First Principles

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 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 operation...

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...

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...

“What is something you believe in, that no one else around you does?” If you’ve heard our episode 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 prof...

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...

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 Agarwa...

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...

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 cr...

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...

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—de...

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...

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...

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 ro...

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 belo...

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...

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,...

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...