Ajit Mohan on Snap’s India journey, being the underdog, and building in India for the world

From his swanky office on the 16th floor of the Marina Bay Financial Centre in Singapore, Ajit Mohan, the Asia-Pacific head of social media platform Snap, pulls the strings for his third big Indian adventure.

A high-flying consultant with marquee firms in both the US and Singapore for the first 15 years of his career, Mohan shot to prominence when he returned to India. Joining media network Star TV in the early 2010s, he foresaw the rise in digital content consumption, launching and helming the company’s OTT streaming platform Hotstar (now Disney+ Hotstar). Under his leadership, Hotstar grew to become arguably the most popular video streaming service in India.

“If I look at my career, one thing that stands out is that there have been windows that opened up to build a new product and fundamentally change the trajectory of the company. A large part of success is identifying when that window of opportunity opens up,” he says in a video call with The CapTable.

At Hotstar, it was about identifying how cheap access to mobile broadband would revolutionise content consumption. “We recognised and leaned on that before that particular shift or trend became visible to others,” he says.

He displayed similar foresight in his next stint with social media giant Meta. He joined the company as the leader of its Indian business at a time when Instagram, now one of its crown jewels in the Indian market, was still in its nascency in terms of both users and revenues. Mohan, who oversaw not only business teams across products—Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp—but also its policy vertical, saw an opportunity in the short video format when India banned ByteDance’s Tiktok in 2020.