First Principles

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 i...

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...

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. H...

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...

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...

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 co...

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 dre...

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 o...

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 th...

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 loy...

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....

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 t...

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...

“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 profe...

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...

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...

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”...

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...

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 g...

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 i...

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 ne...