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...

The full transcript of this episode is available here. You've probably heard of Groww. It is a financial services platform, last valued at $3 billion.  This year, the Groww team travelled to a bunch of tier-2 and tier-3 cities in South India to talk to users of its products. In fact, so far, they've been to 100 such cities. In this conversation with Rohin, Lalit—the co-founder and CEO of Groww—describes what typically happens during these visits. Take a city like Indore, for example....

Welcome to First Principles, The Ken’s fortnightly leadership podcast! I am Rohin Dharmakumar, your host. First, if you’re a new listener of this podcast, I think you’ve clicked on the right episode.  And if you’re a long-time listener – thank you, by the way – then you might know that here at First Principles, we have a few favourite questions. And we try and ask these questions to most of our guests.  The most interesting part of this is that every guest has a vastly different answer to...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

"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,...

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...

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...