It’s Rachyl Jones, an editorial fellow with the tech team. It’s no secret that tech and media workers bounce around companies. But Snap seems to have a keen interest in Google employees as it navigates the choppy waters of unprofitability.
Snap, the parent company to Snapchat, named a new managing director of its India operations on Wednesday. It appointed Pulkit Trivedi, former director of Google Pay who spent nine years with the company. And Trivedi isn’t the first high-ranking Googler to jump ship for Snap in recent months.
In June, Snap scooped Eric Young, Google’s vice president of engineering for Google Cloud. He became senior vice president of engineering at the social media company. Two months prior, Google’s Darshan Kantak joined Snap as senior vice president of revenue products. He previously managed search ads as vice president of product management at Google.
The hires are part of a larger recruitment effort on Snap’s part to turn its business around. In addition to recruiting from Google in recent months, Snap has also pulled Microsoft’s global head of advertising and a Meta vice president. Snap is hiring for 114 positions, the majority of which are engineering and sales roles, according to its jobs page. Those hires would add to its headcount of 5,300, which is down 18% from the same time last year.
While media companies across the board have taken losses from the post-COVID advertising downturn, Snap was hit especially hard. It lost $1.43 billion last year, triple its losses from the year prior. The company, which has traditionally relied on advertising revenue to turn a profit, is toying with paid subscriptions and an A.I. chatbot to earn a buck and keep its app relevant. But recent earnings results don’t show any major improvements. Snap has never reported an annual profit since it went public in 2017, and its stock has been hovering around the same $10 price for the last year, a fraction of its $83 peak in 2021.
Snap’s most recent hire in Trivedi signals the growth opportunities Snap sees in the Indian market. The company has 200 million monthly active users in the country, doubling in less than two years and representing one-quarter of its total monthly active users, according to Snap reports published earlier this year.
While India presents opportunity, it is also one of the toughest regulatory environments for social media companies. With Trivedi’s hire, Snap restructured its reporting system in the country, giving India’s leaders a bigger say, according to TechCrunch. Trivedi will oversee all of India’s local operations, including revenue, content, and creator partnerships, Snap told TechCrunch. He will report to Ajit Mohan, Meta’s former managing director of India who defected last year.
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Rachyl Jones
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