First Principles

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 capitalist were guests on a show I had built for founders. The businesses were trucks, fish, kitchens and bikes. And my questions moved away from fundraising and towards where a person came from and how they decide. Then I go back to seasons 1 and 2, from Kabeer Biswas in August 2022 to Manav Garg in May 2024, and show how the exceptions of season 2 became the categories of season 3.

Season 4 widens the guest list on purpose: musicians, athletes, actors, writers and scientists, alongside the founders you come for. The founders were easy for me to find because they live in my world. The people I want next mostly don't. So I am asking you for help to find them. The survey below is how.

The survey

https://theken.typeform.com/fp-season-4 · five minutes if you tap, eight if you write

I ask nine things, in this order. Describe First Principles to me in your own words. Pick the season 3 conversations you found most interesting (all seventeen are listed, so you don't have to remember). Tell me what you think the bar is for getting invited onto this show today, before I change it. Name who you want as a guest in season 4, and what you would want me to ask them. Tell me whether you would join a small closed group of listeners I can ask for feedback more often. How and where you listen. How much of the archive you have heard, and whether you go back. A question I should start asking every guest. And anything else that would make the show better.

I read every answer. The season 4 guest list is being built from what you send, and I will share the names you mention most in a newsletter edition before the season starts.

Chapters

• Not a regular episode: no guest, and a look back

• Season 3, April 2025 to August 2026: seventeen conversations, Vidit Aatrey to Mukesh Bansal

• The guests: a lawyer, a banker, a restaurateur, a VC

• Trucks, fish, kitchens and bikes: what the businesses were made of

• I had it backwards: the warm-up questions were the real interview

• The thing I have to own: one woman guest in season 3, and she invited herself

• Season 1, August 2022 to July 2023: twenty-two episodes, never missed a fortnight

• Season 2, August 2023 to May 2024: the exceptions that became season 3

• The eleven-month gap, and the two-hour format

• Season 4: what stays, and who else gets invited

• Why I can't find these people alone: the survey

• Thank you, and the archive is open

The seventeen conversations of season 3

Ep 42 Vidit Aatrey, Meesho · Ep 43 Sahil Barua, Delhivery · Ep 44 Manish Sabharwal, Teamlease · Ep 45 Narayan Subramaniam, Ultraviolette · Ep 46 Anand Jain, CleverTap · Ep 47 Rahul Matthan, Trilegal · Ep 48 Deepak Abbot, Indiagold · Ep 49 Aloke Bajpai, Ixigo · Ep 50 Rohit Chennamaneni, Darwinbox · Ep 51 Kalpana Morparia · Ep 52 Utham Gowda, Captain Fresh · Ep 53 Ankit Nagori, Curefoods · Ep 54 Lal Chand Bisu, Kuku FM · Ep 55 Riyaaz Amlani, Impresario · Ep 56 Saahil Goel, Shiprocket · Ep 57 Kanwal Singh, Fireside Ventures · Ep 58 Mukesh Bansal

All seventeen are in the archive. 

This episode was produced by Rohin Dharmakumar and mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN.
Write to us at [email protected] with your feedback, suggestions, and guests you would want to see on First Principles.
If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word by sharing and gifting it to your friends and family.

Where Part 1 followed the companies, Part 2 is about the person behind them. Picking up from Mukesh Bansal's move from one venture to the next, this half gets into how he finds talent ("work with them for six months"), the mental models he runs his life by, and the beliefs underneath them. He explains why rationally no one should start a company, how he processes every rejection as "no means not now", why he writes three books by simply showing up to a blank page, and how he separated the longevity basics he trusts from the biohacking he no longer does. It ends close to home: loyalty as loyalty to a mission, what he wants for his two children, why parents' expectations matter less than they did, and a life he rates an 8 out of 10.

