Of Meta, Kunal Shah..and is lending still a feature?
A look at what's really happening at Meta and what it needs
Everyone is talking about Kunal Shah becoming CEO of WhatsApp.
I think they’re looking at the wrong story.
The bigger story is that Meta suddenly needs WhatsApp to work.
For years, WhatsApp has been one of the most successful products in the world. But it has also been one of Meta’s biggest unfinished businesses.
Meta paid $19 billion for WhatsApp more than a decade ago. Yet WhatsApp still contributes a tiny fraction of Meta’s revenue (less than 2%).
Now look at what’s happening elsewhere.
Meta is spending aggressively on AI - all of its AI launches have failed so far (remember Llama?).
Employee morale is reportedly under pressure..
As Boz, CTO of Meta recently said in an internal memo:
morale is “maybe not the worst it’s ever been in 20 years here, but it’s probably up there” — comparing it to the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
The company is reorganizing teams, moving talent around, has been recording employees clicks and keystrokes data to train its AI model and throwing enormous resources ($145Bn so far) at finding its next AI growth engine.
Which makes WhatsApp more important than ever.
And nowhere is that challenge more visible than India.
India is WhatsApp’s biggest market by users (26% audience)
India is one of the biggest WhatsApp Business markets (15 million active accounts).
But the monetization numbers tell a very different story.
India accounts for a massive share of WhatsApp usage while contributing a disproportionately small share of revenue.
That is the paradox Meta has failed to solve.
For years, people predicted that WhatsApp Payments would dominate Indian fintech.
It didn’t happen. Not even close.
Not because the market wasn’t large enough. Not because Indians weren’t willing to adopt digital payments. Other fintech companies proved both assumptions wrong.
The real issue was execution and focus. I hope Kunal can bring it - rather, transform WA from a messaging platform to Fintech (lending becomes a feature?).
If Meta wants WhatsApp to become a meaningful business, it has to crack India fintech.
And if it can crack India, it may finally discover the monetization playbook for the rest of the world.
The question is no longer whether WhatsApp can scale.
It already has.
The question is whether Meta can finally figure out what business WhatsApp is actually in.
What’s your take?
