Some may call him a startup hero, but Neeraj Arora calls himself just a business guy. A simple business guy who made sure that his small startup got sold for $19 billion. As The Wall Street Journal pointed out after the WhatsApp acquisition by Facebook, Arora who says he is responsible for all things business at WhatsApp is actually responsible for much more than that. He is a ‘business-development employee, a marketing executive, a human-resources head and a publicist’, all rolled into one. Even before the merger and the huge payout, Arora was instrumental in taking WhatsApp to the top of the messaging app’s pile. With deals with mobile carriers like 3 in Hong Kong and Reliance Communications in India to give consumers unlimited use of WhatsApp if they get a data plan. Arora has a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi and an MBA in Finance and Strategy from the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad. While working as a Principal of Corporate Development he reportedly met Jan Koum, the founder of WhatsApp and offered to head the business unit at the startup. As WhatsApp acquired millions of new subscribers, Arora finally joined the startup in November 2011 and helped grow it into the global behemoth today before engineering the deal with Facebook. Arora has two patents to his name.