Kunal Shah is one of the most famous personalities on the Internet this week. Founder of Freecharge, acquirer of Snapdeal, and founder of CRED, he has recently been appointed as the Global Chief of WhatsApp by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta. It came after a major shake-up and a $900 million investment by the billion-dollar parent company in Shah’s CRED.

In a recent conversation with Groww, Shah gave his deep insights into the productivity trap in the age of AI, social media, and above all, the Internet. While India has had access to the Internet for nearly three decades now, the speed at which AI is developing can only be measured in hours – not years.

At the same time, with access to the world on their fingertips, Shah believes, a large share of the youth is wasting away this previous currency called time. In conversation with Samidha Sharma, Shah said, “The most valuable wealth you have is time, and what you do with it becomes more important than it was before.”

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Time is money, literally

India is the biggest consumer of the Internet, per month, and uses over 30GB per person, which, thanks to the Internet revolution, is nearly free and needs a lot of time to ‘be wasted’, felt Shah, crediting ‘time pass’ and ‘short videos’ for this phenomenon.

“Everybody has only 24 hours in a day, and what we do with that is becoming even more important for wealth to happen,” he said.

The new Indian WhatsApp head added, “We all have the same device that can make us super intelligent or very dumb – very fast.” He noted that it will only take weeks to see a change and make either of these possibilities a reality.

At the end of it, however, is his worry about productivity, a rising national concern. Shah opined that concepts like productivity and efficiency do not exist in the core DNA of Indians, with no representation in the vernacular syntax either. “We don’t value time as much,” Shah remarked.

Kunal Shah’s advice for potential

In his closing note, Shah revealed that he believes that times like today are the ideal time to learn and become extraordinary at something you believe in, especially in a short period of time.

Additionally, he believes that the people around you can actually impact you and your learning. “Think of people around you as stocks, and they have a growth rate,” Shah said and that their growth will impact yours too. Thirdly, “You have to think of yourself as a stock as well, what is your growth rate?” Shah urged his listeners to ponder.

He reminded us that no one will solve a declining growth rate; the only one who has agency over it is you. Moreover, he added, “Also, think of yourself as an app. If you have bugs – fix them. If you have features – enhance them, and release new things more often.”