Chapters
0:00  Where we left off
1:46  Finding talent: "work with them for six months"
3:23  The one open-ended question he asks
5:57  Winning vs looking good
8:00  The compounding argument, revisited
9:40  Learning vs winning: drawing the 2x2
11:17  Three books, and the annual look-back
16:18  Making time to think in a full life
18:45  What a chief of staff is actually for
21:27  "No means not now" and other mental models
25:57  How he writes a book
28:30  How health became a throughline
31:24  From ecosystem to the longevity basics
34:29  Why strength training matters after 50
38:08  Why he runs SparX, and the deep-tech turn
44:05  Loyalty to a mission, and the number two
50:35  The Apple teaching model
52:52  Three adjectives, and being "scary" to juniors
55:30  His kids' worldview
57:54  Do parents' expectations still matter?
1:00:12  Weekends, food, and reading now
1:02:17  Rating his life an 8

Quotes
[8:44] "I don't know if this rocket thing will work. But if it works, it'll take at least ten years… they said, we are willing to work on it for the rest of our lives."
[21:56] "I call this no means not now. That's how I process all the nos in my life."
[24:59] "Zomato was started in 2007. They did not pivot into food delivery till 2017."
[26:05] "Just show up and stare at a blank page for an hour. Sooner or later you'll start writing."
[61:43] "I feel very privileged and very fortunate. So many lucky breaks have worked out for me."

Frameworks & mental models

• No means not now: process every rejection as timing, not a verdict; it protects the ego and the relationship.

• Long-term patient, short-term aggressive / product is marketing: charge hard daily, give the ten-year game room, and let a product people love do the selling.

• Horizontal compounding: compound entrepreneurial skill across ventures, not tenure in one sector.

• Loyalty to a mission: the durable teams are bound to an unfinished job, not to a person; build a number two and give people room.

• The longevity basics beat biohacking: sleep, eat less, move, strength-train after 50, tend emotional health; the exotic stuff is largely unproven.

Credits & sharing
This episode was produced by Rohin Dharmakumar and mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN.
Write to us at [email protected] with your feedback, suggestions, and guests you would want to see on First Principles.
If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word by sharing and gifting it to your friends and family.

Mukesh Bansal has founded and left more companies than most people build in a lifetime, and in Part 1 he explains why. He founded Myntra and sold it to Flipkart; he co-founded Cult.fit and turned fitness into a category; and today he runs the AI company Nurix and the Meraki Labs studio. Asked what he is now, he says "a learner", and admits he gets bored the moment a company starts working. Part 1 traces the thesis and the companies: how he allocates his weeks, why he thinks the AI era rewards the hands-on operator over the people-manager, what Nurix and Fermi are, why Myntra's move into fashion was an "adjustment" not a pivot, and the small-town Haridwar upbringing and library habit that set him off. This is Part 1 of 2; Part 2 turns to the person, the mental models, and how he thinks about health, family and success.

Chapters
0:00  Welcome and who Mukesh Bansal is
3:15  How First Principles is already connected to him
4:21  "Do you see yourself as an operator, a founder, an investor?"
5:27  Zero-to-one, and where learning stops
9:11  Allocating time across companies
10:34  Why an hour of his time isn't what it was
12:59  The three kinds of professionals in the AI age
14:52  His stack: Claude, Warp, agents overnight
17:58  Founder mode, reversed by AI
20:19  No more waiting for a tech co-founder
23:02  How big Nurix is; and what Fermi is
25:38  The Socratic tutor that won't answer
27:18  Back to Myntra: the fashion category today
31:30  Koyu, Lyskraft and the CRED hypothesis
33:41  Why a venture studio, one company a year
38:18  Rejecting the compounding path
42:57  The near-death at Myntra, and raising with a short runway
45:03  Haridwar, BHEL, and the books that lit the fire
48:15  Pivots as chess "adjustments"
50:48  Conviction vs discovery: betting the megatrend
53:08  The Bay Area years and the return to India

Quotes
[4:33] "I see myself as a learner… doing one company over a period of time, I get bored."
[7:08] "Crisis always comes wrapped with a massive gift, if you are only willing to unpeel the onion."
[17:12] "I'm making an even stronger point. If you're only a people manager, watch out."
[18:58] "For the first time you can hire something equivalent to human cognition for cents an hour."
[48:50] "I use the word adjustment rather than pivot. You come to work every day, you're playing chess."

Frameworks & mental models

• Learner over operator: hand off once a company stops teaching you.

• Crisis and momentum: cut the bad, double down on the good.

• The three professionals in the AI age: the hands-on veteran is the one AI turns into a superpower.

• Adjustment, not pivot: the best move on the board each day; a true "wipe the slate" is just a new company.

• Bet the megatrend, stay loose on the path.
  
