Nishad Shah

Speck of dust within the galaxy. Cofounder @goinri @gotrade94 (YC W23). Chatrooms & ecomm product head @ShareChatapp. Seeker. Writer. 太极图
Views are my own.

[Nishad Shah @_NishadShah]

Thought of starting a meta-thread of threads on different topics, my left-brain couldn't resist the organisation temptation this has. On a serious note, I think it will make looking back at my own thoughts easier. So here goes...

[Nishad Shah @_NishadShah]

Reread this and thinking - Fat skills and thin harness is no different than how we manage high agency people.

Human harness has 2 parts:
Alignment —> “this is what we are solving for
Accountability —> “these are the stakes & your targets”

Fat skills are the smartness and agency stacked with tactical domain specific skills.

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

https://t.co/EVPCod6rxu

[Nishad Shah @_NishadShah]

The thing that really stood out for me is how @travisk has extremely pithy sentences that encapsulate so much of the insight and he repeats them over.

"Pricing is the sum of all strategy."

"Fewest number of rules to manage the chaos"

"d (problem creation) / dt < d (problem solving) / dt "

I can see why is a great storyteller and so successful at fundraising as well as culture transmission

[David Senra @davidsenra]

"I don't want to fail, but I'm not afraid of it." — @elonmusk

Travis Kalanick (@travisk) on why you can’t fear failure:

“The psyche around fear of failure f*cks with your ability to get there.”

“A lot of early founders have a fear of failure. That fear blocks you from making progress because you're bogged down.”

“You will never be truly world-class if you have a fear of failure.”

“Fear of failure will prevent you from going all the way.”

[Nishad Shah @_NishadShah]

People are sharing more and more personal stuff with AI.

But at the same time, the general trend is declining relationships / friendships.

I think that’s an anomaly. Why is that context not being used to make relationships better.

Feels like there is an interesting product category hiding somewhere between personal AI and social.

[Nishad Shah @_NishadShah]

Pareto is dead.

Anyone can go to 80, it takes a mountain of effort to go to 100, and the builders who do are the ones who care the most about solving the problem well.

For me, Wispr Flow is that obvious product which goes beyond.

No more 80-20. Pick 1 thing and go to 100.

[Nishad Shah @_NishadShah]

@paraschopra If that’s true, curious what you are thinking as actions to take based on that?

[Nishad Shah @_NishadShah]

Seeing more people in my circle treat Claude as 'human' instead of a tool.

Makes me curious how common this is. Here's a quick poll:

How much personal stuff do you share with Claude / ChatGPT / Gemini?

[Nishad Shah @_NishadShah]

One simple truth keeps hitting me again and again across different things:

The world rewards specificity.

Be it ambition or professional asks, you have to be specific about what you want.

But people do not take the effort to be specific.

Being specific requires being opinionated.

being opinionated requires effort (to make a good opinion) and failure risk (you can still be wrong).

Hence most people stay on the general layer, especially the risk averse ones.

But that hurts our own progress.

Even if the specific opinion is wrong, we can learn much faster and iterate from there to a better one, ending up net ahead.

Risk being specific.

[Nishad Shah @_NishadShah]

Most consumer AI memory are focusing on the wrong problem to solve. It's not just about cognitive load.

It's also about delight. You get delighted when someone remembers aspects of your life that you mentioned earlier.

Executed well, it induces a 'wow, you were listening' feeling that's very hard to forget.

[Nishad Shah @_NishadShah]

@HomeCentreIndia has the most pathetic service ever.

Ordered furniture 20 days back, they keep delaying deliveries after taking my money. Dont even inform - every call from our end gets a reply 'stock not received'.

Still no confirmation on the exact date. Not even refunds.

[Nishad Shah @_NishadShah]

very underrated.

[Tom Blomfield @t_blom]

Every piece of advice is a reaction to something that came before.

"Validate your idea before you go all-in" was a reaction to MBAs raising millions of dollars based on nothing but a business plan.

Today, young builders take that advice and quickly "invalidate" every idea they come up with.

Now the missing ingredient is conviction 🤷‍♂️

[Nishad Shah @_NishadShah]

Check it out here - https://t.co/9BtxskuKg0
(a bit rough around the edges)

[Nishad Shah @_NishadShah]

Most irritating part of BLR house hunting is just waking up everyday and checking so many FB groups daily.

Was fed up of doing this recently, so built a single feed of all major BLR flat-flatmate group listings (500+)

Built for myself, free to use, hope it's useful 👇

[Nishad Shah @_NishadShah]

Thanks for making my interview question real @kunalb11 😅

Whatsapp has always been a very underutilised product.

‘What would you do if you were leading whatsapp’ is what I'd ask often.

Of the 3 pillars - content, commerce and community, they have only scratched the surface of 3rd. The first two are completely up for grabs and so are other usecases within community (e.g. work in India happens over whatsapp, but it’s not made for it).

Excited about Whatsapp's future!

[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.

[Nishad Shah @_NishadShah]

@shyamalanadkat @OpenAI Congrats on moving here! Would love to meet, DMed you!

[Nishad Shah @_NishadShah]

Changing your environment is a highly underrated factor in winning

[signüll @signulll]

as a man, you want to be evaluated in a setting you define. not in someone else’s marketplace, not in a feed. & certainly not on some dumb app.

basically you want to make sure it’s not in a room where the ranking system rewards the shallowest possible read of you, like a police lineup.

what you need a backdrop that reveals what is actually compelling about you like your taste, your judgment, your discipline, your humor, your presence, & most important your way of seeing the world.

if you let modern systems define the frame, they will reduce you to the most superficial version of yourself & then judge you for it.

[Nishad Shah @_NishadShah]

@divz_i_am thank you

[Nishad Shah @_NishadShah]

@gokulr I'm curious how you infused your experience into it. I tried with a consumer entertainment prd but it missed the context.

[Nishad Shah @_NishadShah]

Once you hear it even once, you have a point to grow it from. And then let it compound and guide you to your best decisions.
https://t.co/8PS8HtbAFl

[Nishad Shah @_NishadShah]

A recent learning I had was that we severely underplay the uniqueness of our existence.

Earlier I believed that a lot of thoughts, emotions, rebellions, creations, gifts, circumstances etc are inherently random. They don’t make sense and aren’t supposed to as well.

But, no. 👇

[Nishad Shah @_NishadShah]

The forces that do this are everywhere: envy, prestige, social approval.
It's still there though. Deep down.
Silence, writing, honest conversations — find what drops the noise enough for the signal to come through.