Kunal Shah on winning in India, second-order thinking, the philosophy of startups, and more

Microsoft, Adobe, Alphabet, IBM, Palo Alto Networks, even Starbucks. The CEOs of these companies were all born in India and emigrated to the US.

A lot of CEOs have done well because they follow the ... of the founders quite well. These are the principles that were given to me and I'm gonna sustain this and make it even bigger.

I wanna keep talking about India and how it's different and how to build products that are successful in India.

No Indian has ever been paid an hourly salary in their entire life. The concept of time is not the same.

What do you see as the biggest opportunity for Indian startups?

India is changing because now, for the first time, we are seeing founders being respected and unicorns being celebrated. We have a National Startup Day and probably the first generation that will have to prove ourselves to be very large profitable companies. I wouldn't want to be anywhere else and building.

(instrumental music) Today my guest is Kunal Shah. Kunal is one of the most well-known and respected entrepreneurs and product leaders in India and around the world. He shares endless wisdom on Twitter and LinkedIn where he's got over one million followers. He's the CEO and founder of CRED, a fintech startup based in India which was last valued at over $6 billion and as of a couple years ago, processed over 20% of all credit card bill payments in India. Prior to CRED, he founded three other startups, including FreeCharge which he sold for over $400 million to Snapdeal. Kunal is a deep thinker, both about product and about life. His background is actually in philosophy which comes across very clearly when you hear him share his advice. In our conversation, we get deep into what makes working and building in India different from the US markets and other markets, including why trust is so essential and why so many people are so much more risk-averse in India. We talk about the biggest challenges and opportunities within the India market, why there are so many successful Indian immigrants in CEO roles across tech and what we can learn from that. Also, why companies in India can quickly grow DAOs but not ARPUs and what that means for building products in India. We also talk about how to stay curious and open-minded and the power of second order thinking, also stories of failure and lots of contrarian takes and so much more. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow this podcast on your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously. A big thank you to Sayan Maity for making the connection to Kunal. With that, I bring you Kunal Shah after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're building a SaaS app, at some point, your customers will start asking for enterprise features like SAML authentication and SCIM provisioning. That's where WorkOS comes in, making it fast and painless to add enterprise features to your app. Their APIs are easy to understand so that you can ship quickly and get back to building other features and hundreds of other companies are already powered by WorkOS, including ones you probably know like Vercel, Webflow, and Loom. WorkOS also recently launched AuthKit, a complete authentication and user management service. It's essentially a modern alternative to Auth0, but with better pricing and more flexible APIs. AuthKit's design is stunning out of the box and you can also fully customize it to fit your app's brand. It's an effortless experience from your first user all the way to your largest enterprise customer. Best of all, AuthKit is free for any developer up to one million users. Check it out at workos.com/lenny to learn more. That's workos.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Orb. As a business, you care about revenue, but as a product team, the last thing you wanna do is delay a product launch or a pricing change because your team has to rebuild billing from scratch. Orb is a flexible usage-based billing engine that lets you evolve your pricing with ease. The fastest growing product teams at companies like Vercel and Replit trust Orb to power their pricing changes and launches. Use Orb to ship products faster, stop worrying about billing, and evolve pricing with ease and control. Check it out at withorb.com/lenny and skip the line for a demo or sandbox by using promo code Lenny. That's withorb.com/lenny. Kunal, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.