First Principles

Our guest for this episode, Radhika Gupta, describes Edelweiss AMC—or any mutual fund company, for that matter—as a company that solves financial problems for customers. Simple. Going into anything else, she says, is way too complicated.Edelweiss operates in a crowded market with nearly 50 players. And it's surrounded by giants, rivals much larger than itself.But that also gives it the space to take risks and bets that larger companies might not.That’s how Edelweiss pulled Bharat Bonds into their armour, which shot up their assets massively. It went from number 30 in the mutual fund rankings to number 13 in just a few years.As a CEO, Radhika is a big fan of keeping things simple and effective.She has a straightforward way of dealing with workplace politics. A one-step way to shut down mansplaining. A very simple approach to trying to understand her consumers. And even an easy but brilliant way of organising her favourite poetry, excerpts and stories!In this episode, we talk about:What is the problem that Edelweiss is trying to solve? How does Radihka define success? How Radhika uses an inner scorecard to evaluate herself How does she deal with criticism and separate constructive criticism from targeted bias? Why Radhika doesn’t believe in work-life balance Why Radhika has a third category of priorities after personal and professional Radhika’s advice for young, professional womenThis is Episode 26 of First Principles, with Radhika Gupta — The Ken’s fortnightly 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.

BillDesk does not have a CEO.Instead, it just has three co-founders: MN Srinivasu, Ajay Kaushal and Karthik Ganapathy. And they don’t have separate designations.In fact, BillDesk has no formal hierarchies or designations. People are hired as members of a team. That’s it.More than two decades after they started the company, the three co-founders continue to work from a single desk in the same room.For a 23-year-old organisation that handles over $150 billion in payments, BillDesk is surprisingly lean at just over 800 employees. And that's not the only thing contrarian about it. It has been profitable for over a decade and a half now. When I asked Vasu—that’s how others usually address Srinivasu—how old he was, his answer was, “BillDesk is 23, I am 55.”For this episode, we threw in many new questions based on the subscriber feedback I’d been receiving.What often keeps founders going is the urge to prove something. What is it for Vasu?How has his view of a leadership team evolved?How does he prefer to be “managed upward” by his reporteesHow has what excites or challenges him changedManaging people isn’t what founders have in when they start out. And yet, it is the most important thing that determines their success. How has Vasu’s managing style or philosophy evolved since he started Billdesk in 2000?Over the entire conversation, we also talk about:Why BillDesk doesn’t handle person-to-person payments, for instance, via UPI.How the three co-founders hired and coached their first 100 employeesWhy BillDesk does not incentivise chasing glory metricsWhy the three co-founders continue to work from a single table even todaySnigdha breaks down the story of Disney's decline, on our business podcast Daybreak. Listen here.This is Episode 25 of First Principles, with MN Srinivasu — The Ken’s fortnightly 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.

The business currently known as Clear used to be known as Cleartax before. It started out in 2011 as a minimal, sleek and blazingly fast website to help Indians file taxes. Today, it does much more than just people's taxes, even though its overwhelming market leadership means competitors are just "rounding errors," according to Archit Gupta, the company's co-founder and CEO.Operating largely below the funding and valuation radars of 2020-2022, Clear has been quietly effecting a business model pivot under Archit's leadership. Today, it is overwhelmingly a business-to-business focused company, not a business-to-consumer one. As India digitises and formalises its tax systems together, Clear has ridden both waves to help businesses and consumers stay compliant. But this transition hasn't been quick or easy, as Archit candidly opens up about in our conversation. We talk about building a profitable and lasting company and why he turned from a "business-focused" to a "product-focused" CEO a year ago. We also go into how much of a cultural shift it took for Clear to start charging its customers to file taxes – and then, another significant shift: deciding to expand from India to Saudi Arabia. Archit also tells us how he spots excellent talent and much more in this episode.This is Episode 24 of First Principles, with Archit Gupta — The Ken's fortnightly 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: https://the-ken.com/?utm_source=website&utm_medium=podcasts&utm_campaign=podcast_ep

