Meta executive Aditi Banga ’05 finds energy in the blank slate

Aditi Banga ’05, who serves as Head of Fashion x Innovation Strategy and Partnerships at Meta, focusing on wearable technologies such as the Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses, loves the open questions at the start of a project. She likes building a product from the ground up, and as soon as it has the legs to run (and grow) on its own, she can likely be found at a fresh drawing board, dreaming up, with her teammates, a new product entirely. Read on to learn more about Aditi’s eye-opening years at ASL in Grades 4, 5 and 7, and her path to the US, where her bachelor’s degree from Harvard and MBA from Stanford have given way to a sweeping, creative career in entertainment, media and e-commerce.

Aditi hadn’t encountered many school projects before joining ASL in Grade 4. Until that point, she had been living in India, attending schools that valued memorization more than hands-on, creative learning. The move to London, and American schooling, was, at first, a shock to Aditi’s system. She had never heard of “recess”; she failed her first ASL math test because all of the questions used American coins—she didn’t know a quarter from a nickel or a dime.

“I often think back to what a sea change it was, going from an all-Indian school to ASL,” Aditi says. “It was hard to adjust, but once I did, it was the best experience—being with kids from all around the world, where the norm was that you were welcoming to everybody.” 

Aditi’s family moved to Brussels two years later, and back to London the year after that. She was thrilled to return to ASL, and by the end of Grade 7, she had signed up for everything possible for the school year ahead: “There was an international orchestra I was going to do, and Outward Bound, and all these things,” Aditi remembers. But her father was offered the chance to transfer offices once again—this time, to New York—and the family decided to relocate permanently.

After five years in New York, Aditi enrolled at Harvard for her undergraduate studies, and while she went into college thinking she would go to law school afterward, she picked a major called “history and science”—because it promised to combine two subjects that she loved, and left the future refreshingly open-ended.

Now a creative project aficionado in her professional life, Aditi loves nothing more than the chance to develop something new.

When she graduated, Aditi didn’t feel proficient enough in Excel or PowerPoint to work at the sort of company she hoped to someday join, so she became a consultant for a few years, gaining broader exposure to the working world. She had always felt a gravitational pull toward media—she was deeply involved with her college newspaper, and in producing her high school yearbook before that—and Aditi’s preference for consulting projects in the digital and social media sectors seemed to confirm that media was the right next step for her.

“My dream was to find a career that was both creative and strategic,” Aditi says, adding that her first role after consulting—product management at a small mobile gaming startup in San Francisco—afforded her the chance to be both. Her work was analytical and data-driven, while also encouraging her to think seriously about storylines and game art. “This is sort of the best of both worlds,” Aditi remembers thinking. She learned a certain fluency in communicating with software engineers and designers, too: a skill that continues to serve her today.

Still, Aditi wasn’t a mobile gaming fanatic the way many of her industry colleagues were, and figured, “If I was going to spend a lot of time working, I wanted to work on something I felt equally fanatical about.” 

After two years at the startup, Aditi began working toward her MBA at Stanford. Her friends had gone into a wide variety of careers after college, but very few had chosen the business route, like she had, so Aditi went into her MBA program hoping to build a strong network of friends (women, especially) who could support one another as they navigated their future business careers. She also wanted to further explore her interests in the entertainment media and fashion industries alike. While completing her studies at Stanford, Aditi did internships at Hulu and at Gilt Groupe, a luxury fashion retailer.

MBA newly in hand, Aditi landed at Apple in California, where she worked on what was then “Apple Video” (the division overseeing iTunes Movies, iTunes TV and the nascent Apple TV)—but she would have been equally happy, she says, going to a tech-meets-fashion company such as Stitch Fix.

“I also could have gone to Time Warner or Warner Brothers or Condé Nast, but I was worried about job stability,” Aditi says. She adds, though, that firsthand knowledge of the legacy media industry is quite valuable. “Looking back, if I could give my younger self some advice, I would say it would be good to go to one of those places, just to learn how things work in a traditional environment.”

