CHAPTERS

• 00:00  Intro: 95% fail by year two — and the man who didn't
• 01:46  Why Mocha in 2001: a city missing "places to be"
• 03:23  Bombay the "coolest cousin"; South Bombay snobbery moves to Bandra
• 05:05  The MTV / Gen X generation and a West-facing India
• 07:47  UCLA, entertainment management, and learning to live culture
• 11:29  What "Handmade" and "Impresario" mean
• 14:13  The business today: 80 restaurants, 900 cr, 5,500 people
• 15:29  Why restaurants die; learning from the community
• 18:02  People vs processes — and why he keeps returning to people
• 19:32  Social: the millennial third space and the shisha ban
• 25:41  The Gen Z puzzle; Saltwater to Bandra Bourn; evolution vs revolution
• 30:46  Real estate: location vs locality and India's "80 pockets"
• 32:32  The metric that matters: AOV x covers x table turnaround
• 35:33  COVID and surviving "mass-extinction events"
• 39:17  The town hall: the team takes 40% pay to save the company
• 40:51  What losing a restaurant feels like; the discipline to quit
• 42:44  Mental model: 4-5 engines to ride economic cycles
• 46:42  The marble business and hustling from age 12
• 51:20  Bowling alleys & Phoenix Mills: people buy time together
• 53:44  Self-rating: 7.5 as a parent, 5 as a CEO
• 55:15  Building a restaurant vs building an organization
• 56:15  The HR crisis: severe attrition, talent going abroad
• 58:44  The one thing he can't delegate: layouts and property selection
• 1:00:49 Becoming a "boardroom warrior" against his will

 KEY COMPANIES & BRANDS

Impresario Handmade Restaurants; Mocha; Social; Saltwater Cafe/Grill; Bandra Born; Cafe Coffee Day; Phoenix Mills "Bowling Company"; Amoeba; UCLA.

KEY CONCEPTS

Third spaces; "handmade" at scale; West-aspirational MTV-generation culture; people vs processes; AOV x covers x table turnaround; frequency as a metric; location vs locality / "80 pockets"; evolution vs revolution; mass-extinction events & resilience; working-capital-negative business; building a restaurant vs building an organization; restaurant-industry attrition; the layouts/property selection he won't delegate.

CHAPTERS

• 00:00  Cold open: 25 years, one craft, an 8-million-guest business
• 02:25  Why Mocha in 2001: Bombay's missing "places to be"
• 06:24  The MTV generation and a West-aspirational India
• 08:18  UCLA, entertainment management, and learning to "live" culture
• 12:08  What "Handmade" and "Impresario" actually mean
• 14:51  The business today: 80 restaurants, 900 cr, 5,500 people, 20 cities
• 15:31  Why restaurants die — and the people-vs-process debate
• 20:05  Social, the millennial third space, and the shisha ban
• 26:21  Decoding Gen Z; Saltwater to Bandra Born; evolution vs revolution
• 31:10  Real estate is the game: location vs locality, India's "80 pockets"
• 32:53  The only metric that matters: AOV x covers x table turnaround
• 35:57  Mass-extinction events: shisha ban, vanishing PE money, COVID
• 39:55  The COVID town hall: how the team carried the company
• 41:25  What losing a restaurant feels like; the discipline to quit
• 43:22  A resilient restaurant group needs 4-5 engines for every cycle
• 47:21  Childhood hustle: the fake-Chinese-marble business
• 53:28  Bowling alleys & Phoenix Mills: people buy time together
• 54:11  Self-rating: 7.5 as a parent, 5 as a CEO
• 55:46  Building a restaurant vs building an organization
• 56:43  The HR crisis: replacing half the staff in a year
• 59:21  The one thing he can't delegate: layouts and property
• 1:04:11 Zomato & Swiggy: the "digital landlords," then and now
• 1:08:52 The Booking.com parallel: stop sending guests to the aggregator
• 1:12:34 Delivery vs dine-in: two completely different businesses
• 1:15:32 Lessons from VC/PE; why restaurants need patient capital
• 1:20:05 What motivates him: reading a city and its community
• 1:21:18 Curiosity, echo chambers, and planning for serendipity
• 1:26:51 Hiring "doers and divas" and the largesse of hospitality
• 1:32:46 Social as social infrastructure: coworking from day one
• 1:36:47 First principles: people + process, soul, belongingness
• 1:39:30 Harvesting feedback: ORM, AI, and the guest-experience officer
• 1:41:40 His kids and the Gen Alpha worldview
• 1:45:26 Weekends, FIFA, meditation, and protecting solitude
• 1:52:09 The 25-year view and "no plan beyond 3 weeks"
• 1:53:17 The 10,000 cr ambition: Impresario as a platform (the invisible 85%)
• 2:01:21 Anti-loyalty vs frequency: cafes are loyalty, restaurants are experience
• 2:03:50 Final question: 9.9 out of 10, and the missing 0.1

KEY COMPANIES & BRANDS

Impresario Handmade Restaurants; Mocha; Social; Smokehouse Delhi; Antisocial; Bandra Born; Saltwater Cafe/Grill; Prithvi Cafe; Zomato; Swiggy; ONDC; Booking.com; Hotels.com; Rebel Foods; Haldiram's; Rameshwaram Cafe; Cafe Coffee Day; Starbucks; Phoenix Mills "Bowling Company"; NRAI (National Restaurant Association of India); UCLA.

 KEY CONCEPTS

Third spaces; "handmade" at scale; people vs processes; the AOV x covers x table-turnaround equation; frequency as the north-star metric; location vs locality and India's "80 pockets"; evolution vs revolution in brand-building; working-capital-negative cash-flow business; mass-extinction events & resilience through diversification; aggregators as "digital landlords" & deep discounting; owning the customer relationship; delivery vs dine-in as separate businesses; patient capital, IRR & late-stage growth math; full-service-restaurant platform; store-level vs corporate EBITDA; the "doers and divas" team; largesse of hospitality; Gen X to Millennial to Gen Z to Gen Alpha taste transitions; feedback via NPS/ORM/AI.

If you haven't heard Part 1 yet, please go back and start there first.

Chapter list

• 01:02 — Indian Institute of Zombies: why theatrical, why in-house, why AI in the pipeline. The decision-making cadence behind it
• 01:08 — "Your vision grows with you." How the original vision changed from "premium storytelling for Bharat" to something larger
• 01:10 — Bathoth → Shekhawati → IIT Jodhpur → Bandra. Studying in Hindi until Class 10, then +2 in Hindi, then English at IIT
• 01:18 — The discipline of saying no. Why nos require more work than yeses, and why nos are usually the better answer
• 01:19 — "The full equation." Why CAC alone is meaningless; why he tracks revenue, CAC, LTV and cohort profit together. The two real metrics: equation health and engagement
• 01:21 — Numbers beyond a limit give you an illusion. "Don't go deeper in the data — keep your life simple."
• 01:21 — Co-founders, span of control, how the four-way role split actually got sorted
• 01:22 — How Bisu learns: most of it from doing and iterations; books help him articulate what the iterations have already taught him
• 01:25 — Pet phrases at work — "build it like a business, not a startup" — and what management style his colleagues would say he has
• 01:28 — Biggest value add as Bisu, not as CEO. The Uber-power-user analogy
• 01:29 — When did he change his mind about managing people? Going from technical-first to people-first
• 01:34 — Hiring: the open-ended questions Bisu actually asks when he meets potential leaders
• 01:36 — What motivates and drives him on a daily basis
• 01:42 — Family, parenting, and the village memory of his grandmother telling stories by oil lamp in the evenings — the original storyteller in his life
• 01:45 — The personal questions: which morning of the week, how he spends weekends, what a productive day looks like, sleep
• 01:46 — On a scale of 1 to 10, how Bisu rates himself as a CEO
• 01:51 — The closing thought. Would the average Kuku FM subscriber actually want to listen to a two-hour interview with the CEO of Kuku FM? "We live in a bubble. The startup ecosystem feels that the world thinks what we think. It doesn't."
• 01:53 — Goodbye

Things mentioned in Part 2

• People: Vinod Kumar Meena, Vikas Goyal (co-founders); Kunj Sanghvi (Kuku's Content Head, previously on Two by Two and Zero Shot); the Dalal brothers (script of Indian Institute of Zombies — Hussain and Abbas Dalal of Brahmāstra / Farzi); Gaganjeet Singh and Alok Dwivedi (directors); Bisu's grandmother
• Places: Bathoth (village in Shekhawati, Rajasthan); IIT Jodhpur; Bandra
• Concepts: the full equation — Bisu's name for treating CAC, revenue, LTV and cohort profit as one calculation, not separate metrics; content is the only product; vision grows with you

To listen to all of First Principles

If you'd like to listen to all 54 First Principles episodes — that's close to 110 hours of conversations with founders and leaders building India's most interesting companies — please subscribe to The Ken directly, or to our premium channel on Apple Podcasts.

Bisu is also just not the kind of founder who walks around telling you any of this. He grew up in Bathoth, a village in Rajasthan; studied in Shekhawati until Class 10; did his +2 in Hindi; only switched to English at IIT. He thinks in Hindi. He's deeply uncomfortable performing.

This is the full, uncut conversation. Two hours, no edits, no breaks.

Chapter list

• 00:00 — How old is Kuku FM, and what Bisu was doing before (Easy Prep, two and a half years at Toppr)
• 00:02 — June birthdays for Kuku, Bisu and his wife Hansa. "I believe in luck. Most things are out of control."
• 00:04 — The three pivots: podcast aggregator → UGC → PUGC. What killed each one and what was kept constant
• 00:09 — Why vernacular audio IP didn't exist, and why Kuku had to become a studio rather than an aggregator
• 00:14 — January 2021: cutting the free tier and charging ₹399 a year. The investor pushback. Why no ads, ever
• 00:23 — Rich Dad Poor Dad in Hindi: 40 million listens. What that number tells you about the listener that English-first publishers have been missing
• 00:27 — How Kuku's content mix has shifted from entertainment to educational and inspirational
• 00:30 — Audio first, then video. Why audio is roughly 50x cheaper to produce and 50x cheaper to stream
• 00:33 — AI in the marketing pipeline: 500 ads/month → 5,000 ads/month, same cost
• 00:42 — The competitor we don't name. What being the also-ran in the press for years actually cost — in hires, in partnerships, and inside Bisu's own head
• 00:45 — The fundraising history: ~$156M raised, the Granite Asia round, and how much of the last cheque is actually still untouched
• 00:50 — Biggest learnings from unsuccessful fundraising. Why nos are usually the harder, better answer
• 00:55 — Kuku TV: from launch to #1 on India's App Store in four months. Microdrama, the ReelShort wave, MS Dhoni
• 01:02 — Indian Institute of Zombies: why theatrical, why in-house, why AI in the pipeline
• 01:08 — "Your vision grows with you." How the original vision changed from "premium storytelling for Bharat" to something larger
• 01:10 — Bathoth → Shekhawati → IIT Jodhpur → Bandra. Studying in Hindi until Class 10, then +2 in Hindi, then English at IIT
• 01:18 — The discipline of saying no. Why nos require more work than yeses, and why nos are usually the better answer
• 01:19 — "The full equation." Why CAC alone is meaningless; why Bisu tracks revenue, CAC, LTV and cohort profit together. The two real metrics he watches: equation health and engagement
• 01:21 — Numbers beyond a limit give you an illusion. "Don't go deeper in the data — keep your life simple."
• 01:21 — Co-founders, span of control, and how the four-way role split actually got sorted
• 01:22 — How Bisu learns: most of it from doing and iterations; books help him articulate what the iterations have already taught him
• 01:25 — Pet phrases at work — "build it like a business, not a startup" — and what management style his colleagues would say he has
• 01:28 — Biggest value add as Bisu, not as CEO. The Uber-power-user analogy
• 01:29 — When Bisu changed his mind about managing people. Going from technical-first to people-first
• 01:34 — Hiring: the open-ended questions Bisu actually asks when he meets potential leaders
• 01:36 — What motivates and drives him on a daily basis
• 01:42 — Family, parenting, and the village memory of his grandmother telling stories by oil lamp in the evenings — the original storyteller in his life
• 01:45 — The personal questions: which morning of the week, how he spends weekends, what a productive day looks like, sleep
• 01:46 — On a scale of 1 to 10, how Bisu rates himself as a CEO
• 01:51 — The closing thought. Would the average Kuku FM subscriber actually want to listen to a two-hour interview with the CEO of Kuku FM? "We live in a bubble. The startup ecosystem feels that the world thinks what we think. It doesn't."
• 01:53 — Goodbye

Things mentioned

People

• Vinod Kumar Meena and Vikas Goyal — Bisu's IIT Jodhpur batchmates and Kuku FM co-founders
• Hansa Bisu — Bisu's wife
• MS Dhoni — Kuku FM brand ambassador
• Kunj Sanghvi — Content Head at Kuku, previously on Two by Two and Zero Shot
• Hussain and Abbas Dalal — script of Indian Institute of Zombies (also of Brahmāstra and Farzi)
• Gaganjeet Singh and Alok Dwivedi — directors of Indian Institute of Zombies
• Nandan Nilekani / Fundamentum — turning-point investor
• Bisu's grandmother — the original storyteller in his life

Companies & investors

• Mebigo Labs (the parent), Toppr, Easy Prep
• Pocket FM (the unnamed competitor)
• Granite Asia, Vertex Ventures, Krafton, Bitkraft, IFC, 3one4 Capital, Shunwei, India Quotient, Fundamentum

Content & references

• Rich Dad Poor Dad in Hindi — 40 million listens on Kuku FM
• Ankur Warikoo's Hindi book
• ReelShort and the Chinese microdrama wave
• Kuku TV
• Indian Institute of Zombies — Kuku's first theatrical, releasing May 8

Concepts that come up more than once

• the full equation — Bisu's name for treating CAC, revenue, LTV and cohort profit as one calculation, not separate metrics
• build it like a business, not a startup — the operating principle that shows up in almost every chapter
• content is the only product
• vision grows with you
• most of my learning comes from iterations, not books

Correction: During the conversation, Bisu mentions that the total amount of venture capital raised by Kuku is $170 million. The company has subsequently clarified that the correct figure is $120 million.

In Part 1, we get into the company history, the pivots, the contrarian decision to cut the free tier, and what 40 million Hindi listens to Rich Dad Poor Dad really mean.

Chapter list

• 00:00 — How old is Kuku FM, and what Bisu was doing before (Easy Prep, two and a half years at Toppr)
• 00:02 — June birthdays, coincidence, and Bisu's definition of luck — "most things are out of control"
• 00:04 — The three pivots: podcast aggregator → UGC → PUGC. What killed each one and what was kept constant
• 00:09 — Why vernacular audio IP didn't exist, and why Kuku had to become a studio rather than an aggregator
• 00:14 — January 2021: cutting the free tier and charging ₹399 a year. The investor pushback. Why no ads, ever
• 00:23 — Rich Dad Poor Dad in Hindi: 40 million listens. What that number tells you about the listener that English-first publishers have been missing
• 00:27 — How Kuku's content mix has shifted from entertainment to educational and inspirational
• 00:30 — Audio first, then video. Why audio is roughly 50x cheaper to produce and 50x cheaper to stream
• 00:33 — AI in the marketing pipeline: 500 ads/month → 5,000 ads/month, same cost
• 00:42 — The competitor we don't name. What being the also-ran in the press for years cost — in hires, partnerships, and inside Bisu's own head
• 00:45 — The fundraising history: ~$156M raised, the Granite Asia round, and how much of the last cheque is actually still untouched
• 00:50 — Biggest learnings from unsuccessful fundraising. Why nos are usually the harder, better answer
• 00:55 — Kuku TV: from launch to #1 on India's App Store in four months. Microdrama, the ReelShort wave, MS Dhoni
• 01:01 — Cliffhanger: the Indian Institute of Zombies theatrical bet — and why an audio platform wrote, produced and AI-assisted its own film instead of licensing one. Bisu's answer to this is in Part 2.