In 2023, the business of online comparison platforms seems old-fashioned.Sure, people may land upon them via search engines, but only some would rarely transact through them. Especially if the products being compared are as life-altering as insurance, right?Wrong. PolicyBazaar—not just India's but the world's largest insurance comparison and transaction platform—proves that.Yashish Dahiya, the co-founder and Group CEO of Policybazaar, takes us through this story in this episode of First Principles.Policybazaar started in 2008 and is a publicly listed company today. It's the largest in its space by far. Many of the things it does, or how it does, don't fit into the easy patterns we've been used to.For instance, employees making phone calls to prospective customers is at the core of their business. In an era where we're told phone calls and call centres are a relic of the past.So, why do they do it?Yashish attributes this and many other decisions to PolicyBazaar to being fundamentally First Principles-driven. Yashish is incredibly energetic and driven. He is a serious sportsman and triathlete. He's also as straight-talking and candid as they come.In this episode, we talk to Yashish about why he calls PolicyBazaar an education platform and not a comparison one, the "right to win", how he spots and grooms talent and the importance of physical endurance and excellence. Chapters:3:49 - Running 22 kms, drying swimming trunks in the car and other practical decisions7:54 - How and when Yashish learnt about life and health insurance15:54 - What is PolicyBazaar18:13 - The problems of the insurance industry23:55 - The short-term perils of educating the customer too much28:25 - How does PolicyBazaar detect insurance fraud37:23 - Is there an ideal claims ratio for a product 38:42 - Why PolicyBazaar is grateful to the call-centre model in this day and age47:50 - You are first a soul, then your body51:55 - Yashish the father vs. Yashish the co-founder1:00:26 - Why confusion is as important as curiosity1:03:15 - How to identify and groom talent1:05:54 - Building and evolving a company’s culture1:14:13 - How to mentor people1:22:21 - Yahish’s go-to First Principles This is Episode 23 of First Principles, with Yashish Dahiya — The Ken's fortnightly leadership podcast.If you're a regular listener, please share your thoughts about First Principles and help us shape it into something more useful and interesting for you? Take our listener survey here.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: https://the-ken.com/?utm_source=website&utm_medium=podcasts&utm_campaign=podcast_ep

Most founders on First Principles—The Ken's fortnightly leadership podcast—have also been CEOs. And one of the questions we often ask them is: when to make way for someone else as a CEO?If leadership is a ladder, we often make the mistake of thinking that the CEO title sits at the apex. Instead, leadership is a journey. And the best founders know that to create organisations that outlast them, the CEO title is but one milestone in their journey. The road doesn't end there.Varun Dua, our guest for this episode, co-founded Acko—a digital-first insurer most recently valued at over $1.4 billion. He was also Acko's CEO before hiring a seasoned insurance industry leader to take over that role.That's not the only thing different about Varun. He freely admits that as a graduate, he was super lazy and had neither a plan for his life nor any interest in being an entrepreneur. His dream at one point was to get hired by eBay or Cleartrip. Thankfully for him, neither of the companies hired him.So, he ended up starting one company, which morphed into another firm, which morphed into Acko.Along the way, he went from super lazy to super driven.In today's episode, Varun reflects on the choices he made in his career and life and talks about how he's preparing for the ones that still lie ahead. This is Episode 22 of First Principles with Varun Dua.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: https://the-ken.com/?utm_source=website&utm_medium=podcasts&utm_campaign=podcast_ep

