First Principles (Private)

Season 3 28.09.2026 14:01 ↓

Summary I have hosted First Principles for four years and 58 episodes, and I have never once stopped to look at it. This episode is me doing that. There is no guest. It runs about fourteen minutes, and it ends with something I need from you. Season 3 started with Vidit Aatrey of Meesho in April 2025 and ended with Mukesh Bansal in August 2026. A lawyer, a banker, a restaurateur and a venture capit...

Mukesh Bansal 10.08.2026 2:00:03 ↓

When Mukesh Bansal is asked what he is now, he doesn't say founder or investor. He says "a learner", and admits that the moment a company starts working, he gets bored. That restlessness is the thread through a career most people would have parked long ago: he founded Myntra and sold it to Flipkart, co-founded Cult.fit and turned fitness into a category, and now runs the enterprise-AI company Nuri...

Kanwaljit Singh 20.07.2026 2:00:50 ↓

1 · Summary For fifty-odd episodes, First Principles kept venture capitalists off the show, because the conversation tends to drift to the portfolio rather than the person. Kanwal Singh is the exception. In 2017, at the peak of the tech boom, he walked away from tech investing to raise a fund only for Indian consumer brands, an idea investors could not place. His first cheques came not from instit...

Utham Gowda 23.02.2026 2:01:13 ↓

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, hi...

Kalpana Morparia 02.02.2026 1:55:31 ↓

Hello, listeners, and welcome back to the 51st episode of First Principles. 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 bu...

Aloke Bajpai 15.12.2025 2:04:28 ↓

Hello and welcome back to First Principles. This is the 49th episode since we started, or the 8th episode of season 3. 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 diffe...

Deepak Abbot 10.11.2025 1:59:12 ↓

Hello, listeners, and welcome back to First Principles, Episode 48, or the 7th episode of season 3.  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...