Karan Shah

All views are personal.

[Karan Shah @iamkrn18]

Football owes egypt an apology.
Fifa clearly robbed them.

Freebies to Argentina.

[Karan Shah @iamkrn18]

@digital_newshub Ayushman Khurana.

[Karan Shah @iamkrn18]

Don Carlo Ancelotti. Reminds me of Real Madrid comeback Master Class!

#FIFAWorldCup

[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.

[Karan Shah @iamkrn18]

Bengal taught us: Democracy isn't clean or quiet. It's messy, loud, emotional, and fiercely alive.

Jai Hind. 🇮🇳🚩

#WestBengal #IndianDemocracy #ElectionResults2026 (9/9)

[Karan Shah @iamkrn18]

From dusty village roads to Kolkata's streets, West Bengal's Assembly Elections 2026 was pure madness!

Politicians poured their hearts out – rallies till midnight, sweat-soaked speeches, promises flying like confetti. (1/9)

#BengalElections2026 #KhelaHobe

[Karan Shah @iamkrn18]

Win or lose, this is the power of Democracy. It makes netas campaign like madmen, common people stand in lines for hours, officials work round the clock, and even critics engage.

No perfect system. But it forces everyone to WORK HARD. Respect. 🙏 (8/9)

[Karan Shah @iamkrn18]

इनको कैसे रोकोगे?

@BJP4India @BJP4Bengal

[Rishi Bagree @rishibagree]

Mood of the West Bengal 🙌🔥🙏

[Karan Shah @iamkrn18]

Amit Shah - The Modern Chanakya!

While others did rallies, he stayed 15 full days on the ground in Bengal. Guided every booth, fixed every detail, and crafted a master plan.

From struggling to cross two digits to storming ~190 seats. 🙌

#BengalVerdict

[Sunanda Roy 👑 @SaffronSunanda]

The West Bengal Elections is not a Political battle

It's a Battle to save our Civilization, Culture and Traditions!!

Fingers crossed 🤞🤞

[Karan Shah @iamkrn18]

The Saffron wave reaches Bengal! 🇮🇳🚩

[Praffulgarg @praffulgarg97]

You love him you hate him. You will see PR campaigns of Modi Yogi but this man @AmitShah will be remembered to bring back West Bengal from the vicious cycle it went into!

[Karan Shah @iamkrn18]

अंधेरा हटेगा, सूरज निकलेगा! ☀️

For years they mastered the dark arts of rigging & fear. Now even a little music from the other side makes them cut rallies short. The sun is up... no more hiding!

#electionresult2026

[Karan Shah @iamkrn18]

@MrBeast

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The West poured $50 billion into fast breeder nuclear reactors and abandoned every single one. India poured $900 million and just achieved criticality on the first commercially viable one outside Russia.

The US spent $15 billion. Gave up. Japan spent $12 billion. Their Monju prototype had one sodium fire in 1995 and never recovered. The UK spent $8 billion. Germany spent $6 billion. France, Italy, all walked away. Six of the richest nations on Earth concluded this technology was too hard and too expensive to pursue.

India started building in 2004 with an initial budget of $420 million. Twenty-two years, a dozen missed deadlines, and a cost doubling later, the Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor at Kalpakkam just sustained a controlled fission chain reaction. The reactor is now alive.

The reason India never quit is a constraint most people have never thought about. India has only 1-2% of the world's uranium reserves. For a country of 1.4 billion people trying to build energy independence, that's a death sentence if you're running conventional nuclear.

But India has 25% of the world's thorium. The single largest national reserve on Earth.

The problem: you can't just burn thorium the way you burn uranium. A physicist named Homi Bhabha designed a three-stage nuclear program in the 1950s specifically to solve this. Stage 1: burn natural uranium in heavy water reactors, collect plutonium as a byproduct. Stage 2: feed that plutonium into fast breeder reactors, where it breeds MORE plutonium AND converts thorium into fissile uranium-233. Stage 3: burn thorium directly at scale.

India just entered Stage 2. Seventy years after Bhabha drew it up on paper.

The math on the thorium endgame is wild. At current energy consumption rates, India's thorium reserves could power the country for over 700 years. Most nuclear nations are playing a uranium game with maybe 80-100 years of runway. India is playing a completely different game with a 7x longer fuel supply.

The West quit because uranium stayed cheap and sodium coolant is terrifying. It catches fire on contact with air. It explodes on contact with water. Russia's BN-600 had 27 sodium leaks and 14 sodium fires between 1980 and 1997. And Russia kept going anyway because Russia doesn't quit nuclear projects. India watched all of that and kept going too.

When you have 1% of the uranium but 25% of the thorium, the engineering difficulty stops being a reason to quit. It becomes the price of admission to a 700-year energy supply that nobody else can access.

[Aravind @aravind]

India has now attained criticality in a commercial, 500MW power producing, fast breeder nuclear reactor.

(We had experimental one before, but this is a big commercial one that can produce power.)

Criticality means reactor is running by itself without needing to keep re-igniting it. Breeder means it makes more fissile fuel than it uses.

Nobody wanted to give India such tech. Because these reactors can create nuclear fissile material. So India created the tech itself in spite of sanctions.

Only Russia has this tech (true commerical fast breeder reactor) running. US, UK, France say they have given up on this. China has one prototype based on Russian tech but it is not yet commercial.

India has refused to put its Fast Breeder Reactor program under international scrutiny. It is a big, big, no HUGE thing for India's energy independence.

But, as usual, most Indians won't know how big as we don't play up our achievements. I was recently amused seeing some posts by Gen-Z advising Indian govt to go for Thorium cycle etc in some condescending tone.

Because India has been on it quietly for sometime. And this reactor going critical now and commercial soon means it can sustain itself for infinity. This cuts India's imports of Uranium. And paves the way for Thorium based reactors as well. (Stage 3 of India's nuclear program, we just passed Stage 2 with PM's post).

Also, what PM didn't say is, this reactor can help generate some 100+kg of weapons grade Plutonium -with which India can make many warheads and expand nuclear stockpile if it wishes so.

But India will never do that, you know, as India is a very peaceful nation promoting world wide nuclear disarmament ;)