the $900M cold email
underneath all of it, this is a huge, huge moment
👋 Hey, I’m Suhas, and welcome to another edition of TPF Weekly!
Indian tech Twitter has been an absolute mayhem since Monday.
In case you missed it, Meta named Kunal Shah the new global head of WhatsApp on Monday, with a $900M investment into CRED on the way out.
Will Cathcart, who ran WhatsApp for 7 years and grew it from 1.5 billion to 3 billion users, is moving on to a new role at Meta.
The timeline has been a mess ever since.
Half the feed is speculating on what happens to CRED now that Kunal’s stepping back, and the other half is speculating on what WhatsApp turns into next.
There are memes about CRED coins finally landing inside WhatsApp / Miten spinning the wheel for the first time / Zuck finally getting his Indian super app via Indiranagar.
It’s all fun, and underneath all of it, this is a huge, huge moment.
I’m just genuinely happy for Kunal, and wanted to sit down and put a few thoughts down before the next news cycle buries it.
How it came about
The Bloomberg version of the story is this. Sometime in spring, Chris Cox, Meta’s Chief Product Officer, sent Kunal a cold email.
He wasn’t recruiting, exactly. It was more like a consultation lap, calling entrepreneurs in India / Brazil / Mexico to figure out what kind of person should run WhatsApp into its next phase.
Kunal was one of those calls.
3 months later, after several trips to California and a dinner at Zuckerberg’s house, that’s how it ended up.
Cox said one more thing about why Kunal got the nod, which I keep coming back to:
He was talking about WhatsApp in India specifically, and that the product behaves a bit like a city here.
Currency flows through it, small businesses live on it, an entire generation talks to its parents on it, and whoever runs it has to feel all of that rather than be briefed on it.
The people who feel it tend to live here.
So Cox went looking for someone who lived it, skipped the executive search firms and made the calls directly.
What's new about this
For about 20 years, the story of Indians running global tech has had a pretty consistent shape.
Someone leaves India in their 20s for grad school in the US, stays, climbs through Microsoft / Google / Adobe or wherever for the next 25 years, and eventually gets the corner office.
Satya, Sundar, Shantanu, Arvind, Leena, Ajay, Indra, the list goes on. All brilliant people,
And the implicit lesson, if you were a young Indian builder, was that the seat you really wanted to be in lived in another country.
The thing about Kunal is, he didn’t do any of that.
He grew up in Mumbai, did a philosophy BA at Wilson College, enrolled in an MBA at NMIMS and dropped out a few months in, and never moved abroad.
For the first time, an Indian builder isn’t being called up after 30 years in someone else’s country.
He’s being called from here, while still living here, to run a product 3 billion people use.
What's been building underneath
You could read this as one guy getting lucky but give it a bit more thought, and that read doesn’t hold up.
India’s been turning into a different kind of place to build, particularly over the last 5-6 years.
The clearest version of this is in what is called Global Capability Centres, which is corporate-speak for the India offices that big global companies set up to do their product, engineering, and research work rather than just back-office support.
A decade ago, most of these were back offices in the older sense, doing the cheaper end of the work that someone in San Francisco didn’t want to do.
The EY surveys from earlier this year say 87% of GCC leaders now own global processes end-to-end, rather than just supporting them from far away.
Translation: this country has been becoming a place where serious global work gets done i.e. the work itself lives here now.
Kunal’s appointment is the symbolic version of all of that.
He’ll probably move to Menlo Park to do the job, but the headline really is that this time the call went the other way around first.
What to do with this
The lazy version of the takeaway is “build your own CRED and Zuck will call you.” but I think there’s another layer to it.
The implicit deal for an ambitious Indian builder used to be: leave first, prove yourself in someone else’s market for a couple of decades, and maybe at some point you get a shot at running something globally.
That deal is no longer the only one on offer.
Kunal got the call because he was doing very specific, very deep work in a market that mattered.
Cox wasn’t being generous. He was looking for someone who understood how WhatsApp lives in a country like India, and that knowledge happens to live here.
There are a lot of products like that now.
Categories where the deepest expertise lives outside Silicon Valley, and where the labs and platforms running them are going to keep noticing.
Anyway, that’s what I wanted to get down before moving to the next big thing in the news.
I’m just happy for Kunal, and a little buzzing about what this opens up for everyone else building here.
Hopefully it’s the first of many of these calls and not the last.
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Hit reply and tell me what you think, about Kunal or about the news or about what you'd say if a Chris Cox in your category emailed you next week. I read every one.
Cheers,
Suhas 👋🏻
P.S. This gets better when the right people are in the room. Share it with one.