Things mentioned in Part 1

• People: Vinod Kumar Meena and Vikas Goyal (co-founders, IIT Jodhpur batchmates); Hansa Bisu (Bisu's wife); MS Dhoni (Kuku FM brand ambassador); Nandan Nilekani / Fundamentum
• Companies & investors: Mebigo Labs, Toppr, Easy Prep, Pocket FM (the unnamed competitor), Granite Asia, Vertex Ventures, Krafton, Bitkraft, IFC, 3one4 Capital, Shunwei, India Quotient
• Content & references: Rich Dad Poor Dad (Hindi); Ankur Warikoo's Hindi book; ReelShort; Kuku TV

To listen to all of First Principles

If you'd like to listen to all 54 First Principles episodes — that's close to 110 hours of conversations with founders and leaders building India's most interesting companies — please subscribe to The Ken directly, or to our premium channel on Apple Podcasts.

Correction: During the conversation, Bisu mentions that the total amount of venture capital raised by Kuku is $170 million. The company has subsequently clarified that the correct figure is $120 million.

In this half, the conversation slows down a little and gets even more interesting. Ankit has strong opinions about why healthy food will always lose to biryani on a Friday night, what building a brand people actually love looks like, and what a Unilever of foods means to him. He is also candid about how he hires, how he spends his Sundays with his son, and what drives him beyond the business.
_________

This episode was produced by Uddantika Kashyap and mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN.

Write to us at fp@the-ken.com with your feedback, suggestions, and guests you would want to see on First Principles.

If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word by sharing and gifting it to your friends and family.

This is Ankit Nagori, who joined Flipkart as the 22nd employee, after cold emailing its founders at a book fair. He had almost no relevant experience but they hired him anyway, and within six years he was Chief Business Officer.

He then co-founded Cult with Mukesh Bansal, built it into one of India's most recognised fitness brands, and walked away to start Curefoods in the middle of a pandemic when the business was down to 2 crores a month.

Rohin and Ankit get into what talent density really means and whether it can be engineered. Ankit explains healthy food will always lose to biryani on a Friday night, and what it actually takes to build a brand people come back to not because of a deal but because they genuinely love it.

Listen in for all this and more, including what a Unilever of foods means to him, why he reset his ambition every time he hit a milestone, and why he takes job interviews on walks.
________

This episode was produced by Uddantika Kashyap and mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN.

Write to us at fp@the-ken.com with your feedback, suggestions, and guests you would want to see on First Principles.

If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word by sharing and gifting it to your friends and family.

Ankit joined Flipkart as the 22nd employee after cold emailing its founders at a book fair with almost no relevant experience and within six years he was Chief Business Officer. He then co-founded Cult with Mukesh Bansal, built it into one of India's most recognised fitness brands, and spun out Curefoods in the middle of a pandemic when the business was down to 2 crores a month.

In this half, Rohin and Ankit get into what those Flipkart years really felt like, what talent density means and whether you can actually design for it, and how Curefoods found its footing when everything was falling apart.
________

This episode was produced by Uddantika Kashyap and mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN.

Write to us at fp@the-ken.com with your feedback, suggestions, and guests you would want to see on First Principles.

If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word by sharing and gifting it to your friends and family.

Rohin met Utham Gowda at Spacebot Studio in Indiranagar on a Tuesday afternoon. Utham was compact, measured, and precise in the way he spoke, like someone who has spent years learning when to talk and when to listen. What's striking was how quickly he opened up. Within the first half hour of the conversation, you got the sense that this is someone who has thought very deeply about his own life, his choices, and what drives him. It makes for one of the best examples on this podcast of a guest easing into a conversation and then, almost without noticing, going places you didn't expect.

The story itself is hard to believe. A kid from landlocked Mysore, with no connection to the sea, no family background in business, builds a billion-dollar global seafood company. He took salary cuts at every job change, even after getting married. He has never owned a car and the highest tax he paid was in 2015. And his eight-year-old son, unable to get his father's attention any other way, started a fake company called Blackfish and would set up a little boardroom at home, just to have something to talk to his dad about.

This episode covers what seafood as an industry actually looks like, why the last 1000 years haven't changed it, what it really means to build a global company from India, and what happens when a founder finally stops chasing money and has to sit with the question of what he actually wants from all of it.

**********

This episode was produced by Uddantika Kashyap and mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN.

Write to us at fp@the-ken.com with your feedback, suggestions, and guests you would want to see on First Principles.

If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word by sharing and gifting it to your friends and family.

The story itself is hard to believe. A kid from landlocked Mysore, with no connection to the sea, no family background in business, builds a billion-dollar global seafood company. He took salary cuts at every job change, even after getting married. He has never owned a car and the highest tax he paid was in 2015. And his eight-year-old son, unable to get his father's attention any other way, started a fake company called Blackfish and would set up a little boardroom at home, just to have something to talk to his dad about.

This episode covers what seafood as an industry actually looks like, why the last 1000 years haven't changed it, what it really means to build a global company from India, and what happens when a founder finally stops chasing money and has to sit with the question of what he actually wants from all of it.

**********

This episode was produced by Uddantika Kashyap and mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN.

Write to us at fp@the-ken.com with your feedback, suggestions, and guests you would want to see on First Principles.

If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word by sharing and gifting it to your friends and family.

Rohin met Utham Gowda at Spacebot Studio in Indiranagar on a Tuesday afternoon. Utham was compact, measured, and precise in the way he spoke, like someone who has spent years learning when to talk and when to listen. What's striking was how quickly he opened up. Within the first half hour of the conversation, you got the sense that this is someone who has thought very deeply about his own life, his choices, and what drives him. It makes for one of the best examples on this podcast of a guest easing into a conversation and then, almost without noticing, going places you didn't expect.

The story itself is hard to believe. A kid from landlocked Mysore, with no connection to the sea, no family background in business, builds a billion-dollar global seafood company. He took salary cuts at every job change, even after getting married. He has never owned a car and the highest tax he paid was in 2015. And his eight-year-old son, unable to get his father's attention any other way, started a fake company called Blackfish and would set up a little boardroom at home, just to have something to talk to his dad about.

This episode covers what seafood as an industry actually looks like, why the last 1000 years haven't changed it, what it really means to build a global company from India, and what happens when a founder finally stops chasing money and has to sit with the question of what he actually wants from all of it.

**********

This episode was produced by Uddantika Kashyap and mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN.

Write to us at fp@the-ken.com with your feedback, suggestions, and guests you would want to see on First Principles.

If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word by sharing and gifting it to your friends and family.

Ms. Kalpana Morparia reached out to us via email after the bro-ification episode. It was the most pleasant surprise and we immediately knew we had to get her on the podcast.

Here's someone who joined ICICI in 1975 as a lawyer, had absolutely no background in finance, and was then asked to run Treasury. She was terrified but her colleagues told her: "You do not say no to Mr. Kamath and live to have a great career in ICICI."

So she said yes and built one of the most remarkable careers in Indian banking.

She talks about the ICICI culture where contradicting the chairman wasn't just allowed, it was encouraged. A senior JPMorgan executive once said the most impressive thing about ICICI was that "the junior-most person could contradict the chairman and get away with it."

She also gets candid about things most leaders don't talk about. Like why she wishes she had done an MBA. Why she has strong opinions about people's physical appearance at work and knows it's a flaw. Why her spiritual guru completely changed her relationship with the one thing she considered her biggest regret in life.

She went to a Ferrari racetrack and hit 304 kmph. She believes work-life balance is nonsense and wishes every youngster would realize that life is work and work is life.

Listen in for all this and more, including why she thinks India's next 30 years belong to banking, healthcare, and infrastructure. Why retirement at 60 is an outdated concept. And why on a scale of 1 to 10, she rates her happiness at 9 plus.

**********

This episode was produced by Uddantika Kashyap and mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN.

Write to us at fp@the-ken.com with your feedback, suggestions, and guests you would want to see on First Principles.

If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word by sharing and gifting it to your friends and family.

Ms. Kalpana Morparia reached out to us via email after the bro-ification episode. It was the most pleasant surprise and we immediately knew we had to get her on the podcast.

Here's someone who joined ICICI in 1975 as a lawyer, had absolutely no background in finance, and was then asked to run Treasury. She was terrified but her colleagues told her: "You do not say no to Mr. Kamath and live to have a great career in ICICI."

So she said yes and built one of the most remarkable careers in Indian banking.

She talks about the ICICI culture where contradicting the chairman wasn't just allowed, it was encouraged. A senior JPMorgan executive once said the most impressive thing about ICICI was that "the junior-most person could contradict the chairman and get away with it."

She also gets candid about things most leaders don't talk about. Like why she wishes she had done an MBA. Why she has strong opinions about people's physical appearance at work and knows it's a flaw. Why her spiritual guru completely changed her relationship with the one thing she considered her biggest regret in life.

She went to a Ferrari racetrack and hit 304 kmph. She believes work-life balance is nonsense and wishes every youngster would realize that life is work and work is life.

Listen in for all this and more, including why she thinks India's next 30 years belong to banking, healthcare, and infrastructure. Why retirement at 60 is an outdated concept. And why on a scale of 1 to 10, she rates her happiness at 9 plus.

**********

This episode was produced by Uddantika Kashyap and mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN.

Write to us at fp@the-ken.com with your feedback, suggestions, and guests you would want to see on First Principles.

If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word by sharing and gifting it to your friends and family.

Ms. Kalpana Morparia reached out to us via email after the bro-ification episode. It was the most pleasant surprise and we immediately knew we had to get her on the podcast.

Here's someone who joined ICICI in 1975 as a lawyer, had absolutely no background in finance, and was then asked to run Treasury. She was terrified but her colleagues told her: "You do not say no to Mr. Kamath and live to have a great career in ICICI."

So she said yes and built one of the most remarkable careers in Indian banking.

She talks about the ICICI culture where contradicting the chairman wasn't just allowed, it was encouraged. A senior JPMorgan executive once said the most impressive thing about ICICI was that "the junior-most person could contradict the chairman and get away with it."

She also gets candid about things most leaders don't talk about. Like why she wishes she had done an MBA. Why she has strong opinions about people's physical appearance at work and knows it's a flaw. Why her spiritual guru completely changed her relationship with the one thing she considered her biggest regret in life.

She went to a Ferrari racetrack and hit 304 kmph. She believes work-life balance is nonsense and wishes every youngster would realize that life is work and work is life.

Listen in for all this and more, including why she thinks India's next 30 years belong to banking, healthcare, and infrastructure. Why retirement at 60 is an outdated concept. And why on a scale of 1 to 10, she rates her happiness at 9 plus.

**********

This episode was produced by Uddantika Kashyap and mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN.

Write to us at fp@the-ken.com with your feedback, suggestions, and guests you would want to see on First Principles.

If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word by sharing and gifting it to your friends and family.

He explains how Darwinbox has operated without a CEO for years, how the 3 founders divide ownership of decisions instead of debating everything together, and why this structure helped them move faster as the company grew.

Rohit also gets specific about product building. He talks about designing HR software that does not need training sessions or long explanations, why adoption matters more than feature depth, and how small product decisions can end up shaping behaviour across entire organisations.

The conversation also turns inward. Rohit reflects on moments where intelligence stopped being the advantage he thought it was, why staying with uncomfortable problems mattered more, and how his understanding of leadership changed as Darwinbox scaled.

This episode looks at company building through real decisions, and what it takes to keep going long after the excitement wears off.

********

This episode was produced by Uddantika Kashyap and mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN.

Write to us at fp@the-ken.com with your feedback, suggestions, and guests you would want to see on First Principles.

If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word by sharing and gifting it to your friends and family.

He explains how Darwinbox has operated without a CEO for years, how the 3 founders divide ownership of decisions instead of debating everything together, and why this structure helped them move faster as the company grew.

Rohit also gets specific about product building. He talks about designing HR software that does not need training sessions or long explanations, why adoption matters more than feature depth, and how small product decisions can end up shaping behaviour across entire organisations.

The conversation also turns inward. Rohit reflects on moments where intelligence stopped being the advantage he thought it was, why staying with uncomfortable problems mattered more, and how his understanding of leadership changed as Darwinbox scaled.

This episode looks at company building through real decisions, and what it takes to keep going long after the excitement wears off.

*******

This episode was produced by Uddantika Kashyap and mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN.

Write to us at fp@the-ken.com with your feedback, suggestions, and guests you would want to see on First Principles.

If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word by sharing and gifting it to your friends and family.

He explains how Darwinbox has operated without a CEO for years, how the 3 founders divide ownership of decisions instead of debating everything together, and why this structure helped them move faster as the company grew.

Rohit also gets specific about product building. He talks about designing HR software that does not need training sessions or long explanations, why adoption matters more than feature depth, and how small product decisions can end up shaping behaviour across entire organisations.

The conversation also turns inward. Rohit reflects on moments where intelligence stopped being the advantage he thought it was, why staying with uncomfortable problems mattered more, and how his understanding of leadership changed as Darwinbox scaled.

This episode looks at company building through real decisions, and what it takes to keep going long after the excitement wears off.

********

This episode was produced by Uddantika Kashyap and mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN.

Write to us at fp@the-ken.com with your feedback, suggestions, and guests you would want to see on First Principles.

If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word by sharing and gifting it to your friends and family.

After a long hiatus and when we thought we'd closed the curtains for good, First Principles came back in April 2025 for Season 3. And what made this comeback so special? Simple: Rohin was genuinely excited to be back in the interviewing chair.

That excitement is infectious. It showed up in every conversation and every question. This year, he sat down with eight incredible CEOs and founders who opened up about their journeys, their philosophies, their wins, and their struggles. These were deep, candid conversations about what it really takes to build something meaningful.

In this special wrap episode, Rohin looks back at all eight conversations from 2025. He gives you the context about what it was really like sitting across from each guest, the moments that surprised him, the insights that stuck with him and then we play you the clips that mattered most. Think of it as a guided tour through the year's best moments.

And here's the thing we're most proud of: First Principles has been named one of Apple's Best Shows of 2025. It's testament to you, our listeners, who make this more than just a podcast. You make it a community.

And next year? It's going to be even better. More intriguing guests. More candid discussions. More first principles thinking applied.

Here are all eight episodes from 2025:

Episode 42: Vidit Aatrey on building a problem-first mindset into Meesho’s culture

Episode 43: Sahil Barua on why Delhivery is the antithesis of moving fast and breaking things

Episode 44: Manish Sabharwal of Teamlease on creating great ancestors, India’s development journey and ‘regulatory cholesterol’

Episode 45: Ultraviolette Automotive’s Narayan Subramaniam on tinkering, designing and learning by discarding

Episode 46: Anand Jain of Clevertap on starting with nothing and learning, building and leading as you go along

Episode 47: Trilegal’s Rahul Matthan on the firm, the partnership, and the principles

Episode 48: Indiagold’s Deepak Abbot on turning a nation’s ‘dead asset’ into credit scores and working capital

Episode 49: Ixigo’s Aloke Bajpai on using empathy, customer experience, and resilience to both survive and thrive

______

Once again, thank you for listening to First Principles. Check out our newsletter and discover more at here.
You can email us at fp@the-ken.com to share your thoughts, suggestions or anything else.

