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By:

Kiran D. Tare

21 August 2024 at 11:23:13 am

From Mumbai to Meta

Kunal Shah’s rise from city entrepreneur to global head of WhatsApp signals that India is producing genuine architects of the digital age. For much of the internet era, the world’s defining digital products were imagined in California. The next chapter looks markedly different. Artificial intelligence, digital finance and ubiquitous connectivity have flattened the distance between Silicon Valley and the rest of the world. Increasingly, the most interesting ideas are emerging not merely from...

From Mumbai to Meta

Kunal Shah’s rise from city entrepreneur to global head of WhatsApp signals that India is producing genuine architects of the digital age. For much of the internet era, the world’s defining digital products were imagined in California. The next chapter looks markedly different. Artificial intelligence, digital finance and ubiquitous connectivity have flattened the distance between Silicon Valley and the rest of the world. Increasingly, the most interesting ideas are emerging not merely from American technology giants but other countries. Few people embody that transition better than Kunal Shah. His recent appointment as the global head of WhatsApp, following Meta’s $900 million investment in CRED, represents the arrival of an Indian entrepreneur at the helm of one of the world’s most consequential digital platforms. Unlike many celebrated founders whose credentials begin with engineering degrees, Shah’s intellectual roots lie elsewhere. A graduate in philosophy from Mumbai’s Wilson College, he briefly enrolled for an MBA. However, rather than collecting qualifications, he accumulated ideas, ranging effortlessly across economics, psychology, incentives and consumer behaviour. His social-media essays and public lectures have acquired an almost cult following among entrepreneurs because they treat business less as accounting than as applied anthropology. His entrepreneurial journey mirrors India’s own digital awakening. Long before smartphones transformed everyday commerce, Shah recognised that friction was the enemy of adoption. His first venture, FreeCharge, helped familiarise millions of Indians with digital payments during a period when cash remained king. Its success made him one of the pioneers of India’s fintech revolution. Following its sale, Shah resisted the temptation to launch another fashionable startup immediately. Instead, he spent years investing in young companies, observing founders and dissecting consumer behaviour with the patience of an academic. That unusually reflective interlude shaped CRED, the company he founded in 2018 around a deceptively simple proposition that trust should carry economic value. Many regarded the idea as eccentric. Why reward consumers merely for paying their credit-card bills on time? But Shah saw something deeper. Modern economies increasingly depend upon trust and reputation. CRED transformed disciplined financial behaviour into a platform that eventually expanded into lending, commerce, insurance, wealth management and payments. Today the company serves around 17 million monthly active members, and has attracted more than $900 million from global investors. It generates annual revenues of roughly $325 million. Importantly, these figures signify that patient product thinking can triumph over fashionable exuberance. Shah’s influence extends well beyond the companies he has founded. He has become perhaps India’s most prolific angel investor, backing more than 250 startups while mentoring hundreds of entrepreneurs. His counsel has shaped businesses across sectors, while advisory roles with Peak XV Partners, Pine Labs and industry bodies have given him an outsized influence over the direction of India’s startup ecosystem. Shah has consistently argued that enduring businesses are built not on funding rounds but on understanding incentives, habits and human psychology. Those qualities explain why Meta came calling. Mark Zuckerberg praised Shah’s “builder mentality” while Meta’s Chief Product Officer, Chris Cox, highlighted his grasp of how WhatsApp fits into people’s everyday lives. That endorsement recognises that the future of messaging lies increasingly beyond messaging itself. Artificial intelligence, digital payments, commerce and business communication are converging into a single ecosystem. Few executives possess practical experience across all four domains. India offers perhaps the clearest glimpse of that future. It is WhatsApp’s largest market, its most sophisticated laboratory for business messaging and an increasingly important arena for digital payments. Shah understands this ecosystem instinctively because he helped build it. His career has unfolded alongside India’s digital public infrastructure, the smartphone revolution and the emergence of one of the world's most dynamic entrepreneurial cultures. There is something symbolically satisfying about the appointment. While technology has long celebrated engineers who solve computational problems, Shah belongs to a different tradition of the entrepreneur who begins by asking why people behave as they do. His greatest strength lies in understanding incentives, trust and networks. History suggests that the most transformative technology leaders are rarely prisoners of technology alone. They are students of people. In elevating Kunal Shah to lead WhatsApp, Meta is betting that the next era of the internet will be shaped less by algorithms than by a deeper understanding of the billions of human beings who use them. Judging by Shah’s career so far, that is a wager with every chance of paying handsome dividends.