If you started listening to First Principles—The Ken's fortnightly leadership podcast—in 2023, then today's special episode might be something you'll love. We went back to guests from episodes 6 to 10 from 2022 and created a supercut episode highlighting some of the most interesting bits from conversations with these accomplished leaders.We'd urge you to listen to the full episodes, but this is a great place to start if you've been meaning to check out our older episodes but haven't gotten around to it.We begin with Harshil Mathur, the co-founder and CEO of Razorpay—a fintech giant offering loans, payroll services, and even bank accounts.Harshil talks about his journey into entrepreneurship, how Razorpay develops products, the importance of deliberately driving company culture, and much more. Episode 6: Razorpay CEO Harshil Mathur talks about deliberate culture, building to a need, and the principles of product developmentNext, we have Vineeta Singh, the co-founder and CEO of SUGAR Cosmetics—one of India's most popular and fastest-growing cosmetics brands.Vineeta talks about overcoming stereotypes as a female founder, the importance of passion when selecting your workplace, and why hustle, hunger, humour, and humility are key pillars of SUGAR's culture. Episode 7: Vineeta Singh of SUGAR Cosmetics talks about building products, educating consumers, and focusing on the long termAnd then, we have Amrish Rau, the CEO of Pine Labs—the payments solution provider whose point-of-sale terminals are visible in most Indian shops and stores.In 2016, Citrus Pay, an online payments provider Amrish co-founded, was acquired by rival PayU for $130 million in cash. It was one of the most significant acquisitions back then. But Amrish says it is also one of his biggest regrets. As a first-time founder, he decided to sell his company too quickly. Amrish tells us why.Episode 8: Amrish Rau of Pine Labs talks about the differences between being a founder and CEONext, we have Amit Agarwal, the co-founder and CEO of NoBroker—the 8-year-old Bengaluru-headquartered real estate platform that wants to disrupt the very concept of brokerage fees.Amit speaks about entering management consulting as a young MBA because it paid the most, starting a business that almost no investor wanted to fund, convincing notoriously value-minded Indians to pay a subscription fee before finding a rental apartment, and running a frugal organisation with a cockroach mentality.Episode 9: Amit Agarwal of NoBroker talks about his single-minded mission to disrupt brokerage, building a cockroach company, and why his office address is a secretAnd finally, we have Tarun Mehta, the co-founder and CEO of Ather Energy—India's best-known electric scooter maker. Tarun speaks about his journey to convince investors of his vision, doing hard things that defied common sense, building an organisation over decades, and why it takes at least three years to make a true impact at work.Episode 10: Tarun Mehta of Ather Energy talks about doing hard things, going down multi-year rabbit holes, building companies over 30-40 years, and being chief storytellerThe 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: https://the-ken.com/?utm_source=website&utm_medium=podcasts&utm_campaign=podcast_ep

We don’t have a new First Principles episode this week, but we do have something special for you.If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, you’ve already built a curiosity for mental models that force you to look at the world differently. To break down complex problems from the ground up. To analyse and synthesise.This, precisely, is also what the First Principles newsletter is about.Each Sunday, this newsletter will bring fresh insights into how accomplished founders, leaders, and changemakers apply First Principles thinking to see the world differently and remake it in their vision.If you’re a free or paying subscriber of The Ken, you’ll find this newsletter in your inbox already.But if not, please click here, sign up for free on our website, and you'll receive the newsletter in your inbox for free: https://the-ken.com/?utm_source=website&utm_medium=podcasts&utm_campaign=podcast_ep

The stories of entrepreneurial success around us are often slick, bulleted, and cleaned up to remove all references to false starts, serendipity or accidents. And at the centre of such stories are founders. These visionary leaders dream up startups worth billions of dollars out of nothing, like Krish Subramanian, the co-founder and CEO of Chargebee.Chargebee started by helping businesses manage their paying subscribers and now operates in the broader revenue management market. This Indian company was last valued at over $3.5 billion.Krish's own path to success, though, was anything but formulaic.He graduated in 2001, as the dot-com boom was cratering and when the 9/11 attacks on America spooked the world. Krish couldn't find a job. Six months later, when he finally did, his first salary was Rs 3500. It would be another ten years before he finally got together with his co-founders and started Chargebee.And even then, they spent the first five years going around in circles before finally hitting their groove. In today's episode, he reflects and explains the meandering path he took to success and the lessons he learned along the way. Krish talks about learning to let go of the need for world-changing ideas, hiring for strengths, why someone great for a zero-to-one project may be terrible for a one-to-10 project, why early-stage founders must set constraints and say 'no' instead of 'challenge accepted!', and treating business as a game.He also shares what he believes is the most critical role for a CEO: Trusting others, getting out of the way and letting go or, in Krish’s own words, continuously firing yourself.This is Episode 21 of First Principles— The Ken’s fortnightly 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: https://the-ken.com/?utm_source=website&utm_medium=podcasts&utm_campaign=podcast_ep

Smita Deorah's daughter was six months old when her mom started reading to her.And as she kept at it, one day, her daughter lapped it up, becoming an independent reader even before learning to speak.At this point, most parents would have thought their child was special. Instead, Smita concluded that her daughter was just the same as most other kids. What was special was that she was privileged enough to be exposed to the right stimuli and resources at a young age by her mother.This was one of the key motivators that drove Smita to start LEAD, an ambitious company trying to solve for better school education in India. Smita is the co-founder and co-CEO of LEAD School.Of India's nearly 280 million school-going children, just around 5 to 8 million might be getting a quality education. She says the rest are either in government-run or affordable private schools that simply aren't equipped to engage their curious and boundless minds. Instead, they're subjected to mindless rote learning, often by underpaid teachers and ill-equipped administrations. To change that, you have to relook at everything, including their curriculum, pedagogy, technology, teaching aids, government policies, parent mindsets and child psychology.In this episode, hosted by Rohin Dharmakumar, Smita explains how she lives on this mission, why she moved back to India, whether schools should work for profit, why India's students lag in learning by two years, and much more.You can read the full transcript of the conversation here: https://the-ken.com/podcasts/first-principles/smita-deorah-lead/This is Episode 20 of First Principles, The Ken's fortnightly 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: https://the-ken.com/?utm_source=website&utm_medium=podcasts&utm_campaign=podcast_ep