This episode was produced by Uddantika Kashyap and mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN, our in-house audio engineer.

See you next year,
Team First Principles

In this episode, I sit down with Aloke Bajpai, Group CEO of Ixigo, one of India's fastest-growing and most downloaded travel platforms. While most Indian OTAs followed the Western template of flights-first followed by hotels, Aloke and his co-founder Rajnish took a radically different path. The one that would take nearly 14 years before Ixigo became a full-blown OTA.

Aloke takes us through Ixigo's unconventional journey, starting as a meta-search engine in 2007 that couldn't raise funding for over a year. We explore how the insight that 96% of Indians don't fly, led them to build a train-first platform, spending four years creating utility features without any monetization. He breaks down the technical innovation behind solving India-specific problems. Right from predicting waitlist confirmations using machine learning to creating a crowdsourced running status system using cell tower IDs when GPS and internet failed along railway tracks.

A central theme is resilience through empathy. Aloke shares how near-death experiences during the 2008 global financial crisis and COVID-19 shaped Ixigo's culture. We discuss the founder's decision to go to zero salary, the whiteboard moment where the entire team transparently decided on salary cuts, and the contrarian choice to proactively refund customers during COVID even when the company was running out of money. Finally, Aloke argues that peace of mind, not tickets, is what travel companies should really be selling.

In this episode, I sit down with Aloke Bajpai, Group CEO of Ixigo, one of India's fastest-growing and most downloaded travel platforms. While most Indian OTAs followed the Western template of flights-first followed by hotels, Aloke and his co-founder Rajnish took a radically different path. The one that would take nearly 14 years before Ixigo became a full-blown OTA.

Aloke takes us through Ixigo's unconventional journey, starting as a meta-search engine in 2007 that couldn't raise funding for over a year. We explore how the insight that 96% of Indians don't fly, led them to build a train-first platform, spending four years creating utility features without any monetization. He breaks down the technical innovation behind solving India-specific problems. Right from predicting waitlist confirmations using machine learning to creating a crowdsourced running status system using cell tower IDs when GPS and internet failed along railway tracks.

A central theme is resilience through empathy. Aloke shares how near-death experiences during the 2008 global financial crisis and COVID-19 shaped Ixigo's culture. We discuss the founder's decision to go to zero salary, the whiteboard moment where the entire team transparently decided on salary cuts, and the contrarian choice to proactively refund customers during COVID even when the company was running out of money. Finally, Aloke argues that peace of mind, not tickets, is what travel companies should really be selling.

In this episode, I sit down with Aloke Bajpai, Group CEO of Ixigo, one of India's fastest-growing and most downloaded travel platforms. While most Indian OTAs followed the Western template of flights-first followed by hotels, Aloke and his co-founder Rajnish took a radically different path. The one that would take nearly 14 years before Ixigo became a full-blown OTA.

Aloke takes us through Ixigo's unconventional journey, starting as a meta-search engine in 2007 that couldn't raise funding for over a year. We explore how the insight that 96% of Indians don't fly, led them to build a train-first platform, spending four years creating utility features without any monetization. He breaks down the technical innovation behind solving India-specific problems. Right from predicting waitlist confirmations using machine learning to creating a crowdsourced running status system using cell tower IDs when GPS and internet failed along railway tracks.

A central theme is resilience through empathy. Aloke shares how near-death experiences during the 2008 global financial crisis and COVID-19 shaped Ixigo's culture. We discuss the founder's decision to go to zero salary, the whiteboard moment where the entire team transparently decided on salary cuts, and the contrarian choice to proactively refund customers during COVID even when the company was running out of money. Finally, Aloke argues that peace of mind, not tickets, is what travel companies should really be selling.

*****

This episode was produced by Uddantika Kashyap and mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN.

Write to us at fp@the-ken.com with your feedback, suggestions, and guests you would want to see on First Principles.

If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word by sharing and gifting it to your friends and family.

The host, Rohin Dharmakumar, first crossed paths with Deepak Abbot back in April 2015, even before The Ken had been founded. Rohin was chasing down an insightful breakdown of the tech ecosystem's huge user numbers during the Free Basics debate, and Deepak, a veteran operator and former product head at Paytm, was the go-to source for his data-filled, analytical posts.

That same data-driven curiosity is what led Deepak to walk away from corporate life in 2019. He was clear: he didn't want to just manage; he had years left to actively "build products, you know, with my own hands". What he built was Indiagold, targeting the massive opportunity of gold in a market VCs often dismissed as an 'old economy product'.

In this episode, Rohin sat down with Deepak Abbot, co-founder of Indiagold, to discuss how they are transforming India's massive $1.5 trillion gold reserve—an asset often locked away and doing nothing—into a productive force. Deepak calls this gold a "dead asset" and explains that Indiagold’s mission is to change the mindset around it. They are not just giving gold loans; they are monetising a secured asset for the 250 million Indians who are excluded from formal credit due to thin or non-existent credit scores. By enabling customers to safely leverage their gold reserve, the company helps jumpstart a formal credit history and provides essential working capital.

Listen in as Deepak charts his operator-to-founder journey, shares how he navigated initial VC skepticism, and details the strategy behind turning a seemingly archaic commodity into a modern fintech solution for one of India’s most fundamental credit problems. Plus, a fascinating look inside a unique company culture, including why Indiagold operates without a CEO.

*****

This episode was mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN.

Write to us at fp@the-ken.com with your feedback, suggestions, and guests you would want to see on First Principles.

If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word by sharing and gifting it to your friends and family.

*****

The host, Rohin Dharmakumar, first crossed paths with Deepak Abbot back in April 2015, even before The Ken had been founded. Rohin was chasing down an insightful breakdown of the tech ecosystem's huge user numbers during the Free Basics debate, and Deepak, a veteran operator and former product head at Paytm, was the go-to source for his data-filled, analytical posts.

That same data-driven curiosity is what led Deepak to walk away from corporate life in 2019. He was clear: he didn't want to just manage; he had years left to actively "build products, you know, with my own hands". What he built was Indiagold, targeting the massive opportunity of gold in a market VCs often dismissed as an 'old economy product'.

In this episode, Rohin sat down with Deepak Abbot, co-founder of Indiagold, to discuss how they are transforming India's massive $1.5 trillion gold reserve—an asset often locked away and doing nothing—into a productive force. Deepak calls this gold a "dead asset" and explains that Indiagold’s mission is to change the mindset around it. They are not just giving gold loans; they are monetising a secured asset for the 250 million Indians who are excluded from formal credit due to thin or non-existent credit scores. By enabling customers to safely leverage their gold reserve, the company helps jumpstart a formal credit history and provides essential working capital.

Listen in as Deepak charts his operator-to-founder journey, shares how he navigated initial VC skepticism, and details the strategy behind turning a seemingly archaic commodity into a modern fintech solution for one of India’s most fundamental credit problems. Plus, a fascinating look inside a unique company culture, including why Indiagold operates without a CEO.

*****

This episode was mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN.

Write to us at fp@the-ken.com with your feedback, suggestions, and guests you would want to see on First Principles.

If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word by sharing and gifting it to your friends and family.

*****

The host, Rohin Dharmakumar, first crossed paths with Deepak Abbot back in April 2015, even before The Ken had been founded. Rohin was chasing down an insightful breakdown of the tech ecosystem's huge user numbers during the Free Basics debate, and Deepak, a veteran operator and former product head at Paytm, was the go-to source for his data-filled, analytical posts.

That same data-driven curiosity is what led Deepak to walk away from corporate life in 2019. He was clear: he didn't want to just manage; he had years left to actively "build products, you know, with my own hands". What he built was Indiagold, targeting the massive opportunity of gold in a market VCs often dismissed as an 'old economy product'.

In this episode, Rohin sat down with Deepak Abbot, co-founder of Indiagold, to discuss how they are transforming India's massive $1.5 trillion gold reserve—an asset often locked away and doing nothing—into a productive force. Deepak calls this gold a "dead asset" and explains that Indiagold’s mission is to change the mindset around it. They are not just giving gold loans; they are monetising a secured asset for the 250 million Indians who are excluded from formal credit due to thin or non-existent credit scores. By enabling customers to safely leverage their gold reserve, the company helps jumpstart a formal credit history and provides essential working capital.

Listen in as Deepak charts his operator-to-founder journey, shares how he navigated initial VC skepticism, and details the strategy behind turning a seemingly archaic commodity into a modern fintech solution for one of India’s most fundamental credit problems. Plus, a fascinating look inside a unique company culture, including why Indiagold operates without a CEO.

*****

This episode was mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN.

Write to us at fp@the-ken.com with your feedback, suggestions, and guests you would want to see on First Principles.

If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word by sharing and gifting it to your friends and family.

*****

In this episode, I sit down with Rahul Matthan, a co-founder of Trilegal, one of India’s largest and most successful full-service law firms. While Rahul starts by questioning if a lawyer can be an entrepreneur, the conversation unfolds into a masterclass on the patient, principled art of building a lasting institution.

Rahul provides a rare, inside look into the unique challenges of building a professional services firm—a business where the people are the product. He breaks down the counterintuitive models Trilegal adopted to foster a culture of collaboration over individual stardom. We explore their radical “all-equity partnership” and the “lockstep” compensation model, designed to de-risk the firm from becoming dependent on individual “rainmakers” and to align everyone’s incentives towards collective success.

A key theme is the power of compounding principles. Rahul explains how foundational decisions made 25 years ago, such as not naming the firm after its founders and instilling a “firm before self” ethos, were critical for long-term, sustainable growth. He also shares the story behind Trilegal’s exponential 3X growth during the COVID period, attributing it not just to market demand but to a crucial, planned transition from a founder-led management to a new leadership team built for scale.

Finally, Rahul offers a nuanced and critical perspective on the impact of AI on the legal profession. He argues that the real disruption won’t be in replacing senior experts, but in hollowing out the training ground for junior associates, posing a fundamental challenge to the apprenticeship model that professions rely on.

*****

This is the 2nd part of my conversation with him.

*****

This episode was mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN.

Write to us at fp@the-ken.com with your feedback, suggestions, and guests you would want to see on First Principles.

If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word by sharing and gifting it to your friends and family.

Of the 10 million foreign tourists who visit India each year, roughly 10% - one million - are classified as luxury. 

“So we've kind of made entire Rajasthan and Kerala as two big sectors for one million tourists,” he said.

In comparison domestic trips made by Indians was around 2.3 billion a year, a few years ago. 

Even if just 1% of those could be upgraded to luxury travel, that’s 23 million.

Chopra wants to make that happen with Postcard Hotels, his luxury boutique hotel chain. Launched in 2018 with 3 hotels, it has 9 today, and 23 in the works. 

He wants them all to be in what he calls the “transformational” category. What’s that you ask?

The first level is commodity. A bed, an air conditioner and a bathroom.

The second level represent hotels that offer differentiated “products”.

The third level are the luxury hotels come, differentiated by exceptional service.

The fourth level is experiential. It’s what Airbnb does when it offers you the ability to stay in Paris at a place that overlooks the Eiffel Tower.

The fifth level is for “transformative experiences”.

“When you combine all of them. If you're able to give a good product, great world class service, great experiential experiences, soak in the destination. If you add all of this together, it becomes transformational,” says Chopra.

He lists three luxury hotel brands in the fifth category – Aman Resorts, Six Senses and One & Only.

“And I looked at them and said, what is common?  They were all founder-led. And the founders were amazing. But the founders all lost control of the brands they had built,” he says.

Kapil Chopra doesn’t want to join that group.

Kapil also has strong opinions on why he believes the luxury hotel business has become sterile and unexciting over the years, and how Postcard is changing that image. Apart from Postcard, Kapil Chopra is also the founder of the table reservation service, discovery and payment platform, EazyDiner.

Over the course of our conversation he also talks about:

• How luxury travel and travelers are evolving in India
• Why did he choose to leave the Oberoi Group at the height of his career
• How he’s become calmer after starting Postcard Hotels
• How he’s doing fundraising, investments and expansion in way that doesn’t endanger the parent company
• Why ESOPs and wealth creation needs to be more prevalent in the hospitality and travel industries

Welcome to First Principles–The weekly leadership podcast from The Ken.

Let’s get started.

____________________

If you love listening to First Principles we’re sure you will enjoy reading our Sunday newsletter aptly titled First Principles as well. Sign up here, it’s free.

Also write to us fp@the-ken.com with your feedback, suggestions and guests you would want to see on First Principles.

And if you'd like to listen to the First Principles Summer Playlist you'll find it here!

____________________

Also have you checked out The Ken’s new app. It’s packed with a lot of new features. Read all about it here. If you haven’t downloaded it already here are the links to both iOS and android.

In this episode, Rohin Dharmakumar sits down with Rahul Matthan, a co-founder of Trilegal, one of India’s largest and most successful full-service law firms. While Rahul starts by questioning if a lawyer can be an entrepreneur, the conversation unfolds into a masterclass on the patient, principled art of building a lasting institution.

Rahul provides a rare, inside look into the unique challenges of building a professional services firm—a business where the people are the product. He breaks down the counterintuitive models Trilegal adopted to foster a culture of collaboration over individual stardom. We explore their radical “all-equity partnership” and the “lockstep” compensation model, designed to de-risk the firm from becoming dependent on individual “rainmakers” and to align everyone’s incentives towards collective success.

A key theme is the power of compounding principles. Rahul explains how foundational decisions made 25 years ago, such as not naming the firm after its founders and instilling a “firm before self” ethos, were critical for long-term, sustainable growth. He also shares the story behind Trilegal’s exponential 3X growth during the COVID period, attributing it not just to market demand but to a crucial, planned transition from a founder-led management to a new leadership team built for scale.

Finally, Rahul offers a nuanced and critical perspective on the impact of AI on the legal profession. He argues that the real disruption won’t be in replacing senior experts, but in hollowing out the training ground for junior associates, posing a fundamental challenge to the apprenticeship model that professions rely on.

Sections

[00:00:00] - Is a Lawyer an Entrepreneur?
[03:02:00] - Why Law Firms Don’t Advertise
[06:20:00] - The Origin Story of Trilegal
[22:42:00] - The All-Equity Partnership Model
[41:56:00] - Trilegal’s Post-COVID Exponential Growth
[01:16:14:00] - AI’s Impact on the Legal Profession
[01:35:43:00] - Rahul Matthan: The Person Beyond the Profession
[15:46:00] - A Passion for Coffee

This episode was mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN.

Write to us at fp@the-ken.com with your feedback, suggestions, and guests you would want to see on First Principles.

If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word by sharing and gifting it to your friends and family.

Rahul provides a rare, inside look into the unique challenges of building a professional services firm—a business where the people are the product. He breaks down the counterintuitive models Trilegal adopted to foster a culture of collaboration over individual stardom. We explore their radical “all-equity partnership” and the “lockstep” compensation model, designed to de-risk the firm from becoming dependent on individual “rainmakers” and to align everyone’s incentives towards collective success.

A key theme is the power of compounding principles. Rahul explains how foundational decisions made 25 years ago, such as not naming the firm after its founders and instilling a “firm before self” ethos, were critical for long-term, sustainable growth. He also shares the story behind Trilegal’s exponential 3X growth during the COVID period, attributing it not just to market demand but to a crucial, planned transition from a founder-led management to a new leadership team built for scale.

Finally, Rahul offers a nuanced and critical perspective on the impact of AI on the legal profession. He argues that the real disruption won’t be in replacing senior experts, but in hollowing out the training ground for junior associates, posing a fundamental challenge to the apprenticeship model that professions rely on.

This episode was mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN.

Write to us at fp@the-ken.com with your feedback, suggestions, and guests you would want to see on First Principles.

