Will Cathcart's departure from the top job marks the end of WhatsApp's foundational era, making way for Shah to tackle the monetization and commerce phase.
Classic example of scaling
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Chennapragada Sathvik
70 posts
Meta replacing Will Cathcart with Kunal Shah tells you everything you need to know about the future of WhatsApp.
Cathcart was a privacy guy who built a 3 billion user moat. Shah is a fintech founder.
They are done building a chat app. They are building a Digital Storefront
Kunal Shah@kunalb11
It’s been a minute. 2015–2018 - Exited FreeCharge. Spent time learning and investing. - Pondered about: Why can't trust be rewarded? Started with $1M of personal capital. - Launched CRED to reward people for paying credit card bills on time. 2019–2025 - Built a system run by a team that values ownership, judgment, and craft. - Grew from 0 to 17M members by aligning incentives with behaviour. - Built several products during COVID lockdowns. - Raised $900M+ from global investors. Did 4 ESOP buybacks. - Made Indiranagar and IPL ads slightly more interesting. - Received a full stack of regulatory licences. - Lost 35 kilos. - Scaled from 0 to ~$325M ( ~₹3,200 crore) in annual revenue across payments, lending, insurance, commerce, wealth, and credit cards. 2026 - First profitable quarter (yet occasionally asked what our business model is) - Raised another $900M from Meta in primary and secondary capital. - Announcing our 5th ESOP buyback. Today CRED is ready for its next phase. I am stepping back and @miten steps in as interim CEO, partnered with an incredibly talented team. He has been heading strategy and finance and suffering me since 2020. I’m stepping away from the operating role and will continue as a shareholder. My commitment doesn’t change. Just the role. Extremely grateful to our members, partners, regulators, and investors who made this possible. And to our board, Shailendra, Micky, Saurabh for their extraordinary conviction. Team CRED, I’ll still expect you to be a 10x version of yourselves. As for me, I’ll be joining Meta to lead WhatsApp globally. Meta comes in as a minority investor in CRED. No access to member data. While it’s come very far, the delta between WhatsApp today and its full potential is massive. I look forward to working with Mark, Chris, and the leadership across Meta for the next step in WhatsApp’s journey. Will, thank you for scaling something the world relies on quietly, and for making this transition smooth. Onwards.
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You know the thing that I hate about LLMs now is that when I ask a deeply personal question it assumes stuff based on my history.
You make it personalised through digging deeper, asking me specific questions. I want to have a conversation with you, don't need a random answer.
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Today was a busy day, was it significant in any way? Not so much.
Our research paper got sent back for review, spent the whole day fixing code, redrawing flowcharts, rewriting the entire paper..... Honestly I hope it goes through!
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@ranjan_vittal @khoslaventures This is the next bet! Congratulations 🎊
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Today, I'm thrilled to announce Pramaana's $27M seed, led by @khoslaventures.
The foundational domains that hold the world together: tax, law, finance, healthcare; all run on certainty. Probabilistic AI can't give them that. We’ve been asked to accept wrong answers with AI as ‘hallucinations’, while in traditional software terms, it’s just a bug. And a wrong answer in such mission-critical domains is more than just a bug, it's a liability that could have catastrophic impact.
We built Pramaana to deliver a 100% trustable experience to the domains that run on certainty: AI that is provably correct, not probabilistically correct. We turn statute and regulation into machine-verifiable code, so every output ships with mathematical proof of correctness. Our mission is to make AI take ownership of it’s work.
Pramaana in Sanskrit stands for “means of valid knowledge”, and we’re going to achieve that by formalizing the world’s knowledge.
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Even with RPKI and MANRS operating at scale, the internet is still a patchwork of legacy configurations. When an incident occurs, it’s usually due to partial enforcement: a massive network accepts a bad route, passes it along internally or to unvalidated peers, and creates a localized black hole before the automated global cryptographic defenses can isolate it.
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BGP hijacking is like a local delivery company lying to the post office, claiming they are Telegram’s official address to intercept mail and leave users stranded. Reliance allegedly did this, broadcasting fake routes that diverted global traffic into a dead end.
Quite intriguing
Pavel Durov@durov
Indian telecom Reliance is sabotaging access to Telegram for millions of users OUTSIDE India (including the UAE) via a rogue method called BGP hijacking. The sabotage seems intentional, as Reliance has ignored multiple reports. This may be part of a competitive war, as Reliance is partially owned by Meta — the company behind WhatsApp. Network operators are advised to reject unauthorized BGP announcements from Reliance (AS18101) to prevent route hijacks and ensure stable Internet access for their users. Such abuse of global Internet routing is alarming. I wouldn’t be surprised if Reliance/WhatsApp were also behind the recent lobbying effort to ban Telegram in India.
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God if only I could have one day without AI. AI detox!
But again, I am not complaining, it's the most important thing in my life right now.
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i pitched clearlyy.io to the founder of a $400M generative Al company in NYC.
halfway through, he stops me and says "how much to acquire your company?"
i froze. completely blank.
flew 8,000 miles from bangalore to show him what we built. not to sell it.
i'm 24. team of 7. built this from a laptop. and someone running a $400M
company thought it was worth buying.
still don't have a good answer for what it's worth.
but that moment changed how i think about everything we're building.
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I need a founding team, different skills but all towards the same vision, building an intelligence layer for modern commerce, can't hire a co-founder, so building one for myself and it's been the best! My sales get sorted, my content gets sorted and that's just the start.
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Great set! James dyson is really inspiring.
Satvik Puti@satvikputi
Got myself new books today!!!
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I started paying for claude code, continued paying for cursors cause it has a lot of context already, use codex through free go, free perplexity pro, All of Google AI Pro Suite.
So many tools I need for so many ideas, I have no time to use them all.
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Every time I sleep without token maxing, I feel I haven't done enough.
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I strongly agree! Companies should start creating loops and not stand alone agents.
If anything proves it, this is exactly why we are building Trita, an architecture that understands human context, reasons, finds cross domain cause and effects and increases overall efficiency.
Satya Nadella@satyanadella
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Tell me if this isn't the coolest image you've seen for a discount.
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I'm just tired of wondering if AI can write better every time I write something on my own.
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Reply and I’ll follow you.
I want to connect with ambitious people building something great.
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