From selling pirated CDs to running WhatsApp
Kunal Shah's unlikely journey from teenage odd jobs in Mumbai to the top of Meta's popular app.
WhatsApp got a new boss this week. Meta, the app's parent company, announced the appointment of Indian entrepreneur Kunal Shah as CEO of the popular messaging platform. Shah, 47, will replace Will Cathcart, who is moving to another role within Meta.
Shah is a serial entrepreneur who has spent about 15 years building businesses in India's fintech sector. He is the founder of CRED, a payments and personal finance platform that has raised funding from global investors including Tiger Global and Singapore's sovereign wealth fund.
His appointment continues a pattern established by Mark Zuckerberg of recruiting accomplished entrepreneurs from outside Meta, often after investing in the companies they built. The same approach was used with Alexander Wang, the founder of Scale AI, who now leads Meta's advanced AI efforts. Meta also invested about $900 million in CRED at a valuation of $4.5 billion. The choice of an Indian executive is also notable because India is WhatsApp's largest market, with more than 500 million users.
Announcing Shah's appointment, Zuckerberg said he had transformed CRED "into one of India's most important technology companies" and praised him for bringing "the builder mentality and global perspective" needed to lead the world's largest messaging platform.
Behind that "builder mentality" lies an unconventional career and an equally unconventional management philosophy.
"The essence of leadership is to provide certainty in times of uncertainty," Shah said in a podcast interview.
In a profile published by Indian broadcaster NDTV, Shah is described as a grounded, empathetic and witty entrepreneur who does not take himself too seriously.
For Shah, empathy is an essential management trait.
"It's almost mandatory," he said. "You can't change consumer behavior or lead a team through change if you don't understand people's emotions. Anyone trying to build something meaningful has no choice but to become more empathetic over time."
He also believes workplaces should not become overly self-important.
"At CRED, we don't value people who take themselves too seriously," he said in another interview. The company even created an internal channel where employees are encouraged to laugh at themselves, and at Shah.
"I wish I were younger," he joked in a recent interview. "I now meet entrepreneurs whose parents are my age. That motivates me to work even harder because I have to keep my energy up."
His early years, however, were no laughing matter.
Shah grew up in Mumbai and began working at the age of 14 after his father's business went bankrupt. To help support his family, he took on a variety of jobs, including running errands, working as a data-entry operator, selling henna cones, selling pirated CDs and tutoring students.
He earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Wilson College in Mumbai. He has said he chose philosophy instead of business administration or computer science because classes finished at 10 a.m., leaving him time to continue working. Shah later enrolled in an MBA program but dropped out.
"I realized I was better off studying on my own than through a structured program because the material was designed more to help people get good grades than to explain how things actually work," he said.
That philosophy also shapes his hiring practices. Rather than recruiting only top graduates, Shah has become known for hiring talented people who reached out to him directly through LinkedIn.
His entrepreneurial breakthrough came in 2010, when he founded FreeCharge, a mobile payments platform. The company grew rapidly and was acquired five years later by e-commerce company Snapdeal for $400 million, one of the largest startup acquisitions in India at the time.
Following the sale, Shah became an angel investor in numerous Indian startups and served as an adviser to startup accelerator Y Combinator and venture capital firm Sequoia Capital.
In 2018, he founded CRED, which now has 17 million monthly active users. The platform rewards subscribers for paying their credit card bills on time and has since expanded into lending, insurance, investing and wealth management.