If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word by sharing and gifting it to your friends and family.

Anand and I were once colleagues at the media conglomerate Network 18. He got out before I did.

In 2013 he and two of his colleagues, Sunil Thomas and Kondamudi, left Network 18 and decided to fire up their respective laptops and code a new customer engagement platform. In just a few months, WizRocket, as it was then called, found its first – albeit non-paying customer. Then, in fairly short order, word-of-mouth driven inbound Seed and Series A investments.

Over time it became Clevertap, raising over $180M in VC funding and becoming a globally used and respected product.

As it turns out though, one of Clevertap’s operating philosophies is, well, First Principles. A strong reason is because Anand himself is a strong believer in it.

At the age of 12 he lost his dad. Thus, at an age when kids are taught to focus only on studies, Anand started tinkering, repairing and learning computer programming to earn money to put food on the table.

His first business was a scheduling system for lawyers in Ahmedabad, written in FoxPro. That was in 1994.

His friends in college called him “khurpechi” in Hindi. Literally, that’s a person who uses a khurpi – a gardening tool – to turn soil over to weed crops or plants. Colloquially though, that’s a person who is curious, restless and is always meddling around with things that don’t concern them directly.

Along the way, Anand co-founded Burrp, one of India’s first restaurant review portals, which got acquired by Network 18. While he was building and running Burrp, he also started manufacturing and selling pigeon spikes to shops, because he noticed there was no one doing that in India!

“I shouldn’t be here,” he told me. Why, I asked. He is not very smart, he replied. He doesn’t have good educational pedigree. He did not even study computer science formally. But, he said, he is extremely hard working and believes that anything can be learnt through hard work and perseverance.

You can see why First Principles is a concept that is dear to Anand.I asked him how happy he was on a scale of 10. He said 10.

I asked him if he’d ever thought of retiring. He said never. Life is too short to not have fun, he said.

Indeed, it is. So let’s dive into episode 46, with Anand Jain, co-founder of Clevertap.

This is part 2 of my conversation with him

-

This episode was produced by Hari Krishna, with mixing and mastering by Rajiv CN.

Write to us at fp@the-ken.com with your feedback, suggestions and guests you would want to see on First Principles.

If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word by sharing and gifting it to your friends and family.

Anand and I were once colleagues at the media conglomerate Network 18. He got out before I did.

In 2013 he and two of his colleagues, Sunil Thomas and Kondamudi, left Network 18 and decided to fire up their respective laptops and code a new customer engagement platform. In just a few months, WizRocket, as it was then called, found its first – albeit non-paying customer. Then, in fairly short order, word-of-mouth driven inbound Seed and Series A investments.

Over time it became Clevertap, raising over $180M in VC funding and becoming a globally used and respected product.

As it turns out though, one of Clevertap’s operating philosophies is, well, First Principles. A strong reason is because Anand himself is a strong believer in it.

At the age of 12 he lost his dad. Thus, at an age when kids are taught to focus only on studies, Anand started tinkering, repairing and learning computer programming to earn money to put food on the table.

His first business was a scheduling system for lawyers in Ahmedabad, written in FoxPro. That was in 1994.

His friends in college called him “khurpechi” in Hindi. Literally, that’s a person who uses a khurpi – a gardening tool – to turn soil over to weed crops or plants. Colloquially though, that’s a person who is curious, restless and is always meddling around with things that don’t concern them directly.

Along the way, Anand co-founded Burrp, one of India’s first restaurant review portals, which got acquired by Network 18. While he was building and running Burrp, he also started manufacturing and selling pigeon spikes to shops, because he noticed there was no one doing that in India!

“I shouldn’t be here,” he told me. Why, I asked. He is not very smart, he replied. He doesn’t have good educational pedigree. He did not even study computer science formally. But, he said, he is extremely hard working and believes that anything can be learnt through hard work and perseverance.

You can see why First Principles is a concept that is dear to Anand.I asked him how happy he was on a scale of 10. He said 10.

I asked him if he’d ever thought of retiring. He said never. Life is too short to not have fun, he said.

Indeed, it is. So let’s dive into episode 46, with Anand Jain, co-founder of Clevertap.

-

This episode was produced by Hari Krishna, with mixing and mastering by Rajiv CN.

Write to us at fp@the-ken.com with your feedback, suggestions and guests you would want to see on First Principles.

If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word by sharing and gifting it to your friends and family.

Anand and I were once colleagues at the media conglomerate Network 18. He got out before I did.

In 2013 he and two of his colleagues, Sunil Thomas and Kondamudi, left Network 18 and decided to fire up their respective laptops and code a new customer engagement platform. In just a few months, WizRocket, as it was then called, found its first – albeit non-paying customer. Then, in fairly short order, word-of-mouth driven inbound Seed and Series A investments.

Over time it became Clevertap, raising over $180M in VC funding and becoming a globally used and respected product.

As it turns out though, one of Clevertap’s operating philosophies is, well, First Principles. A strong reason is because Anand himself is a strong believer in it.

At the age of 12 he lost his dad. Thus, at an age when kids are taught to focus only on studies, Anand started tinkering, repairing and learning computer programming to earn money to put food on the table.

His first business was a scheduling system for lawyers in Ahmedabad, written in FoxPro. That was in 1994.

His friends in college called him “khurpechi” in Hindi. Literally, that’s a person who uses a khurpi – a gardening tool – to turn soil over to weed crops or plants. Colloquially though, that’s a person who is curious, restless and is always meddling around with things that don’t concern them directly.

Along the way, Anand co-founded Burrp, one of India’s first restaurant review portals, which got acquired by Network 18. While he was building and running Burrp, he also started manufacturing and selling pigeon spikes to shops, because he noticed there was no one doing that in India!

“I shouldn’t be here,” he told me. Why, I asked. He is not very smart, he replied. He doesn’t have good educational pedigree. He did not even study computer science formally. But, he said, he is extremely hard working and believes that anything can be learnt through hard work and perseverance.

You can see why First Principles is a concept that is dear to Anand.I asked him how happy he was on a scale of 10. He said 10.

I asked him if he’d ever thought of retiring. He said never. Life is too short to not have fun, he said.

Indeed, it is. So let’s dive into episode 46, with Anand Jain, co-founder of Clevertap.

This is part 1 of my conversation with him

-

This episode was produced by Hari Krishna, with mixing and mastering by Rajiv CN.

Write to us at fp@the-ken.com with your feedback, suggestions and guests you would want to see on First Principles.

If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word by sharing and gifting it to your friends and family.

Not a Premium subscriber? You can subscribe to The Ken Premium on Apple Podcasts for an easy monthly price (Rs 299 in India). The channel includes ALL our premium podcasts.

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My first introduction, and indeed my ongoing and recurring one, to Ultraviolette has been personal. For years, driving by the Inner Koramangala Inner Ring Road from where I stay to Indiranagar, the Ultraviolette showroom would always catch my eye on the left. I used to constantly wonder about those really cool bikes hanging from cables in the double-ceiling office, intrigued by what kind of bikes they were.

Coincidentally, Ultraviolette was founded in the same year that The Ken also started. We've both been in Bangalore, both in a similar part of town, for most of that time. And yet, this was our first time meeting in the ninth year of our respective journeys. As Narayan himself beautifully put it, when you're chasing larger goals, time truly goes by incredibly quickly. We'll delve into what that means for a founder and how they perceive the passage of time when building an organisation from the ground up, because, as Narayan notes, time is the biggest limiting factor for a startup, encompassing money and talent, as founders are always trying to "buy time".

We explored Ultraviolette's foundational vision, how his engineering education laid a strong foundation, and how it fostered a passion to build things from an early age, even tinkering with electronics and DIY systems, their early funding challenges when VCs deemed their ambition "a little too risky" in the early stages, as they were trying to compete with entrenched players.

Narayan is also the head of design at Ultraviolette, so naturally, the conversation went in the direction of him defining the Ultraviolette brand's core pillars as design, technology, and performance, with the promise of "bringing you the future faster than the competition".

He shared Ultraviolette’s ambition to expand to Europe this year and address a significant market gap for compelling electric mid-segment motorcycles at price parity with internal combustion engines.

Narayan also revealed that his colleagues often describe him and his co-founder and childhood friend, Niraj, as "paranoid," driven by a deep attention to detail. He constantly pushes his team to ask, "Have we found the optimal solution after discarding all other possibilities?"

The journey of Ultraviolette is one that defies conventional wisdom.

Welcome to First Principles. 

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This episode was produced by Hari Krishna, with mixing and mastering by Rajiv CN.

Write to us at fp@the-ken.com with your feedback, suggestions and guests you would want to see on First Principles.

If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word by sharing and gifting it to your friends and family.

Not a Premium subscriber? You can subscribe to The Ken Premium on Apple Podcasts for an easy monthly price (Rs 299 in India). The channel includes ALL our premium podcasts.

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My first introduction, and indeed my ongoing and recurring one, to Ultraviolette has been personal. For years, driving by the Inner Koramangala Inner Ring Road from where I stay to Indiranagar, the Ultraviolette showroom would always catch my eye on the left. I used to constantly wonder about those really cool bikes hanging from cables in the double-ceiling office, intrigued by what kind of bikes they were.

Coincidentally, Ultraviolette was founded in the same year that The Ken also started. We've both been in Bangalore, both in a similar part of town, for most of that time. And yet, this was our first time meeting in the ninth year of our respective journeys. As Narayan himself beautifully put it, when you're chasing larger goals, time truly goes by incredibly quickly. We'll delve into what that means for a founder and how they perceive the passage of time when building an organisation from the ground up, because, as Narayan notes, time is the biggest limiting factor for a startup, encompassing money and talent, as founders are always trying to "buy time".

We explored Ultraviolette's foundational vision, how his engineering education laid a strong foundation, and how it fostered a passion to build things from an early age, even tinkering with electronics and DIY systems, their early funding challenges when VCs deemed their ambition "a little too risky" in the early stages, as they were trying to compete with entrenched players.

Narayan is also the head of design at Ultraviolette, so naturally, the conversation went in the direction of him defining the Ultraviolette brand's core pillars as design, technology, and performance, with the promise of "bringing you the future faster than the competition".

He shared Ultraviolette’s ambition to expand to Europe this year and address a significant market gap for compelling electric mid-segment motorcycles at price parity with internal combustion engines.

Narayan also revealed that his colleagues often describe him and his co-founder and childhood friend, Niraj, as "paranoid," driven by a deep attention to detail. He constantly pushes his team to ask, "Have we found the optimal solution after discarding all other possibilities?"

The journey of Ultraviolette is one that defies conventional wisdom.

Welcome to First Principles. 

-

This episode was produced by Hari Krishna, with mixing and mastering by Rajiv CN.

Write to us at fp@the-ken.com with your feedback, suggestions and guests you would want to see on First Principles.

If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word by sharing and gifting it to your friends and family.

Coincidentally, Ultraviolette was founded in the same year that The Ken also started. We've both been in Bangalore, both in a similar part of town, for most of that time. And yet, this was our first time meeting in the ninth year of our respective journeys. As Narayan himself beautifully put it, when you're chasing larger goals, time truly goes by incredibly quickly. We'll delve into what that means for a founder and how they perceive the passage of time when building an organisation from the ground up, because, as Narayan notes, time is the biggest limiting factor for a startup, encompassing money and talent, as founders are always trying to "buy time".

We explored Ultraviolette's foundational vision, how his engineering education laid a strong foundation, and how it fostered a passion to build things from an early age, even tinkering with electronics and DIY systems, their early funding challenges when VCs deemed their ambition "a little too risky" in the early stages, as they were trying to compete with entrenched players.

Narayan is also the head of design at Ultraviolette, so naturally, the conversation went in the direction of him defining the Ultraviolette brand's core pillars as design, technology, and performance, with the promise of "bringing you the future faster than the competition".

He shared Ultraviolette’s ambition to expand to Europe this year and address a significant market gap for compelling electric mid-segment motorcycles at price parity with internal combustion engines.

Narayan also revealed that his colleagues often describe him and his co-founder and childhood friend, Niraj, as "paranoid," driven by a deep attention to detail. He constantly pushes his team to ask, "Have we found the optimal solution after discarding all other possibilities?"

The journey of Ultraviolette is one that defies conventional wisdom.

Welcome to First Principles. 

-

This episode was produced by Hari Krishna, with mixing and mastering by Rajiv CN.

Write to us at fp@the-ken.com with your feedback, suggestions and guests you would want to see on First Principles.

If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word by sharing and gifting it to your friends and family.

Not a Premium subscriber? You can subscribe to The Ken Premium on Apple Podcasts for an easy monthly price (Rs 299 in India). The channel includes ALL our premium podcasts.

-

Manish Sabharwal isn’t an easy man to nail down. By that, I don’t just mean it was hard to nail down a time on his calendar to meet me for the podcast, which it was. Like with most founders and guests on First Principles, the gap between when I first invite them and when they finally appear is usually measured in months, sometimes years. I had first emailed Manish for First Principles in January 2023.

But I’m saying Manish is hard to nail down also because he defies - resists - categorisation. 

Sure, he co-founded Teamlease, one of India’s largest recruitment and human resource providers. It employs over 400,000 people, is listed on the stock exchanges, and is a great barometer of broader employment trends in India. 

But Manish is no longer involved with the day-to-day operations of the company, while still being the largest individual shareholder.

Instead, he leads a “portfolio life”, dividing his time serving on the boards of think tanks, regulatory bodies, universities, non-profits, and even private companies like Phonepe; advising companies and the government on a host of topics like labour markets, regulation, employment, education, economic policy and reforms; being a columnist; and reading books. 

Oh yeah, he says he’s read a book a week for the last - wait for this - 42 years!

Thus, when I sat down with Manish last Thursday, I went in prepared, or as prepared as I could be, with my research and questions. But 10 minutes into the conversation, I decided to drop the conversation narrative I had in mind and instead let the conversation go where it needed to.

Yes, we do cover entrepreneurship, ambition, and finding product-market fit by letting your customers guide your evolution, but we also go much further into topics that we normally don’t. For example, India’s macroeconomic and geopolitical chances, ‘regulatory cholesterol’, higher education and the jobs crisis. All peppered with pithy aphorisms, vivid analogies, and memorable quotes every few minutes, this is something I’ve remembered Manish doing since I first met him as a journalist in the early 2010s.

Welcome to First Principles.

-

This episode was produced by Hari Krishna, and the mixing and mastering of the episode was done by Rajiv CN.

Write to us at fp@the-ken.com with your feedback, suggestions and guests you would want to see on First Principles.

If you liked this episode, help us spread the word by sharing and gifting this episode with your friends and family.

Not a Premium subscriber? You can subscribe to The Ken Premium on Apple Podcasts for an easy monthly price (Rs 299 in India). The channel includes ALL our premium podcasts.

-

Manish Sabharwal isn’t an easy man to nail down. By that, I don’t just mean it was hard to nail down a time on his calendar to meet me for the podcast, which it was. Like with most founders and guests on First Principles, the gap between when I first invite them and when they finally appear is usually measured in months, sometimes years. I had first emailed Manish for First Principles in January 2023.

But I’m saying Manish is hard to nail down also because he defies - resists - categorisation. 

Sure, he co-founded Teamlease, one of India’s largest recruitment and human resource providers. It employs over 400,000 people, is listed on the stock exchanges, and is a great barometer of broader employment trends in India. 

But Manish is no longer involved with the day-to-day operations of the company, while still being the largest individual shareholder.

Instead, he leads a “portfolio life”, dividing his time serving on the boards of think tanks, regulatory bodies, universities, non-profits, and even private companies like Phonepe; advising companies and the government on a host of topics like labour markets, regulation, employment, education, economic policy and reforms; being a columnist; and reading books. 

