Kunal Shah Tells Entrepreneurs to Take Two Days Off a Week to Think

In a recent podcast, Kunal Shah, the founder and CEO of Cred, revealed his strategies and ideas behind building a successful business. One of the things he advised entrepreneurs is to take two days off every week to think. 

“I don’t think people do that because it feels like cheating,” said Shah, that entrepreneurs are hesitant to take two days off in the middle of the week. He also said that many entrepreneurs love ‘sangharsh’, which stands for struggle. This communicates that it is important for entrepreneurs to take some time to think and reflect on what they are building maximising productivity.

“There is no way you could be cute and a top ranker in IIT,” said Shah, explaining that people who have struggled to build their companies and have worked hard in their lives, naturally assume that struggle is the way forward. “Anything which is not ‘sangharsh’ is cheating for you,” he added.

But Shah said that wealth does not necessarily come by just struggling. “I am not saying that people who are successful do not work hard, but their time is spent in very different ways,” Shah added, about how entrepreneurs do not take leaves during the week.

This brings back the conversation about when Narayana Murthy, the Infosys co-founder said that Indian youth should work 70-hours a week. “Performance leads to recognition, recognition leads to respect, respect leads to power,” he said and asked the “wonderful youth of the country” to realise this and work 12 hours a day. 

Recalling his philosophical question asked to Sam Altman when he visited India about what he learned about humans, Shah said that Altman answered that he discovered that intelligence is just a property of matter. “If we give birth to an AI or anything else that is superior to us…the wealth might shift over there and we may not exist as a species,” Shah explained reflecting on the question and that humans have always been an asymmetric information gathering systems, and the same would be true for AI systems.