Kunal Shah of CRED on “exciting but painful” workplaces, gated digital communities, and employee shareholders

Welcome to episode 16. If you like our deep interviews with some of India’s best known founders across a range of domains, please rate us on your favourite podcast platform. All it takes is just a few seconds.

Kunal Shah, the co-founder and CEO of CRED is unapologetic about building products for the top segment of India’s massive consumer pyramid. One would imagine that having raised over $600 million in venture funding puts the pressure on a founder to show a potential market size that’s massive and untapped.

And yet, Shah did quite the opposite. He is single minded in his focus on catering to the top 30-odd million consumers in the world’s most populous country. Why? Because they are the ones with enough disposable income to drive the majority of most discretionary spends, he says. CRED currently has over 11 million users, which fit the definition of “California users” put forth by my colleague Praveen Gopal Krishnan way back in 2021.

And over the last two years, this has become painfully apparent to most Indian startups and founders.
How did CRED and Kunal Shah arrive at this reality ahead of others? I asked him that.

Shah has a habit of saying “Good question” before launching into fairly sprawling and vivid answers. Answers that involve analogies, generalizations and psychology.

Having been thrust into working to support his family while he was still a teenager, Shah ended up being coached through the school of hard knocks and an accidental exposure to philosophy (it was the only course available in the morning, before he left for work).

The result was a curious mix of abilities, knowledge, ambitions and perspective. Chip on the shoulder mixed with the urge to pay it forward. The ability to put himself in another person’s shoes while also being brutally blunt with feedback. Left brain execution and right brain exploration.

This has allowed Shah to create a fairly shape-shifting business model with CRED (worth over $6 billion after its last fund raise). When I asked him to define CRED, he described it in terms of its users, not features. He sees CRED as a community, to which features and monetization methods can be tacked on and off over time.

In another wide-ranging and reflective founder conversation, we go behind Shah’s thoughts about building businesses, hiring “high-slope” professionals, why one of the biggest crises staring India in the face is the disappearance of working women and why many meetings inside CRED as called “shareholder meetings”.

And if you have any questions, thoughts, suggestions, or tips, please email them to podcasts@the-ken.com. We might not be able to reply to all of them but we do read every single one of them.

This is episode 16 of First Principles.