Oh yeah, he says he’s read a book a week for the last - wait for this - 42 years!

Thus, when I sat down with Manish last Thursday, I went in prepared, or as prepared as I could be, with my research and questions. But 10 minutes into the conversation, I decided to drop the conversation narrative I had in mind and instead let the conversation go where it needed to.

Yes, we do cover entrepreneurship, ambition, and finding product-market fit by letting your customers guide your evolution, but we also go much further into topics that we normally don’t. For example, India’s macroeconomic and geopolitical chances, ‘regulatory cholesterol’, higher education and the jobs crisis. All peppered with pithy aphorisms, vivid analogies, and memorable quotes every few minutes, this is something I’ve remembered Manish doing since I first met him as a journalist in the early 2010s.

Welcome to First Principles.

-

This episode was produced by Hari Krishna, and the mixing and mastering of the episode was done by Rajiv CN.

Write to us at fp@the-ken.com with your feedback, suggestions and guests you would want to see on First Principles.

If you liked this episode, help us spread the word by sharing and gifting this episode with your friends and family.

Not a Premium subscriber? You can subscribe to The Ken Premium on Apple Podcasts for an easy monthly price (Rs 299 in India). The channel includes ALL our premium podcasts.

-

Manish Sabharwal isn’t an easy man to nail down. By that, I don’t just mean it was hard to nail down a time on his calendar to meet me for the podcast, which it was. Like with most founders and guests on First Principles, the gap between when I first invite them and when they finally appear is usually measured in months, sometimes years. I had first emailed Manish for First Principles in January 2023.

But I’m saying Manish is hard to nail down also because he defies - resists - categorisation. 

Sure, he co-founded Teamlease, one of India’s largest recruitment and human resource providers. It employs over 400,000 people, is listed on the stock exchanges, and is a great barometer of broader employment trends in India. 

But Manish is no longer involved with the day-to-day operations of the company, while still being the largest individual shareholder.

Instead, he leads a “portfolio life”, dividing his time serving on the boards of think tanks, regulatory bodies, universities, non-profits, and even private companies like Phonepe; advising companies and the government on a host of topics like labour markets, regulation, employment, education, economic policy and reforms; being a columnist; and reading books. 

Oh yeah, he says he’s read a book a week for the last - wait for this - 42 years!

Thus, when I sat down with Manish last Thursday, I went in prepared, or as prepared as I could be, with my research and questions. But 10 minutes into the conversation, I decided to drop the conversation narrative I had in mind and instead let the conversation go where it needed to.

Yes, we do cover entrepreneurship, ambition, and finding product-market fit by letting your customers guide your evolution, but we also go much further into topics that we normally don’t. For example, India’s macroeconomic and geopolitical chances, ‘regulatory cholesterol’, higher education and the jobs crisis. All peppered with pithy aphorisms, vivid analogies, and memorable quotes every few minutes, this is something I’ve remembered Manish doing since I first met him as a journalist in the early 2010s.

Welcome to First Principles.

-

This episode was produced by Hari Krishna, and the mixing and mastering of the episode was done by Rajiv CN.

Write to us at fp@the-ken.com with your feedback, suggestions and guests you would want to see on First Principles.

If you liked this episode, help us spread the word by sharing and gifting this episode with your friends and family.

Yet, a few weeks ago, I flew to Goa to meet its co-founder and CEO, Sahil Barua, because that’s where Delhivery’s headquarters is now.

It was a day trip. I took an early morning flight. Spent a few hours at a quaint cafe where I was the only guest. Then, I walked 15 minutes through still back alleys filled with cashewnut and mango trees before ending up on a dusty highway, dodging traffic next to an under-construction flyover.

By the time I got to the studio where I was meeting Sahil, my adventure quota for the day was almost over. I loved it.

This was the first time I was meeting Sahil. We’d only exchanged emails with each other. He’s tall, lean and bearded. There’s a certain air of seriousness, for want of a better word, to him. A professorial sort. 

I steeled myself, expecting our conversation to be a bit stiff. But Sahil completely surprised me.

Because he felt completely at ease diving into answers, explanations and reflections without much hesitation. It wasn’t impulsiveness, but an ease with his own thoughts and actions, which did not require polishing or editing before being shared.

It was something that kept coming up time and again in my conversation with him. From joining consulting firm Bain right around the time they had set up shop in India to signing up for a triathlon without much regard for what the challenge holds, to moving Delhivery to, well, Goa.

But at Delhivery, as it has become a giant in the e-commerce and logistics business, he tells one thing to his employees—do not move fast and break things.

Delhivery might not be a sexy business from the outset, but the systems they have built and continue to build, as Sahil explains, position it as a company that is always innovating and iterating in a business which has largely remained the same for decades. And as Sahil repeated in different ways, the biggest effort they have taken is building the most effective network out there.

Sahil tracks Delhivery's journey, how he and his co-founders built a logistics network in the image of a telecom network, and how he has grown to be a better, calmer founder over the years.

I talked to Sahil Barua, co-founder and CEO of Delhivery, about that and a lot more during the course of our conversation.

This is part 2 of my conversation with Sahil Barua.

Welcome to First Principles.

-

If you’re a Premium subscriber to The Ken, you can listen to the full episode, along with all our other podcasts, exclusively on our apps now. Not a premium subscriber? You can subscribe to The Ken Premium channel on Apple Podcasts, which unlocks access to all our premium audio offerings at a great monthly recurring price.

-

This episode was produced by Hari Krishna, and the mixing and mastering of the episode was done by Rajiv CN.

Write to us fp@the-ken.com with your feedback, suggestions and guests you would want to see on First Principles.

If you liked this episode, help us spread the word by sharing and gifting this episode with your friends and family.

Yet, a few weeks ago, I flew to Goa to meet its co-founder and CEO, Sahil Barua, because that’s where Delhivery’s headquarters is now.

It was a day trip. I took an early morning flight. Spent a few hours at a quaint cafe where I was the only guest. Then, I walked 15 minutes through still back alleys filled with cashewnut and mango trees before ending up on a dusty highway, dodging traffic next to an under-construction flyover.

By the time I got to the studio where I was meeting Sahil, my adventure quota for the day was almost over. I loved it.

This was the first time I was meeting Sahil. We’d only exchanged emails with each other. He’s tall, lean and bearded. There’s a certain air of seriousness, for want of a better word, to him. A professorial sort. 

I steeled myself, expecting our conversation to be a bit stiff. But Sahil completely surprised me.

Because he felt completely at ease diving into answers, explanations and reflections without much hesitation. It wasn’t impulsiveness, but an ease with his own thoughts and actions, which did not require polishing or editing before being shared.

It was something that kept coming up time and again in my conversation with him. From joining consulting firm Bain right around the time they had set up shop in India to signing up for a triathlon without much regard for what the challenge holds, to moving Delhivery to, well, Goa.

But at Delhivery, as it has become a giant in the e-commerce and logistics business, he tells one thing to his employees—do not move fast and break things.

Delhivery might not be a sexy business from the outset, but the systems they have built and continue to build, as Sahil explains, position it as a company that is always innovating and iterating in a business which has largely remained the same for decades. And as Sahil repeated in different ways, the biggest effort they have taken is building the most effective network out there.

Sahil tracks Delhivery's journey, how he and his co-founders built a logistics network in the image of a telecom network, and how he has grown to be a better, calmer founder over the years.

I talked to Sahil Barua, co-founder and CEO of Delhivery, about that and a lot more during the course of our conversation.

Welcome to First Principles.

-

If you’re a Premium subscriber to The Ken, you can listen to the full episode, along with all our other podcasts, exclusively on our apps now. Not a premium subscriber? You can subscribe to The Ken Premium channel on Apple Podcasts, which unlocks access to all our premium audio offerings at a great monthly recurring price.

-

This episode was produced by Hari Krishna, and the mixing and mastering of the episode was done by Rajiv CN.

Write to us fp@the-ken.com with your feedback, suggestions and guests you would want to see on First Principles.

If you liked this episode, help us spread the word by sharing and gifting this episode with your friends and family.

Yet, a few weeks ago, I flew to Goa to meet its co-founder and CEO, Sahil Barua, because that’s where Delhivery’s headquarters is now.

It was a day trip. I took an early morning flight. Spent a few hours at a quaint cafe where I was the only guest. Then, I walked 15 minutes through still back alleys filled with cashewnut and mango trees before ending up on a dusty highway, dodging traffic next to an under-construction flyover.

By the time I got to the studio where I was meeting Sahil, my adventure quota for the day was almost over. I loved it.

This was the first time I was meeting Sahil. We’d only exchanged emails with each other. He’s tall, lean and bearded. There’s a certain air of seriousness, for want of a better word, to him. A professorial sort. 

I steeled myself, expecting our conversation to be a bit stiff. But Sahil completely surprised me.

Because he felt completely at ease diving into answers, explanations and reflections without much hesitation. It wasn’t impulsiveness, but an ease with his own thoughts and actions, which did not require polishing or editing before being shared.

It was something that kept coming up time and again in my conversation with him. From joining consulting firm Bain right around the time they had set up shop in India to signing up for a triathlon without much regard for what the challenge holds, to moving Delhivery to, well, Goa.

But at Delhivery, as it has become a giant in the e-commerce and logistics business, he tells one thing to his employees—do not move fast and break things.

Delhivery might not be a sexy business from the outset, but the systems they have built and continue to build, as Sahil explains, position it as a company that is always innovating and iterating in a business which has largely remained the same for decades. And as Sahil repeated in different ways, the biggest effort they have taken is building the most effective network out there.

Sahil tracks Delhivery's journey, how he and his co-founders built a logistics network in the image of a telecom network, and how he has grown to be a better, calmer founder over the years.

I talked to Sahil Barua, co-founder and CEO of Delhivery, about that and a lot more during the course of our conversation.

Welcome to First Principles.

-

If you’re a Premium subscriber to The Ken, you can listen to the full episode, along with all our other podcasts, exclusively on our apps now. Not a premium subscriber? You can subscribe to The Ken Premium channel on Apple Podcasts, which unlocks access to all our premium audio offerings at a great monthly recurring price.

-

This episode was produced by Hari Krishna, and the mixing and mastering of the episode was done by Rajiv CN.

Write to us fp@the-ken.com with your feedback, suggestions and guests you would want to see on First Principles.

If you liked this episode, help us spread the word by sharing and gifting this episode with your friends and family.

Vidit and I discussed a lot of things. From the way his upbringing grounded him, the way he approaches hiring at Meesho and how he approaches life now as a parent. It’s a wonderful 40 minutes where I spent some time talking to Vdit about how he continues to look beyond the horizon to find answers to the more ambiguous questions Meesho faces now.

And at the end of it, he has a wonderful book recommendation for everyone. I picked up a copy myself after our conversation.

I hope you had the chance to listen to the first part of our conversation, where he covered Meesho’s history of growth and pivots and how it has aligned with the changes and demands of its customers.

Here’s the link to part 1 of my conversation with Vidit Aatrey - Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Amazon Music | Youtube

Now, let’s get on to part 2 of my conversation with Vidit Aatrey.

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If you're a premium subscriber of The Ken. You can listen to the full conversation with Vidit Aatrey right now using this link.

The full conversation was made available early to Premium subscribers of The Ken on our app and subscribers of The Ken Premium channel via a separate standalone subscription on Apple Podcasts.

Write to us at fp@the-ken.com with your feedback, suggestions and guests you would want to see on First Principles.

Think about it. Can you spend two hours in a room having a truly open-ended, candid and widespread discussion with another person about their life, their business, their colleagues, their company and its culture, and even their family, without getting to really know them?

I’d been wanting to have Vidit as a guest on First Principles for a while, even during our first two seasons. But as it turns out, things clicked only in 2025. I’m glad though, because I do feel Vidit’s and Meesho’s journey are a wonderful opening to Season 3 of First Principles.

There’s a lot of good stuff we talked about. Why Vidit is so eager for Meesho to build for a long-term view, why he values problems way more than solutions, the humility and willingness to be led to new places by customer insights, the much talked about zero commission model, and building products for users who aren’t the top 5% of India.

Let’s get started with the conversation, shall we?

Welcome to season three of First Principles.

-

If you're a premium subscriber of The Ken. You can listen to the full conversation with Vidit Aatrey right now using this link.

Write to us fp@the-ken.com with your feedback, suggestions and guests you would want to see on First Principles.

Think about it. Can you spend two hours in a room having a truly open-ended, candid and widespread discussion with another person about their life, their business, their colleagues, their company and its culture, and even their family, without getting to really know them?

I’d been wanting to have Vidit as a guest on First Principles for a while, even during our first two seasons. But as it turns out, things clicked only in 2025. I’m glad though, because I do feel Vidit’s and Meesho’s journey are a wonderful opening to Season 3 of First Principles.

There’s a lot of good stuff we talked about. Why Vidit is so eager for Meesho to build for a long-term view, why he values problems way more than solutions, the humility and willingness to be led to new places by customer insights, the much talked about zero commission model, and building products for users who aren’t the top 5% of India.

Let’s get started with the conversation, shall we?

Welcome to season three of First Principles.

-

If you're a premium subscriber of The Ken. You can listen to the full conversation with Vidit Aatrey right now using this link.

Write to us fp@the-ken.com with your feedback, suggestions and guests you would want to see on First Principles.

It's called Two by Two – and this podcast will be your personal investigative brain. Each week Two by Two will be where hosts Rohin Dharmakumar and Praveen Gopal Krishnan will be joined by a few interesting and opinionated guests to discuss some of the biggest questions from the world of Indian business.

But, why's it called Two by Two?

Here it is: each episode of the Two by Two podcast will feature an important story investigated and discussed and visualized as a 2x2. A simple matrix that's the purest form of conflict – that places the players and their motivations on both axes. Along with incredible guests, the hosts will discuss what is going on, why is it happening, who gains and who loses, and where is all of this leading to?

Two by Two is a premium podcast – but for now, the first episode is free for all listeners. On this episode, the hosts speak to Professor R Srinivasan and Srikanth Rajagopalan on the brewing rivalry between Flipkart and PhonePe, once parent and child, but now more like cousins. Flipkart, which is now venturing into FinTech with Super.money and Phonepe, which has launched the grocery delivery app Pincode are both stepping into each others turf.

What happens next?

Listen to the full episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube or wherever you find your podcasts.

And like the last episode where we covered founders 1 to 20, you’ll hear super sharp slices of a few minutes each which are reflections on their approach to organization building, risk taking, decision making and life living.

Here are the guests you’ll get listen to in this episode:

Krish Subramanian, co-founder and CEO of Chargebee; Varun Dua, founder of Acko; Yashish Dahiya, co-founder and Group CEO of Policybazaar; Archit Gupta, co-founder and CEO of Clear; M N Srinivasu, co-founder and Director of Billdesk; Radhika Gupta, MD and CEO of Edelweiss Asset Management; Lalit Keshre, co-founder and CEO of Groww; Niraj Singh, founder and CEO of Spinny; Karthik Jayaraman, Managing Director of Waycool; Ritesh Agarwal, founder and CEO of Oyo; Soumya Rajan, founder and CEO of Waterfield Advisors; Viren Shetty, Executive Vice Chairman of Narayana Health; Aneesh Reddy, Founder and MD of Capillary Technologies; Vaibhav Gupta, co-founder and CEO of Udaan; Girish Mathrubootham, Founder and Executive Chairman of Freshworks; Harsh Mariwala, Chairman of Marico; Chetan Maini, co-founder and chairman of SUN Mobility; Jaydeep Barman, co-founder and CEO of Rebel Foods; Alok Mittal, co-founder and MD of Indifi Technologies; Kapil Chopra, Founder of The Postcard Hotels; and Manav Garg, founder of Eka.