If this is your first episode of First Principles, it's a great episode to begin with.Gaurav Munjal is the co-founder and CEO of Unacademy, one of India's most aggressive and highest-valued ed-tech startups, last valued at close to $3.5 billion. But this story started a long time back. When Gaurav was just in class IX, he got into the content game. In a few years, he had started getting monthly payments from Google for the ads he ran on his content.In college, he had a blog devoted to the actress Priyanka Chopra. That fetched him hundreds of thousands of rupees each month. On a Facebook page that he ran—this one devoted to fashion—Chinese brands paid him hundreds of dollars each month to run their ads. So when he finally started Unacademy in 2015, it was, in many ways, a logical evolution of his life thus far. Nearly eight years, and $835 million in venture capital later, Unacademy is a company that reflects much of Gaurav's personality.It has no time for niceties. It would rather disrupt than defend itself. It is supremely confident in the face of even existential crises. And it attaches zero value to classical or theoretical notions of education. I mean, who else would say that education is really a tournament that can change lives and that teachers are coaches and that the best coaches are like mercenaries, and that they already earn more than second-rung movie stars?This is Episode 19 of First Principles, with Gaurav Munjal — The Ken's fortnightly leadership podcast.You can read the full transcript of the conversation here: https://the-ken.com/podcasts/first-principles/gaurav-munjal-unacademy/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: https://the-ken.com/?utm_source=website&utm_medium=podcasts&utm_campaign=podcast_ep

"You need to be restless, because you don't have a choice".Those are words you expect to hear from a 30-something tech founder building a ChatGPT-powered neo startup.But Ronnie Screwvala, whose voice you just heard, is 67. And trust me when I say this, I haven't seen many 30-something founders who are as restless, ambitious and driven as he is.Ronnie is the chairperson and co-founder of upGrad, an online higher education company last valued at over $2.2 billion. He insists, emphatically, that upGrad is neither a startup nor an edtech."Edtech", he says, was "a parlance invented by people who wanted to go out raise money, and VCs who liked the word Tech as it was the flavour for the last five years to invest in."Instead, he says, he tells the 5000+ employees who work at upGrad to have faith that they're going to build something really valuable over the next 5-10 years. And that you cannot have report cards on companies measured over six months or a year.But that's not all Screwvala does.He co-founded Swades Foundation, a philanthropic organisation that works across 2000 villages in Maharashtra.He runs RSVP Movies, a film production company. And much more.Welcome back to First Principles, the fortnightly leadership podcast from The Ken. This is episode 18, and I am Rohin Dharmakumar, your host.Stay with me for a wonderful conversation with Ronnie Screwvala about ambition, organisation building, online education and long-term thinking.You can read the full transcript of the conversation here: https://the-ken.com/podcasts/first-principles/ronnie-screwvala-upgrad/The Ken’s newsroom also publishes Cost to Company, a weekly podcast about careers and workplaces. One of our episodes, inspired by a message from a Cost to Company listener, explores the future of talent in Bombay. Listen to it here: https://the-ken.com/podcasts/cost-to-company/bombay-is-running-out-of-talent/?utm_source=website&utm_medium=podcast2&utm_campaign=ctc_ep&utm_id=ctc.ep25If you, too, have a story to tell about how your work and workplace are adapting to the world around us, please write to us. Click on this link to fill out our survey: https://theken.typeform.com/CTC-may2023?utm_source=ken&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=ctc_survey&utm_id=ctc.05.23

