'I'm a philosophy major, had a hard time hiring engineers': CRED's Kunal Shah on his initial entrepreneurial journey

Fintech firm CRED's founder Kunal Shah spoke about his trials and tribulations as a tech entrepreneur and explained how much more difficult it gets for someone who studied philosophy. 

In a podcast hosted by Myntra founder Mukesh Bansal, Shah spoke about his entreprenurial journey. 

"If you think it's (entrepreneurship) going to be fun and all of that it will not be that. It's a permanent state of crisis, and the only reason you should consider it is that you believe that you have an opinion that you want to prove is right and you were willing to sacrifice everything and anything to achieve that. It has to be just you and it's going to be extremely lonely, it's not going to have a community feeling around it, ultimately it's a very lonely pursuit. 

"I think the reason entrepreneurship is hard because you become the absorber of uncertainty to provide certainty to your customers to your investors to your employees and, therefore, when you are the uncertainty absorber you have to be having a much bigger turmoil that you deal with right," said Shah. 

Shah, after completing his Bachelor’s in Philosophy from Mumbai's Wilson College, joined a management course at NMIMS in 2003. After studying for a year, he dropped out and decided to pursue his entrepreneurial dreams. 

He said that his educational background and lack of access to an alumni network meant he couldn't even manage to hire engineers.

"I'm a philosophy major, I had a hard time hiring two engineers when I started off because I have no alumni to reach out to and say aa jao (come join) and you just have to constantly build your ability to sell, you have to constantly build the ability to execute,. But imagine this being a permanent state, so I would say if you want something that is going to give you peace, don't pick entrepreneurship," added Shah. 

He said having a footing in philosophy had held him in good stead as the boss of CRED.

"I do believe that there is a role that philosophy plays where I think one value we have at CRED, which is called truth seeking and it is a pursuit you never find but you keep seeking it and I think because of that you create a culture that is constantly seeking truth, find flaws, find errors, find changes, find improvement areas. 

"I like to be mostly right in things that we do, for example we recently launched Garage as a product and it took 15 to 18 months and in most tech places it'll not be acceptable but I have a firm belief that you have to become a company that when you launch something people anticipate and say let's see what he did right and nobody should feel oh it is shaky and and that's what creates trust that's what makes people want to try your thing," Shah said. 

He also explained what sort of mindset India needs to be a developed nation. 

Shah said he believes that no big achievement can come from "work-life balance" and that India has imbibed the Western concepts of a "chill life" before becoming a developed nation. "I am not saying it is not a choice you should not make - it is a personal choice. But as a country, we have to go a long way," he said.

"We see an extraordinary execution (in China). It's called 9-9-6 culture - 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week. And you see that progress. We cannot have the ambition of being a 10-20 trillion dollar economy and still expect that life should be chill," the CRED founder said.