This is not the end of the road for me as a podcast host as you’ll soon find out. Actually, very soon. 

I'm Rohin Dharmakumar, your host. And here's part 2 of the final, final supercut.

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Also, if you haven't already, do subscribe to the First Principles newsletter. You can sign up for free here!

But then we decided to do a final super-splice of every single episode we did. There were 41 founders. A bit too many for a single supercut episode, don’t you think?

So, here’s the first 20.

We went through all the episodes and picked a few minutes from each that we felt captured the essence of the specific founder and their approach to entrepreneurship, leadership, and well, life.

You’ll listen to Kabeer Biswas, co-founder and CEO of Dunzo; Baskar Subramamian, co-founder and CEO of Amagi; Nithin Kamath, co-founder and CEO of Zerodha; Naveen Tewari, founder and CEO at InMobi; Ananth Narayanan, founder and CEO of Mensa Brands; Harshil Mathur, co-founder and CEO of Razorpay; Vineeta Singh, co-founder and CEO of Sugar Cosmetics; Amrish Rau, CEO of Pine Labs; Amit Agarwal, co-founder and CEO of NoBroker; Tarun Mehta, co-founder and CEO of Ather Energy; Deep Kalra, founder and chairman of MakeMyTrip; Ruchi Kalra, co-founder and CEO of Oxyzo; Kamal Sagar, co-founder and CEO of Total Environment; Srikanth Iyer, co-founder and CEO of Homelane; Shan Kadavil, founder and CEO of Fresh to Home; Kunal Shah, founder and CEO of CRED; Srikanth Velamakanni, co-founder and CEO of Fractal; Ronnie Screwvala, co-founder and chairperson of UpGrad; Gaurav Munjal, co-founder and CEO of Unacademy; and Smita Deorah, co-founder and co-CEO of LEAD.

Even if you’ve listened to many of these episodes, I think you might enjoy this intense supercut.

Meanwhile, we’re working hard at our next podcast. Which I should be able to introduce to you very shortly. I’m excited!

I’m Rohin Dharmakumar, your host. And here’s part 1 of final, final supercut.

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While you’re still here you can sign up for the First Principles Newsletter here and continue to be part of the First Principles community.

We still want to hear from you and know what you expect from the podcasts from The Ken. Let us know with your suggestions and critique.

We'd love to know your thoughts and you can let us know here.

Also, you can always write to us at fp@the-ken.com with your thoughts.

The leap of faith still exists when you're a woman founder, but with a bunch of other variables you didn't ask for also thrown in.

But I'll tell you what doesn't change. It still takes the same amount of passion, the joy of building, stress, frustration and the ability to manage fires that might go off anytime to keep the ship steady, and eventually succeed in the long run.

Being a woman founder does present its own challenges and hurdles that are often unexpected or even patronising. Because if you've decided to jump into the world of terrible and exciting, then these are just additional hoops that you have to jump through.

That's why role models matter. I must confess we - I - have been disappointed at not being able to get a lot more woman founders and their stories on First Principles. You can be sure we're trying to change that over time. 

But in today's supercut episode, we bring together five women founders from earlier episodes.

This episode features Vineeta Singh of SUGAR Cosmetics, Smita Deorah of LEAD School, Ruchi Kalra of Oxyzo, Radhika Gupta of Edelweiss Asset Management and Soumya Rajan of Waterfield Advisors.

Welcome to First Principles—The weekly leadership podcast from The Ken.

Let's get started.

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Apply for the Young Business Leadership Programme!

What is it?

It is an ambitious and exciting role where we take a handful of talented, ambitious and eager-to-learn graduates from India's top colleges and put them through a two-year program where they will work in different roles and functions at The Ken.

And throughout the two years they will learn virtually all key aspects of building, innovating and scaling a modern "journalism as a product" organization, well, from first principles.

If you want to understand the "why" of why we're doing this, you'll find the details to that here, but if you're just excited about the opportunity from the little I have told you and you're just thinking about "how" do I apply, here's the link for that.

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Also, have you listened to the latest episode of The First Two Years(or TFTY)—The Early Careers podcast from The Ken?

In the latest episode of TFTY, host Akshaya Chandrasekaran goes on a quest to explore how to solicit feedback as requested by a listener of the podcast. Akshaya directed the listener's question to guests on the episode who shared surprising tips and pragmatic ways to ask for feedback. What exactly did they have to say?

Listen to the episode here to find out.

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If you haven't already, subscribe to the First Principles newsletter. It's free. All you need to do is sign up, and you'll find a thoughtfully curated newsletter capturing unique insights on the mental models and first principles, along with a curated list of photos and books contributed by the enthusiastic First Principles community.

You can sign up here!

Also, if you enjoyed listening to this episode, do rate us on your favourite streaming platform, and if you have opinions on what we should be doing differently or just any feedback, good or bad, write to us at fp@the-ken.com. We'll be sure to read it.

I had said in that conversation that venture capitalists are facilitators or enablers, not builders or doers.

Manav, too, like Alok Mittal earlier, has been at both ends, being a facilitator and also being in the thick of building an organisation. A few months ago, he fully transitioned into being a venture capitalist and has raised almost $150 million for Together Fund's Fund II(Fund Two), which is almost double the $85 million they raised for their first fund. Manav terms Together as a founder and 'operator-led' firm, and that distinguishes it from other VC funds.

Manav explained it as, "So we are the people who can, you know, roll our sleeves with them and really help them where they can really think like founders. And our concept was repetition over returns. We want to really think for the founders with empathy and really help them build a global company."

If Alok Mittal's story was about turning from a VC to a founder, Manav's is about turning from a founder to a VC. Well, he is sort of both as a co-founder of Together Fund. But the question is, can a founder be a better VC than, well, a VC?

Welcome to First Principles—The weekly leadership podcast from The Ken.

Let's get started.

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Have you listened to The Ken's early careers podcast, The First Two Years, yet? If you haven't, we've got the perfect episode to start you off. In the latest episode, host Akshaya Chandrasekaran went about exploring how to do networking without making it feel forced and cringe. Check out the episode here!

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That's what Alok Mittal, founder and MD of Indifi, an online lending platform, had to say about startups getting caught up in the founder-worshipping trap.

I hope you have heard my first episode with him. I often ask founders if they believe in the concept of a founder-led organization. Or how they're planning for a post-founder future for their organization. Because like Alok, I do believe that just like a parent's role is to eventually step back and let go of their child, so it is for founders.

But that's not easy when we're living in the golden age of founders. Where co-founder tags are coveted much more than CEO titles. It's not easy for many founders to let go. 

But that was just one of the things that Alok and I discussed in our conversation. Alok, if you didn't know already, is involved in a lot of things. His day job might be MD of Indifi, but he is also the founding board member of Indian Angel Network and co-founder of Plaksha University.

Plaksha is a project he has been working on for quite some time and the way it is structured was interesting and something a lot of centers of education should be aiming to build in India as Alok explained:

"The notion of departments that exist in educational institutions is not the right architecture. Especially for a country like India, more and more of technology skills have to get expressed as entrepreneurship for it to be relevant to society. I don't think we have another answer for the jobs we need to create or the growth that we need to build.

Now, you take all of that, and the question that we are asking is, what does that mean for the university system? And so, for example, at Plaksha, there are no departments. There are these integrated centers of research which are oriented towards a particular problem like climate. But there is no computer science department, there is no mechanical engineering department. There is no mechanical engineering major because we don't think that students will need to be experts at mechanical engineering in a silo to be able to build.

So there is a major in autonomous systems, which means robotics, which means drones, which means all of that. But there's a major in biological systems, which means genetic engineering, which means personalized medicine, things of that nature. So that is the new architecture that we are putting in place for how technology education should be done."

If you haven't already checked out the first part of my conversation with Alok Mittal, now would be the perfect time to give it a listen. You'll find in that conversation when and how Alok fell in love with the idea of being an entrepreneur.

Welcome to First Principles—The weekly leadership podcast from The Ken.

Let's get started.

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Manav Garg, founder and former CEO of Eka Software, a SaaS company that operates in the global commodities trading space. "Former CEO" because Manav started Eka in 2004 and just sold it earlier this year. 

Since Manav was earning $10K a month back in the early 2000s, we talked about golden handcuffs. You know, when people earn so much that they become risk averse? A lot of people are attracted to the lure of startups but not necessarily the grind that comes with them. Including much, much lower pay. 

“So, my competition was TriplePoint, Openlink, SAP. Large companies, at that time. $100 million plus companies. So, I started calling them. Cold calling. And few of them didn't pick up my phone.

One person luckily picked up my phone saying, ‘Please don't call me again and again. It's not nice. I'm never going to work for Indian company.’

I said, ‘Fine. Since I have you on phone, can I meet you?’

He said, ‘No.’

He said, ‘No. What will you do by meeting me?’

I said, ‘Let's have coffee. What I will do is, tell me your travel schedule.’

He said, ‘I am flying to London tomorrow, so I am going to be very busy.’

I said, ‘Okay, let me do one thing. I will travel to London next day and I will meet you at Heathrow. Just have a coffee. You anyway will take a shower.’

Most of the people from New York travel to London that red-eye flight, take a shower in the arrival launch. I knew that. I said, ‘I will meet in the arrival launch. Half an hour coffee and then you are free to go.’

He said, ‘Fine.’

Luckily, he said, ‘Fine.’”

It takes a LOT of courage to fly to London to meet someone who said he doesn’t want to work for an Indian company. And a LOT of vision to convince that person to join you. That’s what happened at the end of that 30-minute meeting that stretched to 2 hours. 

Today, after 20 years as founder, Manav has jumped right back into the ring as the co-founder of venture capital firm TogetherFund, along with Girish Mathrubootham of Freshworks and others. When I asked him about something most potential founders overlooked, his answer was easy: Co-founder selection. 

“See, in India also, still we have in that cultural mix, where you start up with your college friends because you spend time in dorms together, in college, you went through life's ups and downs together, right?

 So, therefore, you're very attuned to start up with your friends from college, most likely, that's the most likely case, or from your workplace. You work with somebody in Amazon, Flipkart, Freshworks, Eka, Zoho, so therefore you end up starting up.

I personally think that there is also a way to manufacture your co-founders.”

 Manav advises founders to set aside at least 6 months to “manufacture” their co-founders by just meeting a LOT of people. 

My conversation with Manav uncovers a lot of insight on how young founders should think about building for the long haul. He did it for 20 years. 

There’s a lot of very counterintuitive builder wisdom to unpack in today’s conversation.

Welcome to First Principles–The weekly leadership podcast from The Ken.

Let’s get started.

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Daybreak is now a daily podcast.

Listen to the first special episode we released on 17th May: “Why aren’t we scared of chemicals in our skincare anymore?”

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But with time he has gained perspective, as one does when they go through all those experiences. Now, he’s thankful for all those who remained despite him not being the best boss.

Today Jaydeep believes Rebel has found its way but he resists to rest in this fast changing world even though he stands by one belief: People’s love for good quality food will always be there and till the day that doesn’t change Rebel will be very much in business.

In the first part of our conversation with Jaydeep he recounted the journey of Rebel Foods, a lot of anecdotes about the restaurant industry at large, how he hires people with founder’s mentality and not LinkedIn mentality and a whole lot more…

We strongly recommend listening to the first part of our conversation with Jaydeep to get the full picture or if you wish you could read the full transcript of that conversation here.

In this second part of our conversation too, Jaydeep was full of insights about the internet restaurant empire he has built and how they arrived at its current version not with clear, set ideas but a lot of experimentation and realising what works and what doesn’t on the way.

Jaydeep also touched upon a lot of other things including:

• The role his co-founder, Kallol Banerjee plays at Rebel
• How they arrived at Rebel OS and the possibilities it holds
• How, at Rebel written reports are the norm and not the exception

Welcome to First Principles–The weekly leadership podcast from The Ken

Let’s get started.

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Additionally, if you love listening to First Principles we’re sure you will enjoy reading our Sunday newsletter aptly titled First Principles as well. It’s the perfect read for a laid back Sunday morning. Every week you’ll see us discussing mental models, insights from disruptive thinkers and founders, photos and book recommendations curated with help of our wonderful First Principles community and even fun playlists. Sign up here, it’s free.

In fact, listen to the Summer Playlist we shared in our latest edition. It’s eclectic, vibe-y and a must listen.

He has very strong thoughts about org building even though he admits Indifi is only 9 years old. He speaks from his observations and his strong beliefs. In Alok’s mind it’s the mid-management which holds together the organization and not necessarily the leadership team.

Alok also has the history of setting up three ventures, which includes the part he played in setting up Canaan Partners, a VC firm in India. Then of course there is JobsAhead which was his first startup and now he’s busy lending to the sector which contributes to 30% of the country’s GDP, and yet finds credit hard to come by.

Alok hung up his VC shoes in 2015 to solve this problem and take on the problem of lending to SMEs, the ones who were being given a pass by traditional banks and NBFCs. But they’re not leaning on solving for every SME out there. Indifi have found the sectors they want to lend to and are working towards making these businesses get access to credit.

He also talked about:

• Failures and the learnings it brings
• How he assesses risks as a VC and a founder
• The bible of raising money
• Advice to Young entrepreneurs

Listen to all of that and a whole lot more in this Part 1 episode of our conversation with Alok Mittal.

Welcome to First Principles – The weekly leadership podcast from The Ken.

Let’s get started.

Also, if you love listening to First Principles, you are sure to love The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business publication. To discover the deeply-reported stories that we publish everyday head over to our website and subscribe to The Ken’s premium subscription.

Also, do write to us with your suggestions and opinions about First Principles at fp@the-ken.com. We love hearing from our listeners and subscribers.

He has very strong thoughts about org building even though he admits Indifi is only 9 years old. He speaks from his observations and his strong beliefs. In Alok’s mind it’s the mid-management which holds together the organization and not necessarily the leadership team.

Alok also has the history of setting up three ventures, which includes the part he played in setting up Canaan Partners, a VC firm in India. Then of course there is JobsAhead which was his first startup and now he’s busy lending to the sector which contributes to 30% of the country’s GDP, and yet finds credit hard to come by.

Alok hung up his VC shoes in 2015 to solve this problem and take on the problem of lending to SMEs, the ones who were being given a pass by traditional banks and NBFCs. But they’re not leaning on solving for every SME out there. Indifi have found the sectors they want to lend to and are working towards making these businesses get access to credit.

He also talked about:

• Failures and the learnings it brings
• How he assesses risks as a VC and a founder
• The bible of raising money
• Advice to Young entrepreneurs

Welcome to First Principles – The weekly leadership podcast from The Ken.

Let’s get started.

Also, if you love listening to First Principles, you are sure to love The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business publication. To discover the deeply-reported stories that we publish everyday head over to our website and subscribe to The Ken’s premium subscription.

Also, do write to us with your suggestions and opinions about First Principles at fp@the-ken.com. We love hearing from our listeners and subscribers.

A few years after starting it both of them left it behind to go and do their second MBAs from INSEAD and after completing it Jaydeep went on to work for McKinsey in London and Kallol headed to Bosch in Singapore.

But the dream of having their own company brought them back to Pune in 2011 and this time they were serious about making Faasos huge. They wanted to make it a QSR chain in the image of McDonald’s and Dominos of the world, but catering to the Indian taste buds. They raised some venture capital and got a few angel investors and decided to fire up their journey to growing their store numbers and serving great food.