Military not a solution to Pakistan problem, need more rounded approach: Ex-envoy TCA Raghavan

  • PTI
  • Jun 4, 2025
  • 3 min read


New Delhi: Amidst growing tensions and a "securitised" India-Pakistan relationship, former Indian high commissioner to Pakistan TCA Raghavan has cautioned that there is no military solution to the problem, urging for a more rounded approach that leverages India's full spectrum of strengths, including diplomatic, societal and political tools.


Speaking at the India Habitat Centre here on Tuesday on the topic, "India-Pakistan relations in light of Operation Sindoor", Raghavan emphasised that India's true influence lies in its economic vitality, social pluralism, institutional resilience and cultural reach -- not just in its military prowess.


In fact, according to the former diplomat who served in Pakistan for seven years, the Pakistani military does not feel threatened by India's military might, but rather seeks "to stand up to it".


"What worries Pakistanis is not your military, but your overall trajectory as a nation -- your economic growth, your societal progress, the pluralism of your society and the strength of your institutions. That is what they really fear.... There is no military solution, you have to bring in all your strengths.


"Your strengths are enormous in the real sense.... You are truly a cultural, social and political hegemon where Pakistan is concerned. So if we move to a purely security-based relationship, all of that is being put aside. Given that you are not just dealing with Pakistan for two, three or even five years, but for a very long time, you need a more rounded approach," Raghavan noted.


The former diplomat served as India's high commissioner to Pakistan from June 6, 2013 till his retirement on December 31, 2015.


Underscoring that the situation with Pakistan is far from merely a "tactical or military issue", the 69-year-old asserted that the central challenge today is "how to manage a volatile and friction-ridden interface with a difficult neighbour in the absence of a functioning bilateral relationship" -- a relationship, he noted, that has been "progressively hollowed out" since 2017-18.


In fact, according to the seasoned diplomat, the recent decision to place the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) in abeyance reflects just how few diplomatic options remain on the table.


"This time, you were, in a sense, left with no other option but to place the IWT in abeyance. Everything else that could have been done had already been done. There was no other peg of the relationship which you could have used as a sanction against Pakistan. The cupboard is bare," Raghavan said.


He also highlighted the danger of viewing Pakistan through what he called a "monochromatic lens" and said there is now a tendency to treat all of Pakistan as uniformly "bad".


Reflecting on India's long-standing position that "talks and terror cannot go together", Raghavan observed that while the principle remains valid, its rigid application may be limiting diplomatic flexibility.


"This is really what 'talks and terror cannot go together' means. But in the process, you are losing the capacity to distinguish between shades of behaviour," he said.


To buttress his point, the author of "The People Next Door: The Curious History of India-Pakistan Relations" gave the example of the 2021 ceasefire reaffirmation agreement at the Line of Control (LoC), despite India facing severe tensions with China at the time, and argued that there was a period of "relatively better" behaviour by Pakistan.


"But we did not take cognisance of it. If you do not distinguish between shades of behaviour, you tie your hands behind your back," he added, advocating for a more calibrated policy, the one where "you have to deal with neighbours as they are, not as you would like them to be".


The discussion, organised by India Foundation, was also joined by Ruchi Ghanashayam, India's former high commissioner to Ghana, South Africa and the United Kingdom, who was also the first Indian woman diplomat stationed in Islamabad.

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