Puneet Kumar

Curious. Grateful. Passionate Amateur. Sports @TheSportsBox1 &
Reflections @At1Breath

[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.

[Matt Smethurst @MattSmethurst]

40% of fatherhood is walking around the house, turning off lights.

[The Sports Box @TheSportsBox1]

Cape Verde are refusing to lose. 🇨🇻
Beat Saudi Arabia and they are on the brink of the knockouts.

[The Sports Box @TheSportsBox1]

Opening Night : Call it

[Aviral Bhatnagar @aviralbhat]

Indian Americans on average make $160K, which is ~50x the average Indian per capita income at ~$3K

50x is the highest such income ratio, ahead of Pakistan, Nigeria, China and Bangladesh

India is the biggest exporter of its highest-skilled talent, who also do extremely well

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

India’s birth rate has fallen below replacement.

Among those most educated, India’s birth rate fell below replacement many years ago.

[Gabbar @GabbbarSingh]

This is the first time 10,000 girls have qualified for JEE advanced. The highest ever. A two fold jump. Earlier 13% now 25% of qualified candidates are women.

Whatay story!

[Jeff Bezos @JeffBezos]

All personnel are accounted for and safe. It’s too early to know the root cause but we’re already working to find it. Very rough day, but we’ll rebuild whatever needs rebuilding and get back to flying. It’s worth it.

[Yuchen Jin @Yuchenj_UW]

Whoever invented “Member of Technical Staff” was a genius.

It filters out Staff/Principal title-maxxers, protects engineering and research from corporate ladder brain, and leaves recruiters staring at LinkedIn like: “Is this person L4 or L7?”

MTS is the best title. Happy to be MTS.

[Muthukrishnan Dhandapani @dmuthuk]

Warren Buffett has been filing his income tax returns from the age of 13. He is now 95. Not only he is filing returns for last 82 years, he has details and copies of all the 82 returns.

When I was in US, lot of my free time was spent in local library. For a voracious reader like me, the variety and volume of books available were feast to the brain.

That's when I first came across Warren Buffett. I think at that time he was the richest or second richest person on earth. And he built it from the scratch legally. I found it difficult to believe that someone can become richest person in the world purely through legal means. That created a huge impression in me.

I made what my auditor then considered as a weird decision. From the time I started accumulating wealth, I began giving all the information to income tax department. For a few lakhs of rupees wealth, I started submitting cash flow statement, Profit and Loss account and balance sheet along with my IT returns.

My current auditor came into my life around two decades ago. He was surprised when he saw my previous returns with this much details. I explained him why I needed it that way. He was also surprised that from every single bank transaction to all financial transactions were entered and maintained in Tally. I was also keeping in box files all back up papers for each financial year.

Within few years of our relationship, he not only implemented this model for his family but also to some of his willing clients.

After I got married, my wife found it very odd to file income tax returns like this. Convinced her and implemented the same for her too.

Time runs fast.

By God's grace, we are wealthy.

But the interesting part is right from my first income tax return to last year - not only I've records of all IT returns, I also have original statements and documents for all financial years. It's all there in tally too.

I don't have a single rupee of black money. More than investing, in which I'm still a novice, I learned lot of life lessons from Warren Buffett.

I don't want to claim any moral superiority. For many people, especially in developed nations, this practice is very normal. Being honest is probably considered abnormal only in our country.

From my life, I'm convinced that it is possible to become rich through legal means. I'm now 53. If God gives me say another 20 to 25 years of life, I'm confident of creating phenomenal wealth, that too purely through legal means.

Warren Buffett says it is very important as to who you have as role model in life. I've few role models in life and probably he was the first to join the list.

Role model matters.

Building significant wealth through legal means is 100% possible.

[Jeff Bezos @JeffBezos]

Thank you. The important part is zeroing out taxes on the bottom half. Best way to put money in someone’s pocket is to not take it out in the first place. Bottom half is only 3% of total tax revenue. But it’s very meaningful to that person. Zero it out.

[Sawyer Merritt @SawyerMerritt]

Wow, Anthropic has agreed to pay @SpaceX $1.25 billion per month through May 2029 for AI compute capacity, with capacity ramping in May and June 2026 at a reduced fee.

Huge deal

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

15 books recommended by Daniel Kahneman:

1) Nudge by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein

[Tushar Mehta @tushaarmehtaa]

anthropic might be building the greatest “individual contributor” team in tech history.

i mean just look at this lineup:

> andrej karpathy (god himself)
> mike krieger (instagram cofounder/cto)
> jarred sumner (bun)
> peter bailis (workday cto)
> bryan mccann (you com cto)
> niki parmar (adept ai cto)
> henry shi (super com cto)

and and and

most of them just become “MTS” at anthropic 😭

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Personal update: I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.

[Tansu Yegen @TansuYegen]

A toddler thought water flowed because mom and dad held hands, and the pure joy was caught on camera.

[Puneet Kumar @IntendedPUNeet]

Profound.

[Puneet Kumar @IntendedPUNeet]

Civil Irony : The quiet grief of adult friendship. https://t.co/0gw9ZnfKEg

[Manosai @manosaie]

Beautiful essay on adult friendship

[Roma @legendofroma]

Full head of hair, mentally sharp and still pretty good physically at 100

What a life in nature, low cortisol and a strong mission does to a man