But this journey hit a roadblock when they grew too fast and revenue didn’t match up growth on a per store basis. This is when they had the first of their ‘lightbulb moments or epiphanies’ as Jaydeep calls them.

Infrastructure or setting up a restaurant on the high street was a fixed cost that made it hard for Rebel Foods to scale beyond a point. So they decided to enforce a change in how they do business by taking away this fixed cost component and just investing in making food in a kitchen ideally in a location where rent is low.

This decision was aided by customer insight as well. When they ran a survey nearly 74% customers said they had never been to a Faasos outlet or they had been to it once. So they piloted the cloud kitchen or ghost kitchen concept, which meant you just have a kitchen which fulfils orders and no storefront or dine-in area, in Mumbai and it worked and they haven’t turned back from there.

There were two more lightbulb moments which have made Rebel Foods what it is today. What were those?

Find out that and a lot more in this episode full of a lot of 2x2 matrix examples, possibly one of the most fun brand origin stories, how Rebel Foods became the world’s largest Internet restaurant and priceless insights into the world of serving food without a restaurant that you and I can dine-in.

Welcome to First Principles – The weekly leadership podcast from The Ken.

Let’s get started.

The Ken completed the training of 100 senior leaders from high-growth Indian companies last month. Read more about our learning programs for leaders here. Sign up by filling out this form. We have a few slots available this year.

Also, how are you finding the First Principles podcasts? What do you like? What can we improve? What do you think? Write to us at fp@the-ken.com.

A few years after starting it both of them left it behind to go and do their second MBAs from INSEAD and after completing it Jaydeep went on to work for McKinsey in London and Kallol headed to Bosch in Singapore.

But the dream of having their own company brought them back to Pune in 2011 and this time they were serious about making Faasos huge. They wanted to make it a QSR chain in the image of McDonald’s and Dominos of the world, but catering to the Indian taste buds. They raised some venture capital and got a few angel investors and decided to fire up their journey to growing their store numbers and serving great food.

But this journey hit a roadblock when they grew too fast and revenue didn’t match up growth on a per store basis. This is when they had the first of their ‘lightbulb moments or epiphanies’ as Jaydeep calls them.

Infrastructure or setting up a restaurant on the high street was a fixed cost that made it hard for Rebel Foods to scale beyond a point. So they decided to enforce a change in how they do business by taking away this fixed cost component and just investing in making food in a kitchen ideally in a location where rent is low.

This decision was aided by customer insight as well. When they ran a survey nearly 74% customers said they had never been to a Faasos outlet or they had been to it once. So they piloted the cloud kitchen or ghost kitchen concept, which meant you just have a kitchen which fulfils orders and no storefront or dine-in area, in Mumbai and it worked and they haven’t turned back from there.

There were two more lightbulb moments which have made Rebel Foods what it is today. What were those?

Find out that and a lot more in this episode full of a lot of 2x2 matrix examples, possibly one of the most fun brand origin stories, how Rebel Foods became the world’s largest Internet restaurant and priceless insights into the world of serving food without a restaurant that you and I can dine-in.

Welcome to First Principles – The weekly leadership podcast from The Ken.

Let’s get started.

The Ken completed the training of 100 senior leaders from high-growth Indian companies last month. Read more about our learning programs for leaders here. Sign up by filling out this form. We have a few slots available this year.

Also, how are you finding the First Principles podcasts? What do you like? What can we improve? What do you think? Write to us at fp@the-ken.com.

His time was still spent in understanding the possibilities electric mobility could unlock for the world and how these possibilities were being explored around the world. He was still involved in setting up and innovating the Formula E division at Mahindra, he still helped Anand Mahindra every now and then on strategic matters in Mahindra’s electric division, he was working with the government, he also helped the BMTC take a part of its fleet electric and the list goes on.

One could say he stepped down to get a better view of the possibilities in electric mobility. He was not looking for opportunities actively during this period, he was merely synthesising what possibilities were feasible.

He did travel across the world during this break but even during that time he was looking at the electric mobility solutions and innovations that were present in the places he visited.

He realised the possibilities in battery swapping as an alternative to charging and filed patents long before he became part of what is SUN Mobility today.

In the first part of our conversation with Chetan we discussed broadly how the sector has evolved, what SUN Mobility has set out to achieve, how their BaaS or Battery as a Service model is an alternative to charging your vehicle and a whole lot more.

In this episode we discuss how Chetan figured out what was next for him, the mental models he applies at SUN Mobility, how he’s built a team that speaks its mind and a lot more.

Welcome to First Principles – The weekly leadership podcast from The Ken.

Let’s get started.

There are many ways to answer this question.

Most founders have a really good answer, some have a meandering one.

Well, let’s just say it’s always a compelling answer.

This week we have five founders to answer that question on a broader range. They function in very competitive sectors and are successfully making their mark in their respective sectors by innovating and more appropriately reinventing the wheel.

First up, we have newly inducted Shark, Radhika Gupta of Edelweiss Asset Management telling us what her company does for its customers, and what she doesn’t want her customers to not do through a great example.

Next up, we have Lalit Keshre of Groww, who is very clear who the target consumer for his company is. Starting off as robo-advisory and then pivoting into the mutual fund sector and now on their way to become a complete financial services platform.

We have another Shark from the Shark Tank panel featured in this episode. Ritesh Agarwal of Oyo Rooms has built Oyo in his own words into a leading global hotel brand. But that’s not all it is as he went on to add further.

Next up, we have Kartik Jayaraman, who founded Waycool, a food and agritech company  at the age of 40. He started off  with the simple explanation: We’re a supply chain company. At our heart that’s what we do. After that he got into the nitty gritty of what Waycool does.

Lastly, we have Niraj Singh of Spinny, who is busy building in a space that has many competitors, old and new, and he explained how he’s servicing the aspirational class of the country by delivering something the competitors couldn’t.

The Ken completed the training of 100 senior leaders from high-growth Indian companies last month. Read more about our learning programs for leaders here. Sign up by filling out this form. We have a few slots available this year.

Welcome to First Principles—the weekly leadership podcast from The Ken.

Let’s get started.

Pilates - once a week.

Strength training - once a week.

Aqua therapy - once a week

Functional training, swimming, breathing exercises, meditating daily with just a little trouble

Golfing three times a week followed up with posture exercises 

And very recently, experimenting with intermittent fasting.

Maybe you’re imagining a very specific type of person. A really fit, disciplined person – perhaps, a fitness influencer?

Well, you ‘re kind of right. You could say the person I’m talking about is very much an influencer. And he’s fit too.

He’s huge on LinkedIn, where he is part of the Top Voice program. On Twitter or X, he has close to a million followers. He’s very popular online.

So, really, if you think about it, he could turn into a fitness influencer if he wanted to.

But, here’s the thing. We're not talking about a young, health obsessed fitness influencer.

This is the routine of a 72-year-old, health obsessed, and I must add restless founder and Chairman of Marico, Harsh Mariwala.

Welcome to First Principles, the weekly leadership podcast from The Ken. I’m your host Rohin Dharmakumar and this is part 2 of my conversation with Harsh Mariwala.

This is episode 45 of First Principles–The Ken’s weekly leadership podcast. Let’s get started. Let’s begin.

Chetan’s raced solar cars, built his own car company REVA and is now building a pay-as-you-go energy infrastructure for a greener future with Sun Mobility. You’ll see in this a proper evolution of owning the chain of control as well.

Well, it has to be said this is not fully intentional. Because in a world where REVAs are speeding down the road left and right you’re not gonna see Chetan going out and building a BaaS, battery as a service business. But it was 2001, and India, and most of the world, was not ready for electric cars.

Chetan, however, persevered even under the shadow of the Mahindra Group and made strides in their electric mobility aspirations before leaving in 2015.

He took a break of two years, observed the EV market across the globe and when he saw the opportunity back home, came back with his expertise and took charge to create what we know today as Sun Mobility. The vision is bigger this time around and time is on his side as well. 

The only thing left to see out: Execution.

And they are not pulling any punches on that front either.

Additional reading: this edition of Green Margins published way back in late 2022 to understand how, here.

Welcome to Season 2, episode 44 of First Principles - A weekly leadership podcast from The Ken.

Chetan’s raced solar cars, built his own car company REVA and is now building a pay-as-you-go energy infrastructure for a greener future with Sun Mobility. You’ll see in this a proper evolution of owning the chain of control as well.

Well, it has to be said this is not fully intentional. Because in a world where REVAs are speeding down the road left and right you’re not gonna see Chetan going out and building a BaaS, battery as a service business. But it was 2001, and India, and most of the world, was not ready for electric cars.

Chetan, however, persevered even under the shadow of the Mahindra Group and made strides in their electric mobility aspirations before leaving in 2015.

He took a break of two years, observed the EV market across the globe and when he saw the opportunity back home, came back with his expertise and took charge to create what we know today as Sun Mobility. The vision is bigger this time around and time is on his side as well. 

The only thing left to see out: Execution.

And they are not pulling any punches on that front either.

Additional reading: this edition of Green Margins published way back in late 2022 to understand how, here.

Welcome to First Principles - A weekly leadership podcast from The Ken.

He made a very apt example in our conversation with him earlier this month at his office in Chennai: a kid never gets to make his own decisions, even if it is to just order food of their liking. This in turn translates into their adulthood as an inability to make decisions.

Girish has been out there making most of his decisions for himself from a young age, including which school he would go to, which college he’ll enrol in and having a say in most of his major life decisions.

The biggest learning he got out of this: understanding the consequences of your actions and reflecting on them to see the untapped opportunities that lay ahead. And once he got good at that, he became adept at learning so that he could do something about the untapped opportunities.

Girish isn’t just the CEO of a NASDAQ-listed SaaS company, he’s also deeply involved in SaaSBoomi, a community that calls itself The World’s Largest Pay-it-forward Community of SaaS Founders.

As one of SaaSboomi’s founding members, Girish played a big role in shaping its culture of openness and paying it forward. He did it by sharing in detail the methods and tactics that got a young Freshworks to $1M in annual revenue. 

Then, a few years later – as he explained –  he took Freshworks from $1M to $5M.

How often do you see a company explain their growth playbook to a possible future competitor and enable them?

It’s rare.

Girish also doesn’t limit his wish to pay-it-back just within the SaaS universe. He’s also out there  with a mission to build world class champions from the football academy he set up, FC Madras. 

He’s infused 100 crores into his academy for the game he loves because he knows the talent is there and it needs to be nurtured properly and in the future we might have a shot at the world stage.

Welcome to part 2 of our conversation with Girish. This episode too, like the first part, is filled with colorful quotes and examples ranging from Steve Jobs to Rajnikanth movies!

This is episode 43 of First Principles–The Ken’s weekly leadership podcast. Let’s get started.

Over the next two decades Harsh learnt the ropes of the family business. Till in 1991 - two decades after he had joined Bombay Oil - he left it to start his own company, Marico.

He had already seen the power of quality and brand in a category that was still almost entirely commoditized and unbranded. For instance, the huge 15 liter tin cans of Parachute coconut oil Bombay Oil sold to shopkeepers were resold in smaller quantities at much higher prices. Harsh rightly wondered, why should someone else capture the margin and premium for my product? 

The company that Harsh founded - Marico - had two powerful brands at its core - Parachute Coconut Oil and Saffola cooking oil. That is true even today, 33 years later. Nearly 1 in 3 Indians use Parachute oil, our research tells us. 

Of course, a lot else has changed since then. 

Marico, which went public just 5 years after being founded in 1991, today boasts a turnover of over 1.2 billion dollars. 

And Harsh is 72, but still learning, exploring, experimenting and unable to take it easy.

Earlier this week, I had the chance to speak to Harsh about his entire (and might I add still evolving) professional journey!

It’s a long time, but Harsh talks about the day Marico was separated from Bombay Oil just like it was yesterday. He talked about how in 1991 they attracted talent by positioning themselves as the disruptive outsiders. Sample one of the headlines from Marico’s ads: 200 employees walk out of Bombay Oil. 

Harsh had a lot of stories for me – from creating differentiation in consumer products even when the market is crowded, to how he fought back and won against the much larger Hindustan Unilever when it wanted to acquire Marico. And then he switched back to the present – and how he’s focussing all his learnings, experience, attention into cultivating innovation in India. 

This is an episode packed with anecdotes and lessons – you’ll hear Harsh talking about a ‘right to win’ in the market, strategizing acquisitions, and making ‘a difference without expectations’ to the shareholders. All in the context of Harsh’s years at Marico, the Mariwala Health Initiative, Ascent foundation and Marico Innovation Foundation! 

Let’s go!

This is episode 42 of First Principles–a weekly leadership podcast from The Ken.

Over the next two decades Harsh learnt the ropes of the family business. Till in 1991 - two decades after he had joined Bombay Oil - he left it to start his own company, Marico.

He had already seen the power of quality and brand in a category that was still almost entirely commoditized and unbranded. For instance, the huge 15 liter tin cans of Parachute coconut oil Bombay Oil sold to shopkeepers were resold in smaller quantities at much higher prices. Harsh rightly wondered, why should someone else capture the margin and premium for my product? 

The company that Harsh founded - Marico - had two powerful brands at its core - Parachute Coconut Oil and Saffola cooking oil. That is true even today, 33 years later. Nearly 1 in 3 Indians use Parachute oil, our research tells us. 

Of course, a lot else has changed since then. 

Marico, which went public just 5 years after being founded in 1991, today boasts a turnover of over 1.2 billion dollars. 

And Harsh is 72, but still learning, exploring, experimenting and unable to take it easy.

Earlier this week, I had the chance to speak to Harsh about his entire (and might I add still evolving) professional journey!

It’s a long time, but Harsh talks about the day Marico was separated from Bombay Oil just like it was yesterday. He talked about how in 1991 they attracted talent by positioning themselves as the disruptive outsiders. Sample one of the headlines from Marico’s ads: 200 employees walk out of Bombay Oil. 

Harsh had a lot of stories for me – from creating differentiation in consumer products even when the market is crowded, to how he fought back and won against the much larger Hindustan Unilever when it wanted to acquire Marico. And then he switched back to the present – and how he’s focussing all his learnings, experience, attention into cultivating innovation in India. 

This is an episode packed with anecdotes and lessons – you’ll hear Harsh talking about a ‘right to win’ in the market, strategizing acquisitions, and making ‘a difference without expectations’ to the shareholders. All in the context of Harsh’s years at Marico, the Mariwala Health Initiative, Ascent foundation and Marico Innovation Foundation! 

Let’s go!

This is First Principles–a weekly leadership podcast from The Ken.

Welcome to Episode 41 of First Principles.

When asked, Girish Mathrubootham* – the CEO and Co-Founder of Freshworks, says that there’s one thing most of his direct reports would agree about him – that he leads from the heart. 

Many Freshworks employees have a different way of describing Girish. He’s a product manager first, and then a CEO. 

Product and People are thus two words to describe Girish. 

One of them - Product - was something he got into accidentally. But both of them are areas where he’s built organisational strengths and culture very intentionally. 

The news headlines when Freshworks went public on NASDAQ was that Girish had created 500 crorepatis within his organization. That is, employees whose Freshworks shares made them worth over 1 crore rupees.

Freshworks was the first Indian SaaS company to become a unicorn. It was also the first Indian SaaS company to be listed on the US markets. Last year it clocked revenues of nearly 600 million dollars. All before its 15th birthday. 

Across this episode, Girish the product manager is front and centre. It was evident in the way that he rattled off sharp and fun analogies to explain how he views Freshworks and his role at the organization as a CEO. It was almost as if Freshworks the company itself were an organically evolving product, with its CEO also its lead product manager. 

