First Principles

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...

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...

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...

"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,...

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 u...

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 mil...

If this isn’t the first time you’re listening to First Principles, you’re probably wondering what’s going on. Why did we have  five different founders opening the episode, instead of just one.  It’s because today’s is a special episode. We went back to the first five episodes we didto compile some of the most interesting, original and often counterintuitive conversations from five accomplished fou...

Shan Kadavil, one eighth a co-founder and 100% a CEO at Fresh To Home, one of the largest online sellers of fish and meat in India, made a rough business plan in 2015. From roughly $2 million in sales in 2016 he wanted to grow to $200 million by 2022. That’s 100X in 6 years. This year Fresh To Home will do around $130 million. 65X is not bad at all. As TAMs – total addressable markets – go, you ca...

The shortest distance between two points may be a straight line, but when it comes to entrepreneurial success, straight lines rarely exist. Instead, the paths taken by most successful entrepreneurs are meandering, if we’re applying the benefit of hindsight. If we don’t, well, they’re often random, confusing and even frustrating. Take Srikanth Iyer, the co-founder of CEO of Home Lane, one of the ma...

One of the recurring themes when it comes to entrepreneurship is “valuation”. How much a company is “worth” is in many ways the tail that wags the enterprise dog in our times. I’ve asked this question to every single one of the guests on First Principles. But the answer from Kamal Sagar, the co-founder and CEO of Bangalore-headquartered real estate and design company Total Environment, still came...

In 2015 Ruchi Kalra was a partner with McKinsey in their Financial Services practices.  In 2016 she, along with four co-founders, started OfBusiness, a business that saw the world in raw materials like plastic, steel, almonds where everyone else saw products like bottles, bridges and cookies. By using tech to disintermediate the various buyers and sellers in the raw material supply chain, OfBusine...

The year was 2004. MakeMyTrip was a struggling 4-year old company and Deep Kalra, its founder, hadn’t taken a salary for nearly 18 months and had exhausted all of his financial savings. His co-founders had already taken salary cuts ranging from 50-70%. That’s when they got an offer from a much larger company to buy MakeMyTrip out. After discussing between themselves, they decided that they’d sell...

Serendipity usually plays a huge role in entrepreneurship. It played an outsized role in Tarun Mehta’s journey to founding Ather Energy, easily India’s best-known electric scooter maker. When Mehta graduated from IIT Madras, he wanted badly to become a consultant because it was where the money and aura was. But he didn’t get a job as a consultant. Then he tried to get into Harvard Business School...

Few companies define themselves so sharply on the basis of what they’re opposed to like NoBroker, the 8-year-old Bengaluru-headquartered real estate platform. Opposition to brokerage is baked into its name, its business model, and even its ambitions. US$19 billion is the amount Indians shell out as brokerage fees on real estate rentals. That’s the market NoBroker wants to disrupt. Flip the mirror...

In a career spanning 25 years, Amrish Rau has been on multiple sides of the leadership equation. He’s been a corporate leader, founder, professional CEO and angel investor. As the CEO of Pine Labs, the payments solution provider whose point of sale terminals can be seen in most Indian shops and stores, Rau says his ambition is to “make money from every transaction”. In 2016, Citrus Pay, an online...

SUGAR Cosmetics, though now amongst the most popular and fastest growing cosmetics brand in India, wasn't the first choice when Vineeta was asked to name her new cosmetics company, and neither was cosmetics the first business that Vineeta undertook when she set out to be an entrepreneur. Getting SUGAR to it's users was a tumultuous journey and as Vineeta sits down with Rohin to recount some of the...

Today’s guest on First Principles is Harshil Mathur, CEO and co-founder of Razorpay. Razorpay claims to be India’s first full-stack financial solutions company. And if that sounds very much like how a coder would describe a company, it’s because that’s exactly what’s happening. When Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar, two coding enthusiasts fresh into their first jobs, started working on what would...

Mensa Brands is India’s fastest unicorn. It took them only six months to zoom past the one-billion-dollar valuation mark. Having raised over US$300 million in debt and equity so far, Ananth Narayanan, the founder and CEO of Mensa Brands and the former CEO of Myntra, seems to be on to something. In this episode, we tap into all of it. From his time at McKinsey as a consultant and his stint as Myntr...

The InMobi Group is a curious giant. Not only is it comprised of India's very first tech unicorn, the mobile advertising platform InMobi, it also houses another unicorn within which is one of India's youngest and fastest. That's the lock screen service Glance that's on hundreds of millions of smartphones globally. There's also live video app Roposo, which is pressing down the accelerator on its li...

This time around First Principles makes its way to possibly one of the most fascinating success stories to come out of the Indian start-up space. Zerodha's cofounder Nithin Kamath joins Rohin Dharmakumar in this free wheeling chat about what makes him tick, why he is thankful no one ever invested in his idea early on, thoughts on their early success, and a lot more around building relationships, i...

In this episode of First Principles we speak to Baskar Subramanian, co-founder and CEO of Amagi, a profitable unicorn you probably haven't heard about. Yet. Valued at almost 1.5 billion dollars, and a leader in the broadcast-technology domain, Amagi's road to the top wasn't easy, but it definitely makes for a fun listen. Listen to that and more about how Baskar built the company, how he leads life...

This pilot episode of First Principles features Kabeer Biswas, founder and CEO at Dunzo, one of India's fastest growing quick commerce companies. Kabeer talks about how he navigates failure, accepts feedback, and makes sure that Dunzo is always focused on the things that matter. First Principles is a show where Rohin Dharmakumar, founder and CEO of The Ken , interviews some of the most successful...