From Cred's Kunal Shah unpacking harsh truth about entrepreneurship to India's corporate hiring pivot, our top stories of the week
In this week's newsletter, also read about whether Indian startups can go global, Meta and Amazon Prime Video's new revenue streams, speculation about who will be India's next premium cricket band—Rishabh Pant, Shubman Gill, or an unexpected contender; and how Labubu dolls feature in China's soft power play
1) Inside the mind of Kunal Shah
Kunal Shah, the founder and CEO of fintech unicorn Cred Illustration: Kapil Kashyap; Image: Madhu Kapparath
"Entrepreneurship is not about glory. It’s about judgment," declares Kunal Shah, the founder and CEO of Cred. A philosophy major, Shah is the only non-STEM founder in the fintech sector. And this education guides his entrepreneurial success: building for trust, embracing discomfort, and making consistently good decisions. In an unstructured, deeply revealing conversation, Shah announces that he isn’t here for vanity metrics or valuation games. Instead, he makes a sharp case for why Indian founders need to play the long game, laser-focused on the 30–40 million high-intent users who actually move the economic needle. His lessons range from the hidden costs of time-wasting in India to the imperative of brand familiarity in building super-apps and super-conglomerates. Read on.
2) Learning the hard way
Image: Kapil Kashyap/AI
The wave of loss-making “new-age technology companies†going public has collided harshly with market realities. There are a few exceptions. Zomato and PB Fintech have managed to regain investor faith. Zaggle and Go Digit have rewarded patient shareholders by proving profitability and scaling responsibly. But the larger pattern points to a valuation bubble correcting itself in real time as experts point to a widening 'Say vs Do' gap. The IPO dream isn’t dead yet. There are more than 60 companies that have already received the market regulator’s approval to go public to raise around ₹1,05,875 crore cumulatively. But the bar has never been higher.
3) Global ambitions
Image: Kapil Kashyap/AI
With 140,000 startups and over 115 unicorns, India’s ecosystem has blossomed. India's consumer-internet darlings, such as InMobi, Ola, Razorpay, Zepto, have built for complexity, chaos, and scale of the domestic market. But conquering new markets will demand more than just ambition; it takes R&D muscle, category depth, and relentless execution to become a tech giant. It’s not about becoming the next Amazon or Google—it’s about building the first great Indian product for the world. The hard-earned playbooks of Indian founders are forged in one of the world’s toughest markets, but are they ready to graduate into global platforms?