And to think that Girish’s entry into product management came over two decades ago when his then manager told him to build a product he had pitched – and essentially become a “product manager.” That day, he went back home and googled what a product manager is. 

He has very sharp and distinct views on leadership and organization building. As a leader, he’s opposed to measuring performance by numbers or execution alone. 

His metric for “winning” – as in, winning as an organization – is shaped by energy and vibes. 

He isn’t just hiring the best talent for a role. He’s giving the right role to the best talent.

In this episode, you’ll understand this curious mix of people and product that keeps the lights on at Freshworks. Girish talks about why a company like Freshworks – which entered and continues to play in a crowded and competitive market – succeeds. Why and how he’s made peace with growing at close to 20% annually, so long as he’s also aiming for around the same percentage in profits. 

And what the best way is to chart a path to entrepreneurship in this day and age. 

And, also – why he loves Chennai so much! 

This is episode 41 of First Principles—The Ken's weekly leadership podcast.

*Girish Mathrubootham is an investor in The Ken.

Welcome to First Principles.

When asked, Girish Mathrubootham* – the CEO and Co-Founder of Freshworks, says that there’s one thing most of his direct reports would agree about him – that he leads from the heart. 

Many Freshworks employees have a different way of describing Girish. He’s a product manager first, and then a CEO. 

Product and People are thus two words to describe Girish. 

One of them - Product - was something he got into accidentally. But both of them are areas where he’s built organisational strengths and culture very intentionally. 

The news headlines when Freshworks went public on NASDAQ was that Girish had created 500 crorepatis within his organization. That is, employees whose Freshworks shares made them worth over 1 crore rupees.

Freshworks was the first Indian SaaS company to become a unicorn. It was also the first Indian SaaS company to be listed on the US markets. Last year it clocked revenues of nearly 600 million dollars. All before its 15th birthday. 

Across this episode, Girish the product manager is front and centre. It was evident in the way that he rattled off sharp and fun analogies to explain how he views Freshworks and his role at the organization as a CEO. It was almost as if Freshworks the company itself were an organically evolving product, with its CEO also its lead product manager. 

And to think that Girish’s entry into product management came over two decades ago when his then manager told him to build a product he had pitched – and essentially become a “product manager.” That day, he went back home and googled what a product manager is. 

He has very sharp and distinct views on leadership and organization building. As a leader, he’s opposed to measuring performance by numbers or execution alone. 

His metric for “winning” – as in, winning as an organization – is shaped by energy and vibes. 

He isn’t just hiring the best talent for a role. He’s giving the right role to the best talent.

In this episode, you’ll understand this curious mix of people and product that keeps the lights on at Freshworks. Girish talks about why a company like Freshworks – which entered and continues to play in a crowded and competitive market – succeeds. Why and how he’s made peace with growing at close to 20% annually, so long as he’s also aiming for around the same percentage in profits. 

And what the best way is to chart a path to entrepreneurship in this day and age. 

And, also – why he loves Chennai so much! 

This is First Principles—The Ken's weekly leadership podcast.

*Girish Mathrubootham is an investor in The Ken.

That running one is like learning how to fly a plane while you’re already up in the air. Or perhaps it's like learning to change an engine while you’re driving a car. 

There is another version of this analogy: it's like learning how to build a plane and learning how to fly it and also mastering how to change an engine mid-air, even as you’re hurtling at hundreds of kilometers per hour through the air. 

A great example of such a startup is Udaan, which in 2019 became India’s fastest unicorn within just 3 years of starting up. 

What does it take to build and scale a company in that manner? 

A few weeks ago, you heard Vaibhav Gupta – Udaan’s co-founder and CEO – answer this question in granular detail. 

Right down to how Udaan looked at the trade cycle of a small mobile accessories shopkeeper in Mysore, who got his supply from Bangalore every 15 days. 

Or the exact changes Udaan has made to their warehouses, so that they’re more efficient. 

He even broke down Udaan’s execution playbooks and what makes them reliable and repeatable. 

But…what happens when you zoom out a little?

The more high-level decisions. Which bets to take, which to let go. Which patterns to follow. What the B2B retail space in India will look like, in 10 years. And what is Udaan doing to prepare for it?

This is the episode where Vaibhav zooms out and reflects on some of these questions. 

He’s still very sharp and detail-oriented, of course. In fact, you’ll hear him say “retail is detail” with an unshakable conviction very soon, in the episode. 

But this time, you’ll notice that the larger decisions that Vaibhav makes for his organizations stems from his own strong beliefs and learnings. 

He’s an introvert, but he has learnt to discuss even his half-formed, unbaked ideas with his team. He’s driven by solving big problems, and so is Udaan. 

He’s become comfortable with being wrong, and that’s a feeling that his employees are encouraged to embrace at every stage.

We talk about all the mental models, habits and frameworks that drive Vaibhav – and the culture at Udaan. And, of course – how First Principles thinking is very crucial to all of these!

This is episode 40 of First Principles with Vaibhav Gupta—The Ken’s weekly leadership podcast.

Thank you for listening to us. We’re thankful that you choose to spend a few hours with us each week!

Today we have a “supercut” episode. Normally our conversations go deep with one specific guest, but every now and then we zoom out and go broad by stitching together a multi-guest conversation. And the invisible thread that connects the conversations with 5 founders we picked for today is company culture.

What’s the best way to empower your talent? What do founders expect from employees? And how do they build their company culture?

This is where it gets interesting. In most cases, our guests have differing opinions on these subjects. But while putting this episode together, we kept encountering one word – or a substitute for it, in some cases. 

And that was, patience. 

Patience in the way that they give feedback to their employees. Patience in investing in your employees. Building this patience not just within themselves, but the entire organization. 

There are some very interesting perspectives in this episode on how these founders approach and practice patience, among other principles of leadership and management. 

Here’s a rundown of our guests in this episode: 

First up, we have Krish Subramanian of Chargebee, who has a simple and powerful dictum, “Move the chairs and get out of the way of good people.” At Chargebee, you wouldn’t fit in if you limit yourself to a strict hierarchy – he sees employees more as his peer group.

Next, we have Varun Dua of Acko Insurance, who spoke about growing in a company from an employee’s point of view. One of the things he told me was that when you find something you love, you should be at it for 10-15 years. Because it is the payoff of years of perseverance that is fruitful – and  not the short term gains you make along the way. 

Yashish Dahiya, the co-founder of PolicyBazaar, was quite candid in our chat. He spoke about why an employee who spent five years at PolicyBazaar is considered a new employee. He  also went on to explain why he distances himself from making hiring decisions.

Next, you’ll hear Archit Gupta of Clear. When talking about employees, Archit was very specific. He told us why investing into the ‘sincere’,‘earnest’ people in the organization is necessary, and why uplifting them is important.

Lastly, MN Srinivasu or Vasu, as he’s often called, spoke to me how he built BillDesk by essentially teaching the first set of employees to be well-versed in the line of business BillDesk was creating. This is a part of BillDesk’s culture. There is a broad belief in patience, at Billdesk. Why does patience matter? What allows his employees to be patient? And how do you find meaning in practicing it? 

This is First Principles—The Ken’s weekly leadership podcast.

The Ken is India's first subscriber-only business journalism platform. Check out our deeply reported long-form stories, insightful newsletters, original podcasts and much more here.

A few weeks ago, you heard the first part of our conversation with Aneesh Reddy, the CEO and Co-Founder of Capillary Tech, a software company offering products and services in the customer experience space.

And you might remember that in that episode, Aneesh took us through the journey of Capillary in instalments – because as he explained, Aneesh dreams in instalments. 

The second instalment was the years 2013 to 2018 – which Aneesh called “Capillary’s confusing years.” 

They were particularly difficult years for them. 

Having raised a massive amount of venture funding at an expensive valuation, Capillary started burning cash as they expanded ambitiously beyond India. The leadership had to justify their valuation, Aneesh said. 

During this time, Aneesh’s co-founder Krishna Mehra, or KK, had moved to San Francisco in the US. Communication between the co-founders started breaking down even as the pressure on Capillary Tech started mounting.

Eventually, both of Aneesh’s co-founders left within months of each other. But before leaving, KK was upfront with Aneesh. 

He told Aneesh that he had become a bully. He wasn’t workable anymore.

Aneesh went to the Capillary board and told them he wanted to quit. 

In this second part, you’ll hear the two things that Aneesh ended up doing to bounce back. 

The first was executive coaching. A difficult process, because Aneesh, in his own words, ‘was a hard nut to crack.’ 

Eventually, the coaching process proved to be so transformative for Aneesh, that Capillary today offers coaching to not just its entire leadership team but also down to first-time managers. 

The second, very interestingly, was Vipassana. And again, as Aneesh explained, it was very difficult at first. 

But it changed him. 

He calls it a process of self-discovery and self-purification that every entrepreneur should experience.

In this episode, Aneesh talks to me about how these two interventions transformed him and Capillary. 

He takes me through both processes – day by day, in the case of Vipassana — and how it made a difference to his temperament, leadership style, and his approach to managing.

We also talk about Aneesh’s fitness journey, finding a purpose in working, and the future of Capillary. 

This is episode 39 of First Principles—The Ken’s weekly leadership podcast.

If you're here to sign up for the First Principles Newsletter, here you go!

In this episode, you will hear Vaibhav Gupta, the CEO and co-founder of Udaan, an online trade platform whose mission is to "transform India".

It hopes to achieve that lofty goal by bringing tens of thousands of shopkeepers and grocery store owners closer to their suppliers and offering them competitive pricing, guarantees on quality, and easy deliveries and returns.

Vaibhav and his co-founders—Amod Malaviya and Sujeet Kumar—were all senior Flipkart leaders before starting Udaan. And yet, he insists Udaan isn't merely a "Flipkart for businesses".

Since 2016, when it first began operations, Udaan has raised over a billion dollars in venture capital. It was one of the fastest startups to achieve the coveted "unicorn tag".

It has also gone through its ups and downs in terms of valuations and headcount.

In this episode—Part 1 of our conversation with Vaibhav Gupta, we discuss:

--> Why Udaan evolved from a marketplace to a first-party business

--> Why the firm instituted a formal CEO position after five years of its existence

--> The five pillars of Udaan's culture

--> What daily conversations inside Udaan's leadership team look like

This is First Principles—The Ken's weekly leadership podcast.

If you're here to sign up for the First Principles Newsletter, here you go!

In this episode, you will hear Vaibhav Gupta, the CEO and co-founder of Udaan, an online trade platform whose mission is to "transform India".

It hopes to achieve that lofty goal by bringing tens of thousands of shopkeepers and grocery store owners closer to their suppliers and offering them competitive pricing, guarantees on quality, and easy deliveries and returns.

Vaibhav and his co-founders—Amod Malaviya and Sujeet Kumar—were all senior Flipkart leaders before starting Udaan. And yet, he insists Udaan isn't merely a "Flipkart for businesses".

Since 2016, when it first began operations, Udaan has raised over a billion dollars in venture capital. It was one of the fastest startups to achieve the coveted "unicorn tag".

It has also gone through its ups and downs in terms of valuations and headcount.

In this episode—Part 1 of our conversation with Vaibhav Gupta, we discuss:

--> Why Udaan evolved from a marketplace to a first-party business

--> Why the firm instituted a formal CEO position after five years of its existence

--> The five pillars of Udaan's culture

--> What daily conversations inside Udaan's leadership team look like

This is episode 38 of First Principles—The Ken's weekly leadership podcast.

If you’re here to find our latest edition of the First Principles Newsletter, here you go!

A few weeks ago, we had a wonderful conversation with Viren Shetty – the executive vice chairman of Narayana Health.  Narayana Health – formerly called Narayana Hrudalaya – is a hospital network that’s also listed on the stock exchanges. 

Today’s episode is the second part of our conversation with Viren. In part 1, Viren talked about healthcare in India – something he described as an “assembly line.” 

If you remember listening to it, you’ll know that Viren has both intricate knowledge and undeniable intuition about the healthcare landscape in India. We discussed Viren’s ambitions to fix healthcare in India and where Narayana Health is headed. 

That led us to why Viren holds this mission so close to his heart, in this second part of our conversation.

What led him to healthcare? What drives him to wake up and do this, day after day? In our opening, you heard about Viren’s innate pattern recognition superpower, which is very different from his father Dr. DeviShetty’s.

So, how did he build this intuition? And how does he use it to run a vast hospital network?

Viren answers all of these questions with stories from his life, career and even from the hospitals where he grew up. 

This is episode 37 of First Principles—The Ken’s weekly leadership podcast.

P.S. Please recommend your favourite books for the First Principles community here!

If you're here to find our latest edition of the First Principles Newsletter, here you go!

Our guest for this episode is Aneesh Reddy, the co-founder and CEO of Capillary Technologies, a Bangalore-headquartered software-as-a-service – or SaaS – company that is one of the global leaders in customer loyalty and engagement.

Capillary powers the customer loyalty operations of hundreds of companies around the world. From companies like Domino’s, Puma, Shell, Marks & Spencers, and the Tata Group, to 15 of the world’s top Fortune 100 companies. 

Each time you transact at one of their stores or respond to a marketing message or upgrade your room, it’s probably Capillary’s tech at play behind the scenes. 

In its 16th year now, Capillary powers close to 7 billion annual transactions for its customer’s customers.

But – and there’s always a but in great stories – Capillary and Aneesh didn’t have an easy ride.

They went through multiple economic downturns. They raised large venture rounds and expanded globally, only to shut down many of those operations after losing millions of dollars. Of the three co-founders, two left. 

One having burnt out and the other because Aneesh was too stressful to work with.

Aneesh himself wanted to quit. But his board wouldn’t have it.

In this episode, Aneesh explains how CapillaryTech bounced back from this point, by slicing  their journey into three  “dream installments.”

He also talks about:

1. How CapillaryTech “bounced” into SaaS in a global recession 
2. The breakout SaaS model that gets them $1 million deals 
3. Building a people-first organization 
4. Learning and changing as a leader

This is First Principles—The Ken's weekly leadership podcast.

P.S. Please recommend your favourite books for the First Principles community here!

If you're here to find our latest edition of the First Principles Newsletter, here you go!

Our guest for this episode is Aneesh Reddy, the co-founder and CEO of Capillary Technologies, a Bangalore-headquartered software-as-a-service – or SaaS – company that is one of the global leaders in customer loyalty and engagement.

Capillary powers the customer loyalty operations of hundreds of companies around the world. From companies like Domino’s, Puma, Shell, Marks & Spencers, and the Tata Group, to 15 of the world’s top Fortune 100 companies. 

Each time you transact at one of their stores or respond to a marketing message or upgrade your room, it’s probably Capillary’s tech at play behind the scenes. 

In its 16th year now, Capillary powers close to 7 billion annual transactions for its customer’s customers.

But – and there’s always a but in great stories – Capillary and Aneesh didn’t have an easy ride.

They went through multiple economic downturns. They raised large venture rounds and expanded globally, only to shut down many of those operations after losing millions of dollars. Of the three co-founders, two left. 

One having burnt out and the other because Aneesh was too stressful to work with.

Aneesh himself wanted to quit. But his board wouldn’t have it.

In this episode, Aneesh explains how CapillaryTech bounced back from this point, by slicing  their journey into three  “dream installments.”

He also talks about:

1. How CapillaryTech “bounced” into SaaS in a global recession 
2. The breakout SaaS model that gets them $1 million deals 
3. Building a people-first organization 
4. Learning and changing as a leader

This is episode 36 of First Principles—The Ken's weekly leadership podcast.

P.S. Please recommend your favourite books for the First Principles community here!