Worth over $1.5 billion today, Fractal has raised close to $700 million in venture capital over its lifetime. But the path it took to get here is anything but boring. Growing up in a middle-class Indian family, Srikanth Velamakanni, Fractal’s co-founder and group CEO, remembers his father telling him there was no such thing as an “honest businessman”. The phrase was an oxymoron.“So when I grew up, I told myself that while I’d go and get a world-class education, I would always work for a high-quality company. I would never start a business. It was very clear to me,” he says as we sit down for the latest episode of First Principles.And yet, in 2000, Srikanth and five of his friends quit their jobs, scraped and pooled in Rs 2 lakh each (~US$2,400), and started Fractal.It takes a lot to build companies for the long term—only 2% of all companies get to celebrate their tenth anniversary. The school of hard knocks is unforgiving to young companies and first-time founders. The odds are measured in terms of survival first and not success.Fractal and Srikanth were part of the 2% that survived the first ten years.Listen to this episode of First Principles to understand how the soon-to-be 25-year-old company plans to beat the odds and still be around 50 years from now.You can read the full transcript of the conversation here: https://the-ken.com/podcasts/first-principles/srikanth-velamakanni-fractal/

Welcome to episode 16. If you like our deep interviews with some of India’s best known founders across a range of domains, please rate us on your favourite podcast platform. All it takes is just a few seconds.Kunal Shah, the co-founder and CEO of CRED is unapologetic about building products for the top segment of India’s massive consumer pyramid. One would imagine that having raised over $600 million in venture funding puts the pressure on a founder to show a potential market size that’s massive and untapped.And yet, Shah did quite the opposite. He is single minded in his focus on catering to the top 30-odd million consumers in the world’s most populous country. Why? Because they are the ones with enough disposable income to drive the majority of most discretionary spends, he says. CRED currently has over 11 million users, which fit the definition of “California users” put forth by my colleague Praveen Gopal Krishnan way back in 2021.And over the last two years, this has become painfully apparent to most Indian startups and founders.How did CRED and Kunal Shah arrive at this reality ahead of others? I asked him that.Shah has a habit of saying “Good question” before launching into fairly sprawling and vivid answers. Answers that involve analogies, generalizations and psychology.Having been thrust into working to support his family while he was still a teenager, Shah ended up being coached through the school of hard knocks and an accidental exposure to philosophy (it was the only course available in the morning, before he left for work).The result was a curious mix of abilities, knowledge, ambitions and perspective. Chip on the shoulder mixed with the urge to pay it forward. The ability to put himself in another person’s shoes while also being brutally blunt with feedback. Left brain execution and right brain exploration.This has allowed Shah to create a fairly shape-shifting business model with CRED (worth over $6 billion after its last fund raise). When I asked him to define CRED, he described it in terms of its users, not features. He sees CRED as a community, to which features and monetization methods can be tacked on and off over time.In another wide-ranging and reflective founder conversation, we go behind Shah’s thoughts about building businesses, hiring “high-slope” professionals, why one of the biggest crises staring India in the face is the disappearance of working women and why many meetings inside CRED as called “shareholder meetings”.And if you have any questions, thoughts, suggestions, or tips, please email them to podcasts@the-ken.com. We might not be able to reply to all of them but we do read every single one of them.This is episode 16 of First Principles.