  

Credits & sharing
This episode was produced by Rohin Dharmakumar and mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN.
Write to us at [email protected] with your feedback, suggestions, and guests you would want to see on First Principles.
If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word by sharing and gifting it to your friends and family.

1 · Summary

Part 2 of 2. Part 1 laid out the bet: a fund built only for Indian consumer brands, back when the idea sounded absurd, and the anti-power-law machine Kanwal Singh built to make it work. This half is the person. The near-decade at Hindustan Lever that gave him his love of consumer, the Intel years, and the Paper Boat conviction that taught him to back the founder over the idea. Then the man himself: parents who came to India as refugees from Pakistan, a father who kept collecting degrees while feeding the family, the coach he started seeing in his sixties and what separates coaching from therapy, and how he reads a founder by meeting their family. He turned down twice the money he could have raised. He rates his life a 10.

2 · Chapters

3 · Pull-quotes

• [17:56] "I could have raised 2x of this. Genuinely, we could have raised 2x of this."

• [23:55] "You cannot build to sell. You build for sustenance, you build for good."

• [27:04] "Both my parents were refugees from Pakistan."

• [51:34] "A 10." (asked how happy he is with his life)

4 · Frameworks & mental models

• Founder assessment through the family: read a founder by their story and support system, often over a meal with their spouse, on the belief that no one survives a decade-long build without one.

• Build for sustenance, not to sell: the best businesses are bought, not sold; you build for the long run and treat a sale as a business decision along the way.

• Value of good ("do good to do well"): founder first, planet first, one Fireside, with goodness as the foundation of doing well.

• Coaching vs therapy: therapy addresses a medical issue; coaching is vulnerability and honesty in a business context, and only works once you have the self-awareness to accept there's a problem.

This episode was produced by Rohin Dharmakumar and mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN.
Write to us at [email protected] with your feedback, suggestions, and guests you would want to see on First Principles.
If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word by sharing and gifting it to your friends and family.

1 · Summary

Part 1 of 2. Kanwal Singh is the first venture capitalist to appear on First Principles, and the reason is the bet he made with the fund itself. In 2017, at the peak of the tech boom, he walked away from tech investing to raise a fund only for Indian consumer brands, when almost nobody believed India had a consumer story worth venture capital. His first backers weren't institutions, they were the consumer families who had built India's brands. This half covers the whole bet: what investors actually said when he pitched a consumer-only fund, why he raised in India rather than abroad, the ownership and follow-on design he corrected fund after fund, his claim that most of his companies succeed rather than one outlier, and his working map of India 1, 2 and 3. Part 2 turns to the person behind it.

2 · Chapters

3 · Pull-quotes

• [0:20] "For a 5x, nobody will call you legendary."

• [34:24] "We can build successful funds, fund after fund... not necessarily depending on those one or two outliers. Good news is we also have the outliers."

• [40:26] "The answer lies in the question. It is hard."

• [54:12] "The power of the brand is truly manifest in quick commerce."

4 · Frameworks & mental models

• Anti-power-law investing: a portfolio where most companies clear "capital plus," not one built to live or die on a single outlier.

• The three breaks from the VC default: consumer over tech, Indian consumer-family LPs over global institutions, one shared-credit team over lone-hero dealmakers.

• India 1, 2, 3: his working map of where consumption grows, with India 2 needing products designed for it and India 3 reached through doorstep models.

• Quick commerce is brand-first: scarce shelf space and a buy-not-browse shopper mean only brands with genuine pull survive.

This episode was produced by Rohin Dharmakumar and mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN.
Write to us at [email protected] with your feedback, suggestions, and guests you would want to see on First Principles.
If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word by sharing and gifting it to your friends and family.

Part 2 of 2. In Part 1 we walked the road from 2011 — three companies, an investor ultimatum, and the capital it took to build. Part 2 is the mind. Saahil Goel starts with what, given hindsight, he'd do differently, then the first principles he runs Shiprocket on (distribution beats product), the two or three metrics he genuinely obsesses over, his bet on applied AI, why he believes you can't actually manage people, who does and doesn't survive at the company, the guitar he still plays, his dog, and the question Rohin closes every episode with, which Saahil answers with a single number.

