When Meta began looking for the next leader of WhatsApp, it was not searching for another engineer, product manager or MBA-trained executive. It already had thousands of them. What it wanted was someone who understood people.
After months of discussions and assessments, the social media giant settled on Cred founder Kunal Shah, a philosophy student from Mumbai’s Wilson College whose reputation has been built as much on understanding human behaviour as on building companies.
The appointment, announced alongside Meta’s $900 million investment in Cred, was not simply a by-product of the transaction, according to people familiar with the matter.
Meta conducted a global search to find a successor to WhatsApp chief Will Cathcart and evaluated candidates with strong technology and management credentials. What distinguished Shah was his ability to think beyond technology itself.
“Meta did not need another technologist. It already has some of the best engineers in the world,” said a person aware of the discussions. “What it wanted was somebody who understands why people behave the way they do and how products become habits.”
That thinking is not entirely new. Technology companies have often looked beyond conventional industry backgrounds when entering a new phase of growth. Apple’s decision to appoint former Burberry chief Angela Ahrendts to lead its retail operations reflected a belief that customer experience and consumer behaviour can matter as much as technical expertise.
Meta’s search followed a similar logic. As the company looks beyond messaging and towards commerce, payments and artificial intelligence, understanding how users adopt new behaviours has become as important as building new features.
Shah, who built FreeCharge before founding Cred, emerged as a compelling candidate because of his long-standing fascination with incentives, trust and consumer psychology.
The challenge before him is formidable. WhatsApp has more than 3 billion users globally and India is its largest market, with over 500 million users. Yet one of Meta’s biggest ambitions for the platform remains unrealised.
Despite its dominance in messaging, WhatsApp has struggled to secure a meaningful share of India’s UPI payments market, where PhonePe and Google Pay continue to dominate.
Meta believes that if WhatsApp can crack payments in India, it can replicate that success across emerging markets and gradually evolve into a broader platform that combines communication, commerce, payments and AI-powered services.
Internally, India is viewed as the most important testing ground for that ambition because it combines WhatsApp’s largest user base with one of the world’s most advanced digital public infrastructures. Success here could provide a template for expansion across Asia, Africa and Latin America.
That ambition helps explain why Shah appealed to Meta. Associates describe him as someone who spends less time discussing margins and quarterly targets than incentives, trust and human behaviour.
Conversations with him frequently drift towards psychology, habit formation and decision-making. Those qualities have made him one of the most influential thinkers in India’s startup ecosystem, even among founders who have built larger companies.
For Meta, they may prove even more valuable. The company already possesses the engineering muscle required to build products and AI capabilities. What it needs now is a deeper understanding of how billions of people will adopt and use them.
In Kunal Shah, Meta believes it has found not just a founder or an operator, but a student of human behaviour capable of helping write WhatsApp’s next chapter. The $900 million investment in Cred, people familiar with the matter said, was as much about securing that relationship as it was about backing the company itself.