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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.

Why is Mamata Seeing Ghost of Bangladesh?

Updated: Oct 21, 2024

Why is Mamata Seeing Ghost of Bangladesh?

Mamata is seeing a ghost of Bangladesh behind the massive outrage and waves of protest over rape and murder of the trainee doctor. And the reasons are many.

It’s been over a fortnight. Yet with each passing day the voice of protest is getting louder and stronger. From the streets of Kolkata it’s pouring into roads of hinterland. The cry for justice for a rape victim has consolidated into a wail of demands to set a lot of wrongdoings right. Here in lies the fear and trepidation. Wasn’t the issue that brought the youth of Bangladesh out on the thoroughfares a simple, innocent one of quota reform?

The chief minister of Bengal, known for understanding the pulse of people better than many, was quick to read the signages floating in the political horizon.

The most obvious reason for her to be tensed is that both the regime change in Bangladesh and the mass protest in Bengal, were student-driven to begin with. The two incidents---end of 15 year old Sheikh Hasina government and turbulence in West Bengal, over the heinous crime, falling back to back, the first on August 5th and the latter from August 9th onwards, give natural scope for comparisons. More so, because in both the cases the movement strayed beyond an affected constituency to include aggrieved people at large, cutting across socio-economic demography. If the quota reform protest started by students in Bangladesh became a mass uprising against an autocratic regime, the campaign demanding justice for the rape victim and overall safety and security of women in Mamata Banerjee’s Bengal soon snowballed into a movement of no-confidence against the government. Slogans--”Mamata must resign” also got floated in social media much in line with the call for ouster of Sheikh Hasina. In fact “Resignation of Hasina” became the single point agenda into which all other fringe demands coalesced.

Incidentally, even before people started drawing parallels, that there could be a thread of commonality in the way the upheaval in Bangladesh and Bengal played out, Mamata was quick to point out that the Opposition were trying to pull off a Bangladesh by politicizing the tragic incident: “A coordinated approach has been executed by the BJP and the CPIM with support from the Centre to defame Bengal and exploit the situation....They want to make a Bangladesh here. They are taking cues from student unrest in Bangladesh and are attempting to capture similarly. I have no longing for the chair. I came here to serve people.”

Not only Mamata, her political lieutenants are consistently equating the turmoil in Bengal with the mayhem in Bangladesh. Cabinet minister for North Bengal development Udayan Guha threatened to take stern action against those, who would be trying to exploit the situation by emulating a Bangladesh like movement. “ Even after the hospital was vandalised, the police did not open fire on anyone. The police will not allow a Bangladesh type situation. We will not allow Bengal to turn into Bangladesh, Guha thundered.

Is the government’s fear unfounded?

Apart from the similarities on ground zero, as to how and where the future course of events are heading to, there are ample reasons for Bengal to mull on-- as to what led to a Bangladesh like boiling point. To begin with, it’ll be appropriate to talk of Bangladesh and the prevailing situation, that made the students’ protest become big in magnitude. The students were out on the streets because of a high reservation in public jobs. Unemployment and stagnant job market in private sector coupled with a high rate of inflation drove the educated youth to rebel against the government.

But soon the students found enormous number of sympathisers, who were equally at the receiving end. According to Bangladesh citizens, the last two terms of the Sheikh Hasina government were a mockery of democracy. Even elections would be compromised. As Hasina grew from strength to strength, she politicized institutions. The rank and file of police owed allegiance to the ruling dispensation. Extortion, harrassment and raids by police and people in power became rampant. An atmosphere of fear and repression reigned and people got restless to overthrow the government.

Politicization of institutions has been happening in Mamata government too. Allegations are quite strong that police in Bengal functions at the beck and call of political bosses. The lapses and alleged loopholes on the part of police in handling the rape and murder of the young doctor have yet again revealed a sense of confused or misplaced loyalty.

But above everything else both Hasina and Mamata governments allegedly seem to have twined in accepting corruption as a way of life. In Bangladesh jobs of primary and secondary teachers got sold at premium, Rs 10-12 lakh in the Hasina regime. Even police had to pay up for prized postings and transfers. In Bengal busting of the teacher’s recruitment scam has revealed how unsuccessful and ineligible candidates got government jobs in schools in exchange of bribes.

Similarities are multiple and inescapable. Mamata has good reasons to be apprehensive. It’s not only she, who can see and connect the dots. People, out on the streets, clamoring for justice, can see a providential pattern somewhere in the unfolding of future events in these two places-- Bangladesh and Bengal. True, they share more than 2,217 odd km of border. They share the same umbilical cord, other than language, culture, ethos, icons. Even emotions are the same. So she cannot take any risk.

(The writer is a senior jounalist based in Kolkata. Views personal)

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