Cold call to dinner with Mark Zuckerberg, how Kunal Shah clinched the top job at WhatsApp
Meta Platforms Inc.’s decision to hand leadership of WhatsApp to Kunal Shah, one of India’s most prominent angel investors and the founder of fintech star
Meta Platforms Inc.’s decision to hand leadership of WhatsApp to Kunal Shah, one of India’s most prominent angel investors and the founder of fintech star Cred, started with a cold email. Meta Chief Product Officer Chris Cox reached out to Shah directly in the spring, seeking advice on picking the future leader of WhatsApp. Cox had been calling entrepreneurs and investors in places like India, Brazil and Mexico, countries where WhatsApp is a dominant part of business and culture, and Shah’s ideas about the future of the app left an immediate impression. “He had an incredible set of answers,” Cox recalled in an interview. “At the end of the call, I asked him if maybe he and I should talk about him doing it.” On Monday, Shah was announced as the new global head of WhatsApp, one of world’s largest communications services and a potentially lucrative driver of Meta’s future revenue. Despite an audience of more than three billion monthly users, WhatsApp’s business remains relatively underdeveloped for its size. It makes billions each year from paid messaging and that push users into WhatsApp chats with businesses, but is still in the early stages of rolling out other key money-making products, including subscriptions and AI agents. “While it’s come very far,” Shah posted on X, “the delta between WhatsApp today and its full potential is massive”. WhatsApp in India Maximising the potential now falls to the 47-year-old entrepreneur, who has a track record of building and identifying successful ventures in India’s incredibly competitive online arena.
A former adviser to Sequoia Capital India, Shah has made angel investments in more than 250 startups, including Indonesia's Gojek and India's Razorpay. He’s also founded multiple companies, most recently Cred, which offers its 17 million monthly users rewards for paying their credit card bills on time. As part of his recruitment to run WhatsApp, Meta invested $900 million into Cred, taking a roughly 20% stake. Cred is now valued at $4.5 billion post-money, though the business has yet to turn an annual profit in its eight years of operation. Shah’s experience growing a business in India is a significant part of his lure for Cox and Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, with Zuckerberg lauding his “builder mentality.” Over the three-month hiring process that involved multiple trips for Shah to Meta’s headquarters in California, including dinner at Zuckerberg’s house, Cox developed a keen sense that Meta would benefit from someone who lives with WhatsApp in a way that few in the US can fully appreciate. “It’s almost like speaking a language,” Cox said of understanding the app’s usage in markets like India. “There’s a lot of intuition that comes with that that’s hard to gather by having someone explain it to you or even learning it on a research trip.” Also Read | Why Meta is betting $4.5 billion on Kunal Shah and Cred Who is Kunal Shah, anyway? Shah was born in Ahmedabad and raised in Mumbai.
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