Chapters

1:02  With hindsight, what he'd do differently

2:10  “A paisa of every transaction in India”

5:23  First principles: distribution beats product

11:32  The metrics he obsesses over

17:22  Betting on applied AI

29:33  “You can't manage people”

31:45  Who doesn't survive at Shiprocket

42:05  The guitar, Pink Floyd, and Bruno the CHO

58:28  The book he forgets — and how he reflects

1:00:50  Rating his life an 8

This episode was produced by Rohin Dharmakumar and mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN.

Write to us at [email protected] with your feedback, suggestions, and guests you would want to see on First Principles.

If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word by sharing and gifting it to your friends and family.

Part 1 of 2. Most people date Shiprocket to 2017; in truth it was born in 2011, and the road there runs through two companies called KartRocket and Craftly. Saahil Goel walks Rohin through the build: Rs 15 lakh of their own money, nearly not being hired by their own first engineers, the hard lesson that in India you sell outcomes not software, an investor ultimatum to take $4 million or nothing, and by the end, just how much capital it's taken to get from that first office to the edge of a public listing. Part 2 gets into how he actually thinks.

Chapters

0:00  The company that started in 2011, not 2017

4:01  KartRocket: building an agency to learn the market

6:09  Bootstrapped on Rs 15 lakh

9:02  Why Indian SMBs wouldn't pay for software

17:58  “Take $4 million or nothing”

22:38  How Shiprocket was born

27:06  What Shiprocket actually is — and how it makes money

37:58  The IPO, and the state of the business

44:19  Quick commerce without owning a truck

48:42  From Delhi to a US career — and back

55:59  Lessons from failed fundraises

1:04:23  How much they've raised

This episode was produced by Rohin Dharmakumar and mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN.

Write to us at [email protected] with your feedback, suggestions, and guests you would want to see on First Principles.

If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word by sharing and gifting it to your friends and family.

Part 2 moves from the journey to the operating philosophy. Riyaaz Amlani unpacks his evolving stance on the aggregators — from resistance to "uneasy truce" — and the hard lesson that restaurateurs who send guests to Zomato and Swiggy have only themselves to blame. He argues delivery and dine-in are two different businesses, lays out his ambition to turn Impresario into a full-service-restaurant platform, and gets personal on hiring, Gen Alpha kids, weekends, and why his life scores 9.9 out of 10.

CHAPTERS

• 00:00  Recap and what's ahead: aggregators, the platform, the missing 0.1
• 01:48  "Digital landlords": Zomato & Swiggy, then and now
• 02:47  From resistance to cohabitation; how aggregators trained demand
• 05:24  Owning the customer; the cross-sector aggregator tension
• 07:04  The Booking.com / Hotels.com parallel and how hotels fought back
• 09:41  Build your own loyalty — don't blame the aggregator
• 10:09  Delivery vs dine-in: two completely different businesses
• 13:09  Restaurants beat the movies; lessons from raising VC/PE
• 16:34  Growth math: IRR, 20-25% stable growth, the late-stage problem
• 17:45  What motivates him: reading a city and its community
• 18:56  Curiosity over the "5 people"; planning for serendipity
• 24:29  Hiring: "doers and divas" and the largesse of hospitality
• 30:24  Social as social infrastructure: coworking from day one
• 34:25  First principles: people + process, soul, belongingness
• 37:08  Harvesting feedback: NPS, ORM, AI, the guest-experience officer
• 39:18  His kids and the Gen Alpha worldview
• 43:39  Weekends, FIFA, meditation, and protecting solitude
• 48:10  Comfort food and deferring to the chef
• 50:11  The 25-year view; the 10,000 cr platform and the invisible 85%
• 59:03  Anti-loyalty vs frequency: cafes are loyalty, restaurants are experience
• 1:01:44 Final question: 9.9 out of 10, and the missing 0.1

KEY COMPANIES & BRANDS

Impresario Handmade Restaurants; Social; Zomato; Swiggy; ONDC; Booking.com; Hotels.com; Rebel Foods; Haldiram's; Rameshwaram Cafe; Starbucks; NRAI; PlayStation/FIFA/Minecraft (referenced).

KEY CONCEPTS

Aggregators as "digital landlords"; deep discounting & perceived value; the uneasy truce; owning the customer relationship; the Booking.com hotel-inventory parallel; loyalty programs & direct outreach; delivery vs dine-in as separate businesses; patient capital, IRR & late-stage growth math; "doers and divas"; largesse of hospitality; full-service-restaurant platform; store-level vs corporate EBITDA; the invisible 85% "iceberg" of running a restaurant; anti-loyalty vs frequency; cafes (loyalty/convenience) vs restaurants (experience/variety); NPS/ORM/AI feedback; Gen Alpha.