If this isn’t the first time you’re listening to First Principles, you’re probably wondering what’s going on. Why did we have five different founders opening the episode, instead of just one. It’s because today’s is a special episode. We went back to the first five episodes we didto compile some of the most interesting, original and often counterintuitive conversations from five accomplished founders. While I’d urge you to listen to each of their conversations in full, this episode is a good place if you took to First Principles recently and are searching for reasons to listen to older episodes. We begin with Kabeer Biswas, the co-founder and CEO of Dunzo, the cult-like instant delivery service that started from Bangalore. He talks about the 10,000 plus tasks he’s run himself on Dunzo, the impossible grind of fundraising, how founders’ traits tend to show up as organization’s culture and many more things. Episode 1: Kabeer Biswas of Dunzo talks about raising money, gathering user insights, battling deadlines and moreNext, we have Baskar Subramanian, the co-founder and CEO of Amagi, the most unlikely of unicorns to emerge from India. It is a media technology company that enables virtually the entire video production and distribution chain for all sorts of media companies globally. “Glass to glass solutions” is how Amagi describes itself, implying its presence from the glass of the camera where video is being shot to the glass of the screen on which it is finally watched. Baskar dropped out of his master’s program at IIT Bombay because he found it oriented around getting grades, not necessarily learning. He talks about why entrepreneurship is like a drug for him, why vulnerability is a core value at Amagi, why a CEO’s job is to be a clock-builder and not a time-keeper, and many more things. Episode 2: $1.5B Amagi Founder Baskar Subramanian talks about culture at work, parenting, and building from ground upNext is Nithin Kamath, the co-founder and CEO of Zerodha, India’s largest online brokerage. He doesn’t believe in setting targets or goals for his company or employees. He also is one of those rare Bangalore founders who have succeeded at scale without taking a single dollar of venture capital. No, in fact Nithin insists Zerodha’s success is partly due to avoiding venture capital.From his anonymous days as “Nathan Hawk”, “Tarzan” or “Columbus” at a call center or internet forums, to running one of the most profitable and yet leanest startups in India, Nithin covers a lot of ground. He talks about thinking like a trader, running a company with zero attrition, creating optionality and many more things. Episode 3: Nithin Kamath of Zerodha candidly talks about building his bootstrapped business, weighing risks, and finding opportunitiesWhich brings me to Naveen Tewari, the co-founder and CEO of adtech giant InMobi, which is not only a unicorn in terms of its own valuation, but was also the first Indian company to incubate another unicorn of its own, lockscreen giant Glance. Naveen is one of the earliest tech entrepreneurs from India, having started his very first company, SMS-based search provider mKhoj, way back in 2007. Thus, survival is one of his recurring themes.Over the conversation he talks about the mistakes he made as an entrepreneur and his lessons from them, building careers and companies slowly instead of “blitzscaling”, CEOs pushing the envelope of what’s possible within companies, and a lot more. Episode 4: InMobi founder Naveen Tewari gets candid about survival, innovation, and playing the game by changing the rulesAnd finally, we have Ananth Narayanan, the co-founder and CEO of Mensa Brands, a global tech-led house of brands – I know, it’s a mouthful – which earned the distinction of becoming India’s fastest unicorn. It buys existing brands, and then punches up their scale by providing the resources and knowledge to do so. Ananth says that’s no different from a P&G, which too is a house of brands if you really look closely.Ananth talks about the emotional toll founders pay silently each day, learning to manage energy and not time, the best way to solicit and give feedback, and many more things.Episode 5: Learnability, curiosity, and brand building; Ex-Myntra CEO and Mensa Brands founder Ananth Narayanan gets candidI hope I managed to interest you in at least a few of those incredible conversations, if not all of them! Tell us what you thought of today’s format. Did you like it? No? What other new features would you like from First Principles or The Ken?  Write to me at podcasts@the-ken.com. And if you haven’t already rated us on your favourite podcast platform, why is that? I would truly appreciate your rating, no matter what it is. Lastly, a big thanks to my colleague Rajiv CN, our resident sound engineer, for helping put together this special episode across nearly 8 hours of conversations. See you next time with a new conversation with another accomplished founder. Till then, this is me Rohin thanking you for listening and for your support.

Shan Kadavil, one eighth a co-founder and 100% a CEO at Fresh To Home, one of the largest online sellers of fish and meat in India, made a rough business plan in 2015. From roughly $2 million in sales in 2016 he wanted to grow to $200 million by 2022. That’s 100X in 6 years.This year Fresh To Home will do around $130 million. 65X is not bad at all.As TAMs – total addressable markets – go, you can’t go wrong selling meat and fish in the world’s largest country where the majority of the population are nonvegetarians. Go one level deeper and Kadavil says the consumption of fish outstrips that of poultry by nearly a factor of three. And fish offers gross margins of 40-50%, unlike, say smartphones or consumer products.Starting with a mission to “Clone Mathew” (Mathew Joseph being one of the Fresh To Home co-founders and its current COO) to running an OKR-driven organization modelled around gaming pioneer Zynga (where Kadavil was an early employee, and subsequently executive), this conversation covers a lot of bases around the first principles of running a business that isn’t easy.From obsessing over CURR, NURR and RURR metrics or encouraging employees to look for ways to disrupt their own business, Kadavil offers a lot of first hand insight from his multiple stints as an entrepreneur.This is episode 15 of First Principles. If you like our deep interviews with some of India’s best known founders across a range of domains, please consider rating us on your podcast platform.And if you have any questions, thoughts, suggestions, or tips, please email them to podcasts@the-ken.com. We might not be able to reply to all of them but we do read every single one of them.

