Prashant Chopra

Reader, traveller, occasional golfer, business strategist --- Work in progress.. Tweets / Re-tweets = personal, ≠ endorsements.

[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.

[kris gopalakrishnan @kris_sg]

IIT Madras brain centre releases the world’s most detailed 3D atlas of human brainstem at cell resolution https://t.co/peJwpGt4Yi @iitmadras

[OP Singh @opsinghips]

Neeraj Chopra almost didn't happen.

Not because of corruption. Not because of incompetence.

Because of a file that in summer noon of 2011 could have gone upward, a committee that could have met, and a season that could have passed.

One official decided instead. Same afternoon. No precedent. No committee. Rs 1 lakh for javelins.

Refer. Defer. Wait. He didn't.

The boys were practising by the evening at Panchkula athletic track. They did so there for next five years before moving to more competitive circuits.

One of them did exceptionally well. India got an #Olympic gold.

We blame governance failure on corrupt officials. Or incompetent ones.

There is a third failure — the honest, competent official who has learned that deciding is more dangerous than not deciding.

Kahneman showed people feel losses twice as powerfully as gains. The status quo is the system's default — and the official's shelter. The harm of his action is traceable to him. The harm of his silence is traceable to no one.

So he refers. Defers.
Performs just enough to stay invisible.

I call it rational abdication.

It is costing India more than corruption ever did. And it can be fixed by making inaction visible and bonafide mistakes absorbable.

Read my article in #Dailyworld

The Neeraj Chopra story is the lucky version. You have been that citizen whose file went upward and never came back. What was yours? Tell me. ⬇️

#RationalAbdication #Governance #NeerajChopra

[Shiv Aroor @ShivAroor]

BREAKING: Trump stops all military strikes on Iran for 5 days, says "very good and productive conversations" with Iran for "total resolution of our hostilities".

[Trung Phan @TrungTPhan]

always suspected Mckinsey had serious IT security vulnerabilities based on their own MBA candidate recruiting video

[Fan Account Richard Kettlebourogh @RichKettle07]

If this match wasn't Live then Pakistan would have claimed the victory 🤐 #INDvsPAK

[Forbes @Forbes]

Quote of the day. #QOTD

[CERT-In @IndianCERT]

CERT-In, MeitY, Government of India and BITS Pilani Group through its Center for Research Excellence in National security (CRENS) have signed an MoU on 10 July 2025.

[Ethan Evans @EthanEvansVP]

One of my biggest regrets is how stressful I allowed my career to be. I worried constantly while on the path to becoming an Amazon VP. Let me save you some stress. Career growth requires:

[Hiten Shah @hnshah]

Startups begin with a sharp focus on the customer. They have to. There’s no one else.

But as companies grow, attention shifts inward. People start optimizing for internal status instead of external truth. You want to avoid conflict. You want to make someone feel included. You want credit. These are normal instincts. But they come at a cost.

Bit by bit, the customer fades. They become a slide, not a person. A talking point, not a test. You still think you’re building for them but you’re not in contact with them anymore.

That’s how companies lose their edge. Not because they forget how to build. Because they forget who they’re building for.

[Gabbar @GabbbarSingh]

The company which makes the PL-15 missile. Stock is 6% down today. India announced it found one unexplored and they are reverse engineering it.

[Sheel Mohnot @pitdesi]

Love Buffett’s response to “when did you know you were rich?”

Particularly the highlighted part.

[Abhinav Kukreja @kukreja_abhinav]

I am v bullish on BITS Pilani. Not sure what’s going on there but somehow the majority of risk taking engineers all went to the same college.

No noise about quant. Minimal debate about core vs non core. V little entitlement. Just cracked students doing engineering.

[Gurpriya @GurpriyaSidhu]

Circuit was Munna Bhai's Chief of Staff

[Satya Nadella @satyanadella]

A couple reflections on the quantum computing breakthrough we just announced...

Most of us grew up learning there are three main types of matter that matter: solid, liquid, and gas. Today, that changed.

After a nearly 20 year pursuit, we’ve created an entirely new state of matter, unlocked by a new class of materials, topoconductors, that enable a fundamental leap in computing.

It powers Majorana 1, the first quantum processing unit built on a topological core.

We believe this breakthrough will allow us to create a truly meaningful quantum computer not in decades, as some have predicted, but in years.

The qubits created with topoconductors are faster, more reliable, and smaller.

They are 1/100th of a millimeter, meaning we now have a clear path to a million-qubit processor.

Imagine a chip that can fit in the palm of your hand yet is capable of solving problems that even all the computers on Earth today combined could not!

Sometimes researchers have to work on things for decades to make progress possible.

It takes patience and persistence to have big impact in the world.

And I am glad we get the opportunity to do just that at Microsoft.

This is our focus: When productivity rises, economies grow faster, benefiting every sector and every corner of the globe.

It’s not about hyping tech; it’s about building technology that truly serves the world.

[Prashant Chopra @PrashChops]

@PaytmSeONDC I have DM’ed you 20 mins back. Got no response as yet !!

[Prashant Chopra @PrashChops]

@Paytmcare I ordered food an hour back from @ONDC_Official APP. No food and update still. How do I get a refund?

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

This report is long but very good.

“With R1, DeepSeek essentially cracked one of the holy grails of AI: getting models to reason step-by-step without relying on massive supervised datasets. Their DeepSeek-R1-Zero experiment showed something remarkable: using pure reinforcement learning with carefully crafted reward functions, they managed to get models to develop sophisticated reasoning capabilities completely autonomously. This wasn't just about solving problems— the model organically learned to generate long chains of thought, self-verify its work, and allocate more computation time to harder problems.

The technical breakthrough here was their novel approach to reward modeling. Rather than using complex neural reward models that can lead to "reward hacking" (where the model finds bogus ways to boost their rewards that don't actually lead to better real-world model performance), they developed a clever rule-based system that combines accuracy rewards (verifying final answers) with format rewards (encouraging structured thinking). This simpler approach turned out to be more robust and scalable than the process-based reward models that others have tried.”

https://t.co/XRqgMNRzg1

[Niteen S Dharmawat, CFA @niteen_india]

With ♥️ to L&T chief...

#WAfwd

[Jitendra Jain @jitendrajain]

14/ The banking system has good people caught in a bad process. It’s time to rethink how we measure success in banking—for the benefit of both employees and customers.

What’s your experience with banking? Comment below