Alok Mittal has been on both ends of the startup ecosystem. He’s been a founder and a VC. These days he’s back in the founder’s seat but still enabling businesses but through his lending platform Indifi which lends money to Small and Medium Enterprises or SMEs. 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...

Rebel Foods was incorporated in 2015. Before that it was Faasos and Faasos has been around since 2004. But co-founder and CEO Jaydeep Barman says back in 2004 when he and his co-founder Kallol Banerjee started it, they didn’t look at it as a means of living. It existed to some extent, primarily, to fulfil their own craving for good Calcutta rolls as Pune, where both of them were living at the time, didn't have any nice joints for the same. A few years after starting it both of them left it...

When Chetan Maini – co-founder and chairman of SUN Mobility – stepped down as Mahindra Reva CEO in 2015, he wasn’t thinking what was the next venture to start. In fact even though he stepped down he was still involved in the space. 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...

What does your company do? 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...

Our guest for this episode has a very specific weekly routine.  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...

Chetan Maini, the co-founder and Chairman of Sun Mobility has done a whole lot in his life. He’s been forever a tinkerer as you’re bound to find out if you read his father Dr.S.K.Maini’s book REVA: India’s Green Gift to the World. 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...

Girish Mathrubootham – founder and CEO of Freshworks – feels strongly about having the authority to take one’s own decisions, from a young age. 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...

Sometime in the early 1970s a young Harsh Mariwala joined Bombay Oil Industries, a company set up by his grandfather in 1948, just a year after India’s independence. The company would trade in spices, oils and chemicals. 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...

If you're here to find out more about our brand new early careers podcast, check out The First Two Years and how you can join the TFTY community here! You can also listen to our trailer on Spotify and Apple.  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...

There is a cliche often associated with hyper growth startups.  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...

Welcome back to First Principles. I’m your host, Rohin Dharmakumar.   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...

Welcome back to Episode 39 of First Principles! 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...

Welcome to Episode 38 of First Principles! 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...

Welcome back to Episode 37 of First Principles. 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...

Welcome to Episode 36 of First Principles! 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,...

A few weeks ago, we published an episode with Soumya Rajan of Waterfield Advisors. We discussed what it was like to bet your future on an idea that no one had tried before, in India.  In Soumya’s case, that idea was a business model around wealth management. You might remember Soumya saying it really wasn’t easy.  Her peers had doubts. Her clients had doubts. Her family had doubts. She had doubts.  But she dug her heels in. 12 years in, Waterfield Advisors is now India’s largest multi-family...

Welcome to the first 2024 episode of First Principles! Though we’re only 15 months old, we’re also technically into our third calendar year, after our first episode in August 2022. A happy new year to you. Here’s to many more years of wonderful conversations, learning and growing. Our guest today is Viren Shetty, the executive vice chairman of Narayana Health—the publicly listed healthcare group that operates over two dozen hospitals across India.  Refreshingly, Viren thinks about...

A couple of weeks ago, you heard our episode with Ritesh Agarwal, the founder and Group CEO of OYO rooms. If you remember, he talked to me about the atmosphere at the organization after COVID hit. To put it simply, it was wartime inside OYO. Cash needed to be protected. Leadership had to be let go. The company completely changed. In the first hour of the conversation with Ritesh, who explained in detail what it took to come back from this near-death experience. We’d urge you to check out...

“What is something you believe in, that no one else around you does?” If you’ve heard episode 30 with Ritesh Agarwal, the founder and CEO of OYO Rooms, then you’ll recognize this as a question that he had to answer while applying for the Thiel Fellowship. It’s a simple but powerful question that usually differentiates motivated, passionate and unreasonable founders from other equally capable professionals. Because what is a startup if not a mere belief in something that should exist? This...

Welcome to to episode 31 of First Principles!   If you’ve been listening to us for a while, you’ll notice that this was supposed to be an off week for us as a fortnightly show. We used to release new episodes every other Thursday. And last Thursday was our episode with Ritesh Agarwal of OYO Rooms.    But starting this week, First Principles is now a weekly podcast. We’re going to bring you a fresh conversation every Thursday.    But in a slightly different way.   Well, the supply of truly...

Welcome to Episode 30 of First Principles! We recorded this episode at Spacebot Studio, a new, sleek space overlooking the metro in Indiranagar Our guest, Ritesh, was already at the studio. Ritesh was asking the owners of the studio a bunch of questions: how big is this space? How many bookings do you get in a day? Are there other studios around in this location?  And it’s not surprising, because our guest for this episode is Ritesh Agarwal – the Founder and Group CEO of OYO.  This even...

Welcome back to First Principles!   If you’ve been listening to us for a while, you know that First Principles covers a lot of topics. Leadership, organization building, decision making, learning methods, careers, life principles, habits, people management, parenting..it goes on. But if there’s a common thread that connects them all together, it’s entrepreneurship. Thus, today we have a “supercut” episode about the lives of founders.   You’re probably familiar with our supercut episodes....

Welcome to Episode 29 of First Principles. Our guest for this episode is Karthik Jayaraman, the co-founder and MD of WayCool Foods. Karthik's leadership style and philosophies differ from many of the earlier leaders and founders featured in the last 28 episodes of First Principles.  Perhaps it's because he started WayCool, an agri-tech startup, after turning 40. Karthik jokes that some people buy a Ferrari as a response to their midlife crisis. Instead, he decided to start up. WayCool was...

Read the full transcript for free here. Niraj Singh, the co-founder and CEO of Spinny, loves cars. So much so that when asked what would be the few things he would take with him to a deserted island, he hesitated a bit and then said: “I would take my car!” He tells us it’s the only real personal space someone has.  Niraj talks about how buying a car is one of the three or four milestones a person has in their life. And yet, buying a used car is still often a messy affair because trust or...