Samosa Chat: Prashanth Challapalli being 'Prashant Challapalli' on and off social media

The digital-savvy aka travel buff aka Co-Founder of Gravity Integrated, Prashanth Challapalli straddles between social media apps for no less than 6 hours daily. In the latest episode of Samosa Chat, we take a sneak peek into his social media journey so far.

Before joining Orkut in 2007, Prashanth Challapalli, Co-founder & CEO, Gravity Integrated, carried out in-depth- research about who are the cool people on the platform and what makes them cool. After experimenting with Orkut for a while, he also made a Facebook account later. Episode 4 of Samosa Chat explores Challapalli’s stint with social media for all these years and how he keeps evolving with the changing digital-centric world.

“I realized that this is where real conversations were happening, and people were sort of letting their guard down. They were being their natural self. I was in mainline advertising at that point in time. Seeing how people were interacting freely on these platforms. So-called nerds were actually becoming cool because they suddenly had all these hobbies people didn’t know about, “ he quips.

Sooner or later he realized that if you don’t understand these platforms you will never really able to build brands in the coming years. And that’s what also sort of inspired Challapalli to launch Jack in the Box Worldwide in 2009.

Also Read: Samosa Chat: Nisha Singhania on why being tolerant on social media is important

His initial journey on social media as a user and then as a practitioner was full of wonder, learnings, and sometimes failing. He also notes the transition of social media to a whole new gamut and how and why the essence of interactivity has lost its ground.

While exploring the tidbits of social media, he also decided that he would make his life an open book on the new age platform to see what would happen, the kind of content he would see and what all could he grasp as learnings.

For him, Facebook and Instagram have become sort of an online equivalent of a television channel. “We could call it a crowdsourced one, but it's become more about passive consumption than interactivity.”

One of the interesting things that he decided for himself as a ground rule was he will never insult people on social media and unnecessarily criticize brands. Challapalli spends around 6- hours daily on social media and likes to consume content that he is truly passionate about.

Watch the full video to know more about his area of interests, why he likes to consume more content instead of posting, his take on ‘trolls’, rapid-fire, and much more.