American financial services company Robinhood Markets Inc. has appointed Google’s top executive Aparna Chennapragada as its first chief product officer. She will be overseeing the company’s product, design and research initiatives, according to a statement on Thursday.
With this, she joins an exclusive club of Indians who are leading technology or product teams at some of the biggest Silicon Valley natives—from Twitter to YouTube.
Here’s a quick look at them:
Aparna Chennapragada, CPO, Robinhood
Before joining Robinhood, Chennapragada was with Google for more than 12 years. Most recently, she served as vice president and general manager for the company’s consumer shopping vertical. She also led the search giant’s augmented reality and visual search products.
An IIT Madras alumnus, Chennapragada joined Google as a product manager in 2008 after stints at Akamai and Oracle. She led product development on some of Google’s key products, including YouTube, Google Search, Google Now and Google Lens. She also served as a technical assistant to chief executive Sundar Pichai, helping drive company-wide product efforts.
Chennapragada has also been on the board of financial giant Capital One since March 2018.
Surojit Chatterjee, CPO, Coinbase
ETtechCoinbase CPO Surojit Chatterjee (left) wih CEO Brian Armstrong.
Surojit Chatterjee joined cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase in January 2020 after spending more than three years at Google, where he led the company’s Shopping platform.
During an earlier stint at Google, he was a founding member of the company’s mobile search ads product and responsible for the global product strategy and end-to-end product delivery for mobile search ads and AdSense for Search. He also led the launch of AdSense for Shopping and Search Ads in Google Play Store. In all he has spent 11 years at the company.
An IIT Kharagpur alumnus, Chatterjee has also served as the head of product at Flipkart, where he led the company’s product management, user experience, product operations and data science functions.
Chatterjee has also been an active angel investor in the United States, having backed companies such as Authy, Udemy, Palantir, Skillshare, and VideoKen among others.
Parag Agrawal, CTO, Twitter
ETtechTwitter CTO Parag Agrawal.
IIT Bombay alumnus Parag Agrawal has been Twitter’s chief technology officer since October 2017. He joined the social media firm in October 2011.
He is currently responsible for Twitter’s technical strategy and overseeing machine learning and artificial intelligence across its consumer, revenue and science teams. Before this, he led the company’s efforts on scaling its ads systems as well as improving the relevance of Twitter’s Home timeline to reaccelerate user growth.
Before joining Twitter, Agrawal did research in large-scale data management with collaborators at Microsoft Research, Yahoo! Research and AT&T Labs.
Neal Mohan, CPO, YouTube
ETtechYouTube CPO Neal Mohan.
Indian-America executive Neal Mohan is responsible for YouTube products, user experience, and trust and safety on all platforms and devices across the world. This includes YouTube’s mobile, desktop and television apps, YouTube Music, YouTube Kids, and its subscription products YouTube Premium and YouTube TV.
Mohan also oversees the creation and enforcement of platform policies and community guidelines governing YouTube content. Prior to this, Mohan was in charge of Google’s display and video advertising business. He has been with Google since March 2008.
A Stanford alumnus, Mohan also played a key role in DoubleClick’s $ 3.1-billion sale to Google in 2008. He is also on the boards of companies such as personal styling service Stitch Fix and genetic testing firm 23andme.
Naveen Gavini, head of products, Pinterest
ETtechPinterest’s head of products Naveen Gavini.
One of Pinterest’s earliest engineers, Naveen Gavini oversees the design and product efforts for both consumer and advertiser products at the company. Before this, he led both the design and engineering functions. Gavini joined Pinterest in 2012 and played a key role in scaling the company’s engineering team.
Before that, he worked at Yahoo, developing consumer mobile and web applications. In 2004, he founded an internet consulting company called Nexsphere, which provided services to small businesses and professional athletes.
