Cold call to dinner with Mark Zuckerberg, how Kunal Shah clinched the top job at WhatsApp

Meta Platforms Inc.’s decision to hand over leadership of WhatsApp to Kunal Shah, one of India’s most prominent angel investors and founder of fintech star Cred, started with a cold email.

Meta Chief Product Officer Chris Cox reached out to Shah directly in the spring, asking for advice on choosing WhatsApp’s future leader. Cox was calling on entrepreneurs and investors in countries like India, Brazil and Mexico, where WhatsApp is a dominant part of business and culture, and Shah’s ideas about the app’s future made an immediate impact.

“He had an incredible range of answers,” Cox recalled in an interview. “At the end of the conversation, I asked him if he and I should talk about doing this.”

On Monday, Shah was announced as the new global head of WhatsApp, one of the world’s largest communications services and a potentially lucrative driver of Meta’s future revenue. Despite a monthly user base of more than three billion, WhatsApp’s business remains relatively underdeveloped for its size. It makes billions of dollars each year from paid messages and ads that direct users to WhatsApp chats with businesses, but it’s still in the early stages of launching other major money-making products, including subscriptions and AI agents.

“While it has come a long way, the gap between WhatsApp today and its full potential is huge,” Shah wrote on X.

WhatsApp in India

Maximizing the potential is now up to the 47-year-old entrepreneur, who has a track record of establishing and identifying successful startups in India’s incredibly competitive online arena.

Shah, a former advisor to Sequoia Capital India, 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 its recruitment to run WhatsApp, Meta invested $900 million in Cred and took a nearly 20% stake. Cred currently has a post-money valuation of $4.5 billion, but the business has yet to turn an annual profit in its eight years of operation.

Shah’s experience developing business in India is a key part of his appeal to Cox and Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg; Zuckerberg praises his “builder mentality.” Over the course of the three-month hiring process, which included multiple trips from Shah to Meta’s headquarters in California, including dinner at Zuckerberg’s house, Cox developed a keen sense that Meta could benefit from someone living with WhatsApp in a way that few in the U.S. could fully appreciate.

“It’s almost like speaking a language,” Cox said of understanding the app’s use in markets like India. “There are a lot of insights that are hard to come by by having someone explain it to you or even learning it on a research trip.”

Who is Kunal Shah by the way?

Shah was born in Ahmedabad and grew up in Mumbai. He studied philosophy at Wilson College in the city before enrolling in a management course, but he did not stay there long; He left a few months later to pursue entrepreneurship, according to his LinkedIn profile.

He has undertaken many successful initiatives. In 2010, Shah founded FreeCharge, a startup that rewards users who recharge their prepaid mobile phones with discount coupons before switching to digital payments. In 2015, SoftBank Group Corp. acquired FreeCharge. He sold it to Snapdeal-backed company for approximately $450 million.

Shah founded Cred in 2018, which rewards consumers who pay their credit cards on time with strong credit scores. It has since expanded into lending, payments, insurance and asset management, and its investors include Peak XV Partners, DST Global and Tiger Global. And of course Meta.

In India’s startup economy, Shah has emerged as one of the leading advocates of understanding consumers to build large businesses. “Many high-IQ people are not good at solving a wide range of problems,” he wrote to X in early 2025. “Most of the problems in starting a company have to do with relationships with people.”

According to him, financial products are ultimately products of psychology and consumer behavior is more important than engineering. He understands why Indians are hesitant to adopt certain financial products or what creates trust in payments, for example. Years of work with banks, shadow lenders, regulators and payment companies have given him a practical understanding of India’s financial system; This is important information for developing a messaging service focused on expanding its role in payments.

Shah has brought his experience to a wide audience on X (formerly Twitter), where he frequently broadcasts his views on technology, entrepreneurship, and even philosophy to 1.1 million followers. “I think it’s almost imperative to seek the truth,” he said during a 2019 podcast. “I haven’t seen a single super-successful founder who isn’t a philosopher.”

“His biggest strength is understanding the pulse of the consumer and what makes the consumer tick,” said Amrish Rau, CEO of fintech provider Pine Labs Ltd., who has known Shah for more than 15 years. But understanding a user base across geographies and at WhatsApp’s scale will be “a huge challenge.”

meta angle

Meta and Zuckerberg have historically promoted product leaders from within the company, taking advantage of longtime company veterans who understand the company’s mission and have earned Zuckerberg’s trust. Outgoing WhatsApp boss Will Cathcart, for example, worked at Meta for almost a decade before taking over the messaging service in 2019. During his tenure, he helped the app grow its number of users from 1.5 billion to more than 3 billion, and he will remain at Meta to develop new consumer products with the help of artificial intelligence, a spokesman said. Those responsible for Facebook, Instagram, and Meta’s hardware division are also long-time Meta product leaders.

This means the Shah will be stepping into a top leadership group dominated by the Meta’s old guard, but his new perspective is also part of the appeal. “I also think it will benefit Meta’s leadership team to have an Indian entrepreneur in such an important role,” Cox said. “This has value far beyond anything that could happen for WhatsApp.”