Vidit Maniyar

In Sept 2021, I joined Meta and have been working at WhatsApp ever since. I have worked on features such as Message Reactions, Document Captions, Message Editing, Forwarding media with captions et al that are used by billions of users across the globe on a daily basis.

My current focus at WhatsApp is revampping its web app. Ever since its inception in 2014, WhatsApp's web app has grown to be the center of its users' productivity and connections when on a large screen. The team was so busy investing in bringing new (and dare I say awesome) features to the users that we could never prioritize modernizing the app experience. I am glad to share that this is changing. After months of working and refining, we recently shipped the first installment of the new experience on web.whatsapp.com. I am excited to be leading the charge for this project as we look for more ways to make the app delightful to use on large screens.

Prior to that I worked at PayPal from 2015 to 2021. At PayPal my role was that of a Software Engineer and I grew to become an Architect in the next few years. In these initial years I was part of the team that built custom solutions for our most strategic partners (>$100M TPV annually) to find product market fit for these ideas.

I also spent about a year and a half working at the PayPal Innovation Lab. This unit is PayPal's think tank - responsible for creating IP for the company and experimenting and building with bleeding edge technology. During my time with this team I created an internal-facing cryptocurrency that used blockchain to reward employees. In my final year at PayPal, the company formalized its Blockchain and Digital Currencies organization and I became one of its early members. During my tenure at PayPal I filed 14 patents in fintech/payments spanning across domains like Identity, AR, Blockchain, Information Security, Mobile hardware and Voice based AI systems, to name a few and was named one of the top inventors at the company, a few years in a row.