The Cred Code: What Kunal Shah Looked for in His Founding Team (and Why It Worked)

When Kunal Shah launched CRED in 2018, people were puzzled. An app just to pay credit card bills? And only for the top 1%?

But Shah wasn’t chasing downloads. He was chasing something rarer: trust, exclusivity, and a culture of problem-solvers.

Because here’s the thing, ideas are everywhere. Execution is everything. And execution depends on who you bring into the room on Day 1. Shah knew that if CRED was ever going to become the $6.4 billion fintech giant it is today, he needed a founding team that could thrive in ambiguity, challenge convention, and sweat the details others ignored.

So what exactly was he looking for in those early hires? That’s the heart of the Cred Code, and it’s a playbook every founder can steal from.

Why Founders Can’t Afford to Wing Early Hires

Let’s start with a broader truth: your first 10–15 hires will define your company far more than your first 100.

According to First Round Capital, startups with top-quartile founding teams raise 30% more funding and grow their user base 3.6x faster than average. Similarly, CB Insights found that 23% of startups fail due to not having the right team, more than those that fail due to a lack of funding.

For B2C fintech especially, where trust is the product, the stakes are even higher. If your earliest engineers, product thinkers, and designers don’t embody the culture and solve problems with razor-sharp execution, you won’t just ship slower, you’ll ship the wrong things.

That’s why Shah’s founding team principles matter: they explain why CRED’s DNA looks so different from its competitors, and why top-tier investors like DST Global, Tiger Global, and Sequoia Capital bet on them so early.

Rule #1 – Hire Problem-Solvers, Not Just Good Talkers

Shah has always been vocal about this. He once wrote:

Translation? He wasn’t looking for people who could just charm their way through interviews. He wanted builders. Folks who could roll up their sleeves, stare at messy problems, and untangle them.

Back then, India had ~50 million credit cards in circulation but low usage compared to debit cards. Banks were making billions from late fees. Customers hated paying bills.

The easy route would’ve been “yet another payments app.” Instead, the team reimagined the whole experience: what if paying bills actually felt good? Enter CRED coins, points you earned for paying on time, redeemable for rewards. That kind of thinking doesn’t come from generic résumés; it comes from a team wired to solve hard problems differently.

Rule #2 – Test Culture Fit With Games, Not Interviews

Shah doesn’t believe you see the real person in a conference room Q&A.

In fact, in a 2025 post he said:

Why? Because games reveal everything. Who takes the lead? Who supports? Who gets competitive in the wrong way? Who’s quietly lifting everyone?

At CRED, that mattered. Early teams often implode not because of bad ideas, but because of ego clashes and misaligned values. By filtering for collaboration in unconventional ways, Shah stacked his early team with people who trusted each other enough to challenge, debate, and still move forward together.

Rule #3 – Obsess Over Trust

CRED’s entire business is built on one word: trust.

Shah’s worldview (he studied philosophy, remember) is that India’s biggest tax isn’t GST, it’s the “trust deficit.” Fraud, red tape, late payments, broken promises. CRED’s big bet was simple: reward those who do the right thing.

This wasn’t just branding; it was baked into how the early team thought about product. Every design decision, from the clean black-and-white app UI to the quirky, meme-worthy campaigns, was about making trust and responsibility aspirational.

By 2024, over 35% of India’s credit card users were on CRED. That kind of adoption doesn’t happen unless people believe in what you stand for.

Rule #4 – Value Cross-Disciplinary Thinkers

Most fintech startups are led by engineers. Kunal Shah? He studied philosophy.

Sounds like a disadvantage, right? But it wasn’t.

That’s why CRED doesn’t feel like a boring payments utility. It feels like a game. It taps into psychology, status signaling, and community. Paying your bill earns you rewards and social capital.

To build that, Shah needed people who weren’t boxed in—designers who thought like storytellers, engineers who cared about behavior, marketers who obsessed over product. The early CRED team reflected that diversity of thought.

Rule #5 – Start With the 1%, Not the 100%

Here’s where Shah really broke the startup playbook.

Most founders in India’s fintech scene were obsessed with scale at all costs. Free cashbacks. Free rides. Free groceries.

Shah said: No thanks.

Instead, he zoomed in on the top 30 million Indians with credit cards, who accounted for almost 70% of India’s credit spending. This wasn’t just a segment; it was a community. By making CRED an invite-only club, Shah turned paying bills into a status symbol.

That decision defined everything. The design language. The tone of campaigns. Even the kind of people he hired, because you can’t build an aspirational brand if your own team doesn’t buy into the vision.

Rule #6 – Execution Over Ideas

Here’s the dirty secret of startups: ideas are everywhere. Execution is what separates unicorns from also-rans.

CRED’s early team was built around execution machines. The first hires included top engineers, product managers, analytics experts, and campaign leads.

This DNA paid off. Within just a couple of years, CRED wasn’t just about credit card bills anymore. They launched:

• CRED RentPay (2020) → pay your rent with a credit card.
• CRED Pay → a one-click checkout for e-commerce.
• CRED Cash → instant personal credit lines.
• Wealth management & investment products (via acquisition of Kuvera in 2024).

That kind of speed only happens when your team can take an abstract idea and build it into something real fast.

Rule #7 – Mix Skills, Not Just People

Plenty of founders make the mistake of hiring a team of “mini-me”s. It feels comfortable, but it’s also limiting.

Research from Nature Human Behaviour (2023) shows startups with personality-diverse founding teams outperform homogeneous ones in sales and growth. Diverse skills = more creativity, more resilience, fewer blind spots.

CRED’s first team wasn’t just a group of coders. It had:

• Architects who could scale infrastructure.
• Product & marketing minds who obsessed over storytelling.
• Analytics experts who measured everything.
• Operations leaders who made the machine run smoothly.

That mix meant they could handle experimentation, whether it was launching India’s quirkiest IPL ads or rolling out new fintech products without losing focus.

The Lesson for Founders

CRED’s story shows one thing clearly: your first 10 hires set the DNA for everything that follows.

Kunal Shah didn’t chase flashy résumés or mass-market scale. He looked for problem-solvers, tested culture fit in real situations, and built around a simple philosophy: reward trust. That’s how CRED grew from a “bill-paying app” into a $6.4B fintech brand with 16M+ members.

For founders, the takeaway is simple: don’t just fill seats, hire for philosophy, problem-solving, and cultural chemistry.

At Intervue, we help you do exactly that with structured live coding interviews, on-demand expert panels, and clear reporting. Because the right team doesn’t just ship features—they build movements.