Exclusive: Kunal Shah on the 'human' side of business

CRED CEO Kunal Shah, who believes his employees are no different from his family members, spoke at length about the need for empathetic leadership.

Saturday June 12, 2021 , 3 min Read

Good morning!

From encouraging employees to troll their leaders to providing unlimited leave, shorter work-weeks and advance salaries while assuring them of job security, serial entrepreneur Kunal Shah’s style of leadership at fintech unicorn CRED is far from ordinary.

In fact, the entrepreneur told YourStory, he highly encourages ‘trolling’ and meme-making of the leadership team, so much so that the startup’s Slack actually has a dedicated “Meme” channel.

The fintech company, which has over 400 employees, hired more than half of its staff through the pandemic and has assured staff that there will be no job cuts, Kunal Shah told YourStory on #HumanBeyondResources, a series that explores the ‘human’ aspect of Human Resource management in the new normal.

Kunal, who believes his employees are no different from his family members, spoke at length about the need for empathetic leadership.

He says, “Anybody who is trying to build anything does not have a choice to really be not empathetic for a long period of time...Ultimately, it's people that drive things [businesses].”

Watch the unfiltered conversation with Kunal Shah on #HumanBeyondResources

Editor’s Pick: The Turning Point

Curefit — with its range of fitness and wellness offerings — recently received $75 million from Tata Digital to help expand into a proactive health management space.

However, five years ago, when serial entrepreneurs Mukesh Bansal and Ankit Nagori set out to build the health and fitness startup, there was hardly any player looking at all the healthcare aspects as a complete ecosystem. Read more.

Mukesh Bansal on the ideology behind building CureFit

Startup Spotlight

AdmitKard building a full-stack career guidance and foreign admissions platform

In 2019, 7.53 lakh students from India were studying abroad, according to data from the Ministry of External Affairs.

While some homegrown startups service individual segments like study abroad loans, counselling and mentoring, others have become full-stack platforms offering students end-to-end admission guidance. AdmitKard falls in the latter category. Read more.

News & Updates

In response to reports of the Enforcement Directorate issuing a show-cause notice to WazirX for allegedly violating FEMA rules, Founder Nischal Shetty said that the company had not received any formal communication and was in "compliance with all applicable laws" and will "fully cooperate" in any investigation.

Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) received CSR support from Huawei India for the deployment of non-invasive ventilators and remote vitals monitoring machines in public health hospitals and facilities across Karnataka.

According to a COVID-19 Suitability Index report by Square Yards, the east zone in Gurugram, the western and central suburbs in Mumbai, and the Mahadevapura zone in Bengaluru were found to be the most suitable to live from a COVID-19 perspective.