Anand Chandrasekaran

Anand Chandrasekaran is an Indian-born business executive who works for Facebook Inc. on developing partnerships and global strategies for Facebook Messenger. Previously, he was the Chief Product Officer of Snapdeal, one of India's pre-eminent Internet companies as well as Chief Product Officer of Bharti Airtel, the third largest mobile operator in the world.

Education

Chandrasekaran holds an undergraduate degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.

Career

After graduating from Stanford University in 2001, he co-founded Aeroprise, one of the early innovators in personalized mobile applications software. Aeroprise had some of the world's largest enterprises as customers and was acquired by BMC Software in 2011.

In 2011, he joined Yahoo and was a well-regarded product leader. During his stint there, he worked on the partnership with Yelp and its integration into Yahoo Search. This partnership was similar to content deals announced by Apple and Microsoft.

In 2010, Anand was named by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader. In 2014, he was hired by CEO Gopal Vittal to join Bharti Airtel in the newly created position of Chief Product Officer, in charge of conceptualizing and delivering new products and reporting to Consumer Business head Srini Gopalan. In 2014, he helped launch Wynk Music, and led the partnership with Google as the exclusive network partner in India for Android One. Anand subsequently moved to e-commerce firm Snapdeal in 2015 in a similar role. Anand has invested in 15 start-ups to date, including food tech start-up Innerchef, online healthcare firm Pluss, online dating platform Aisle, planar transducer headphone company Audeze and smartphone firm CREO.

He is also a Producer of the award-winning HIV-AIDS related documentary Tapestries of Hope

and has been an advisor to Storm Ventures.