The life story of Kunal Shah — from a childhood delivery boy and data-entry operator to one of India’s most successful startup entrepreneurs — reads like the plot of a film. He has now been appointed chief executive officer of WhatsApp. Meta, the parent company of WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram, made the formal announcement on Monday night.
In a statement, Meta also said that, alongside appointing Kunal Shah, it would invest $900 million in CRED, the financial firm he built with his own hands. The company described Shah as an entrepreneur with a ‘builder mindset’ and a global outlook.
Meta’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, said Kunal had turned CRED into one of India’s most important technology companies. He added that Kunal had the kind of energetic mindset and global vision needed to head the world’s biggest messaging app.
Kunal Shah is an entrepreneur who began life’s struggles at a very young age. After his family’s business failed and the family fell into financial crisis, he began doing various jobs from the age of just 14 or 15. By the age of 16 he had achieved financial independence by working as a delivery boy, a data-entry operator, a mehndi-cone seller, a cyber-cafe operator, a seller of pirated CDs and a computer tutor.
In a 2021 interview, Kunal said that to build something big, empathy was not an option but a necessity. To inspire people in an organisation, he said, it was essential to understand their feelings, and to build a successful organisation in the long term, leadership had to be sensitive to people’s emotions and needs. Many organisations could succeed temporarily even with empathy-less leadership, he said, but ran the risk of not surviving in the end.
Unlike many other Indian startup founders, Kunal Shah does not have an IIT or IIM background; he studied philosophy at Wilson College in Mumbai. He later began an MBA at NMIMS but did not complete it. In his view, the conventional education system places more importance on exam marks than on reality, so he chose to learn and progress on his own. Kunal Shah has always believed that, for success, skill and multifaceted thinking are more important than a degree. He says CRED even has a senior leader who has passed only class 10, and that in hiring he gives more importance to people’s diversity and ability than to their degrees.
In 2018, Kunal founded CRED with an investment of about $1 million of his own. It is essentially a membership-based platform that rewards users for paying their credit-card bills on time. He had earlier built FreeCharge, which was later sold to Axis Bank in 2017.
WhatsApp currently has more than 3 billion users worldwide, including more than 500 million in India, its biggest market.
According to analysts, Kunal Shah’s appointment is a major achievement for India’s startup ecosystem. It is also important for WhatsApp, as the Indian market is regarded as a hub of future growth. For several years now, US technology firms have been consistently appointing executives of Indian origin to top positions — in a sense, Indians now hold sway over ‘Silicon Valley.’ Kunal Shah has now joined a list of big names that includes Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Arvind Krishna, Nikesh Arora and Sajith Pai.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report