The shortest distance between two points may be a straight line, but when it comes to entrepreneurial success, straight lines rarely exist. Instead, the paths taken by most successful entrepreneurs are meandering, if we’re applying the benefit of hindsight. If we don’t, well, they’re often random, confusing and even frustrating.Take Srikanth Iyer, the co-founder of CEO of Home Lane, one of the market leaders in the online home interiors space today.But wind the clock back on Iyer’s entrepreneurial journey and we see him doing terribly in class 12, but getting into a good college because he was a state-level table tennis player. He gets into Wipro after finishing his degree, but quits in just 3 months to…assemble and sell PCs. When that business naturally gets commoditized, he shuts it down and starts an edtech business way before it was cool to do so.Unfortunately, not enough Indians have PCs or broadband to buy his “CD-ROMs” (a concept as alien today as rotary telephones). So he hitched his wagon with PC makers, book publishers and even soap brands!He would end up selling the same business thrice over.By the time he started Homelane in 2014, Iyer already had over two decades of entrepreneurial experience, though none of it was in home interiors.His first year was chaos. His first NPS score was -27. He almost went into depression.The popular view of enterprise is that you succeed by doing more things. Iyer offers a well-argued (and well-experienced) countertake to that. Sometimes it’s best to say no to things or to focus on understanding what you’re bad at.“I'm a better wartime general,” says Iyer to me during an honest, candid and insightful conversation that spans his three decade career as an entrepreneur.If you like First Principles, please help us reach more listeners and subscribers by rating us. And if you have any questions, thoughts, suggestions, or tips, please email them to podcasts@the-ken.com. We might not be able to reply to all of them but we do read every single one of them.

One of the recurring themes when it comes to entrepreneurship is “valuation”. How much a company is “worth” is in many ways the tail that wags the enterprise dog in our times.I’ve asked this question to every single one of the guests on First Principles. But the answer from Kamal Sagar, the co-founder and CEO of Bangalore-headquartered real estate and design company Total Environment, still came as a bit of surprise. (Last year the company did around $250M in sales.) “I don't know what the valuation is,” said Sagar. “We didn't build it with the idea of selling it, so we haven’t ever looked at that option.” And this is nearly 27 years after he started Total Environment.During that time, the company has charted a distinctly contrarian path for itself. At every stage of its evolution, it chose to do things that took more time, more money and more effort. It built its own design software. It vertically integrated its operations, down to the bricks, tiles and furniture that went into its homes. It stuck trees and lawns into balconies and roofs. It turned apartment designs into versioned products, much like productized software.In a candid and reflective conversation that spans his three decade career as an architect and entrepreneur, Sagar shows us an alternate view of building a company. A word that comes up multiple time in the conversation is “authenticity”.Starting with the “C” he got at IIT for being obstinate, to the many times he chose to take Total Environment down paths that traded rapid growth for slower design, Sagar gives us a glimpse into the incredibly inefficient, frustrating and lucrative sector that is real estate.If you’d rather (or perhaps also) read than listen, we have also published the full transcript for this interview on our website. You can click here and read through it.As usual, a big thanks to my colleague Rahul Choudhary who diligently helps me with the transcripts each fortnight.If you have any questions, thoughts, suggestions, or tips, please email them to podcasts@the-ken.com. We might not be able to reply to all of them but we do read every single one of them.

