups are with less than 10 people. But, in the last two years, we really learnt to limit misinformation,” says Mohan. Facebook has used three things — a public campaign against forwarding without checks, connecting people to authentic sources and donations to fact checking networks — to reduce highly forwarded messages by 70 per cent.
On the mother brand, Mohan reckons more checks and balances are fine. But “in the last 18 months, there has been a disconnect between the public portrayal of the firm and what’s happening inside. There is a lot of sincerity, a lot of reflection and problem solving. Naughty or bad are easy labels. A lot of research shows that polarisation cannot be hung on social media companies’ necks. It is an extremely complex issue”, says Mohan.
It is. And not one to be tackled after more than two hours of talking. It is time to bid adieu.