At Apple, all work was done with a unique level of precision. For one of her nearly three years there, Aditi worked on a business case for simultaneously releasing films in theaters and on Apple. “It got shelved: Apple doesn’t do anything unless it feels perfect,” she says. “And then COVID happened, and it happened. By that point I was no longer there, but it was funny to see that come to life.”

By the time COVID took hold and Apple began releasing new movies on their platform to fulfill our (suddenly urgent) home entertainment needs, Aditi was back in New York and working at Instagram, which had already been acquired by Meta, Facebook’s parent company. After Apple, she had hoped to identify a startup she loved and help build something from scratch, but could not find the right fit. “I thought, ‘I’ll take the Instagram job, and use it as a place to land for a year or two while I get to know the New York tech ecosystem better.’” 

Seven years later, Aditi is still at Meta, and loving it. “When I joined, I was amazed to see that a company the size of Instagram, with a billion users already at the time, operated as nimbly as it did,” says Aditi. Again, she found herself enjoying something like the best of both worlds: “the security and scale of a large company, but the speed and opportunity to own things of a smaller one.”

Three months after she joined, the company announced that they were making a huge investment in the world of shopping. “I got lucky,” she says. “I was there at the right time, I had the experience, and I wanted to work on it. I got to kind of build it from the ground up.”

As the first employee to work on partnerships within the earliest iteration of Instagram Shopping, Aditi was able to develop a strategy to decide which brands to launch with and the first influencers that Instagram would help to monetize using their platform. She built a team, which quickly jumped from three members, to five, to 12, to 17. “We went from building shopping products to expanding into adjacent areas, such as affiliate marketing and NFTs, to thinking about other ways in which people monetize on the platform. The full suite of creator monetization tools fell under my team’s remit for four and a half years.”

Meta, unlike Apple, does not spend years debating what to try next, Aditi says. “It likes to experiment, try things, revise.” In the summer of 2023, that meant that Meta was rethinking some of its focus on the shopping and monetization spheres, and Aditi’s team was dissolved.

“The silver lining was that it ended up being good timing for me, given what I had learned about myself over the years: how I really, really love the early stages of building new experiences, and thinking about strategy, and mapping out what it would be like to scale a business and product—but the actual grind of scaling it is not where I get my energy,” says Aditi. “I get energy from the white space of, ‘What should we do here?’”

Since June 2023, Aditi has served as head of Fashion x Innovation Strategy and Partnerships at Meta, and in that time, her remit has been largely, though not exclusively, wearable technology. Think Ray-Ban and Oakley Meta AI glasses, Meta Quest (formerly “Oculus”) headsets, and things that—as far as you know—only exist in the movies. 

“It’s a chance to think beyond software,” Aditi says of wearable tech. “It’s interesting because it feels so fashion-related, and ties together a lot of my interests in a new way.”

Ever since her time at Apple, Aditi has worn an Apple Watch, and occasionally tires of feeling like she can’t swap it out for a classic analog watch every now and then. “I think a lot about how wearables make you consider your personal expression and style,” Aditi muses. “What would get somebody to say, ‘I’m going to commit to wearing this day in and day out—for years’?”

Today’s wearable tech market, while relatively young, is saturated with chic accessories to track every last life metric. “All these devices are good; each is better at something slightly different,” Aditi says of today’s well-known wearables. “But you do ask yourself, ‘Am I really going to add on the Oura for my sleep, and the Apple Watch for my steps, and the Whoop for my energy?’”

Meta, for now, is going big on the visual, with its multiple lines of popular brand-name glasses. The Meta/Ray-Ban collaboration has “taken off in a way that I don’t think anyone expected, which is why it’s always sold out,” Aditi says. “I think a big reason for that is that it’s an opportunity for people to get a little more choosy on the style front.” She suggests that Meta’s embrace of brand partnerships has unlocked new thinking within the industry: “Maybe one way to do this is in partnership with brands, by tapping into some of their cachet, and the loyalty that they have built up over the years when it comes to style.”

Looking through her (metaphorical) Meta-tinted glasses at the ever-widening world of wearables, Aditi sees profound untapped potential—which she finds quite fun. “It’s nice to work on something that still feels early-stage.”