In 2015 Ruchi Kalra was a partner with McKinsey in their Financial Services practices. In 2016 she, along with four co-founders, started OfBusiness, a business that saw the world in raw materials like plastic, steel, almonds where everyone else saw products like bottles, bridges and cookies. By using tech to disintermediate the various buyers and sellers in the raw material supply chain, OfBusiness wanted to make purchases cheaper and faster. In 2017 Kalra, again with her four co-founders, one of who also happens to be her husband and former colleague, started another business, Oxyzo. What would it do? It would provide credit to businesses that wanted to buy raw materials. Cut to 2023. OfBusiness and Oxyzo are both unicorns. They’re also growing at an incredibly fast rate. Kalra is the CEO of Oxyzo, while also doubling up as the CFO of OfBusiness. Last year OfBusiness drove around Rs.7,500 crore of sales, says Kalra. Which is slated to jump to over Rs.20,000 crore this year. In the same period Oxyzo’s balance sheet size as a lender will swell from Rs.3,500 crore to Rs.5,000 crore. For these numbers, the two sibling unicorns employ just about 1000 professionals between them. “If I were to do a rough employee-to-valuation calculation, that would place you in, I'm guessing, one of the highest...”Kalra cuts me off. “I think more than the employee-to-valuation, it's more an employee-to-profit calculation.”That’s because the B2B siblings also both profitable. Together they are slated to grow their profit after tax (a phrase that’s quite rare in the unicorn space) 150% over the last year, to Rs500 crore. Kalra starting at McKinsey after an engineering degree from IIT Delhi and an MBA from ISB is a pattern easy to understand. What’s not so easy is how and why she decided to quit after making partner, and start a business in a very different and “uncool” sector.In a candid and reflective conversation, Kalra talks about career choices, business building, market sizing, operational discipline, and her own transformation from an executive to a founder, and finally, leader. It’s a masterclass on how starting up later in life often brings perspectives and experiences that are hard for others to replicate.If you’d rather (or perhaps also) read than listen, we have also published the full transcript for this interview on our website. You can click here and read through it. We normally record First Principles episodes inside a professional studio, but this episode was recorded inside one of the meeting rooms at Oxyzo’s buzzing Gurugram offices in December. Which is why, in spite of our best efforts, the audio will sound a bit different. A big shout out to my colleague Rahul Choudhary who diligently helps me with the transcripts each fortnight. Lastly, if you have any questions, thoughts, suggestions, or tips, please email them to podcasts@the-ken.com. We might not be able to reply to all of them but we do read every single one of them.

The year was 2004. MakeMyTrip was a struggling 4-year old company and Deep Kalra, its founder, hadn’t taken a salary for nearly 18 months and had exhausted all of his financial savings. His co-founders had already taken salary cuts ranging from 50-70%. That’s when they got an offer from a much larger company to buy MakeMyTrip out. After discussing between themselves, they decided that they’d sell if the offer was $10 million. The first offer from the potential buyer was $5 million. Which Kalra refused, of course. Then the haggling started. Over a few hours and price inched up bit by bit to around $7 million. “And the meeting ended. And I was actually very relieved,” says Deep in episode 11 of First Principles.He says his single biggest advice to young founders is to “just hang in there and don't give up too early because so many businesses haven't seen the light of day because someone gave up too early.”MakeMyTrip went through long periods of struggle, often existential, before it became the online travel giant that it is today. And Kalra has been part of it all through.In a reflective and wide-ranging conversation, Kalra covers a two decade span of evolution of India’s internet and startup space, including his own journey as an entrepreneur. It’s a masterclass on not giving up, staying in the game, and building to last.If you’d rather (or perhaps also) read than listen, we have also published the full transcript for this interview on our website. You can click here and read through it.And if you have any questions, thoughts, suggestions, or tips, please email them to podcasts@the-ken.com. We might not be able to reply to all of them but we do read every single one of them.

Serendipity usually plays a huge role in entrepreneurship. It played an outsized role in Tarun Mehta’s journey to founding Ather Energy, easily India’s best-known electric scooter maker.When Mehta graduated from IIT Madras, he wanted badly to become a consultant because it was where the money and aura was. But he didn’t get a job as a consultant. Then he tried to get into Harvard Business School for an MBA, but that didn’t pan out either.Instead, he ended up at Ashok Leyland, a maker of buses and trucks. It took four months after he joined for Mehta to be allocated a computer of his own. During that time, he’d walk around and find a computer belonging to someone who hadn’t come to office. Or he’d walk through its sprawling Chennai campus and read books in its library. Of course, his salary wasn’t high by any standards.The low salary and lack of any meaningful work allowed Mehta to drift back to the IIT Madras campus he’d graduated from. After convincing a professor of their desire to build battery packs, Mehta and his co-founder Swapnil Jain, moved to an empty hostel room to start building things.Building hard things.That’s the origin story of Ather Energy, the company that started out wanting to build battery packs, but ended up doing multi-year deep dives to re-imagine virtually every part of an electric scooter. This stubbornness would bring Ather Energy to the brink of death five times.Today, Ather sells over 10,000 electric scooters in India. Next year, it wants to double that number. And then some more.Tarun speaks at length about his journey to convince investors of his vision; doing hard things that defied common sense; building an organisation over decades; and why it takes at least three years to make a true impact at work.If you’d rather (or perhaps also) read than listen, we have published the full transcript for this interview on our website. You can click here and read through it.If you have any questions, thoughts, suggestions, or tips, please email them to podcasts@the-ken.com. We might not be able to reply to all of them, but we do read every single one of them.