Part 1 of Rohin Dharmakumar's conversation with Riyaaz Amlani is the origin story: why a returning UCLA grad decided Bombay was missing "places to be," how Mocha became Social, and what it actually takes to keep a restaurant group alive for 25 years in the highest-mortality business there is. The shisha ban, the private-equity money that never arrived, COVID, the marble hustle at age six, and the real engine underneath it all: people.

CHAPTERS

• 00:00  Intro: 95% fail by year two — and the man who didn't
• 01:46  Why Mocha in 2001: a city missing "places to be"
• 03:23  Bombay the "coolest cousin"; South Bombay snobbery moves to Bandra
• 05:05  The MTV / Gen X generation and a West-facing India
• 07:47  UCLA, entertainment management, and learning to live culture
• 11:29  What "Handmade" and "Impresario" mean
• 14:13  The business today: 80 restaurants, 900 cr, 5,500 people
• 15:29  Why restaurants die; learning from the community
• 18:02  People vs processes — and why he keeps returning to people
• 19:32  Social: the millennial third space and the shisha ban
• 25:41  The Gen Z puzzle; Saltwater to Bandra Bourn; evolution vs revolution
• 30:46  Real estate: location vs locality and India's "80 pockets"
• 32:32  The metric that matters: AOV x covers x table turnaround
• 35:33  COVID and surviving "mass-extinction events"
• 39:17  The town hall: the team takes 40% pay to save the company
• 40:51  What losing a restaurant feels like; the discipline to quit
• 42:44  Mental model: 4-5 engines to ride economic cycles
• 46:42  The marble business and hustling from age 12
• 51:20  Bowling alleys & Phoenix Mills: people buy time together
• 53:44  Self-rating: 7.5 as a parent, 5 as a CEO
• 55:15  Building a restaurant vs building an organization
• 56:15  The HR crisis: severe attrition, talent going abroad
• 58:44  The one thing he can't delegate: layouts and property selection
• 1:00:49 Becoming a "boardroom warrior" against his will

 KEY COMPANIES & BRANDS

Impresario Handmade Restaurants; Mocha; Social; Saltwater Cafe/Grill; Bandra Born; Cafe Coffee Day; Phoenix Mills "Bowling Company"; Amoeba; UCLA.

KEY CONCEPTS

Third spaces; "handmade" at scale; West-aspirational MTV-generation culture; people vs processes; AOV x covers x table turnaround; frequency as a metric; location vs locality / "80 pockets"; evolution vs revolution; mass-extinction events & resilience; working-capital-negative business; building a restaurant vs building an organization; restaurant-industry attrition; the layouts/property selection he won't delegate.

Part 2 picks up exactly where I left Bisu — on why a 7-year-old audio platform is releasing a theatrical film on May 8. From there, we go everywhere. Bisu's actual journey from a small village in Shekhawati to Bandra. The "full equation" view of metrics. Why saying no requires more work than saying yes. Why most of his learning comes from iterations, not books. And, in his closing answer, a quietly devastating line about the startup ecosystem itself.

If you haven't heard Part 1 yet, please go back and start there first.

Chapter list

• 01:02 — Indian Institute of Zombies: why theatrical, why in-house, why AI in the pipeline. The decision-making cadence behind it
• 01:08 — "Your vision grows with you." How the original vision changed from "premium storytelling for Bharat" to something larger
• 01:10 — Bathoth → Shekhawati → IIT Jodhpur → Bandra. Studying in Hindi until Class 10, then +2 in Hindi, then English at IIT
• 01:18 — The discipline of saying no. Why nos require more work than yeses, and why nos are usually the better answer
• 01:19 — "The full equation." Why CAC alone is meaningless; why he tracks revenue, CAC, LTV and cohort profit together. The two real metrics: equation health and engagement
• 01:21 — Numbers beyond a limit give you an illusion. "Don't go deeper in the data — keep your life simple."
• 01:21 — Co-founders, span of control, how the four-way role split actually got sorted
• 01:22 — How Bisu learns: most of it from doing and iterations; books help him articulate what the iterations have already taught him
• 01:25 — Pet phrases at work — "build it like a business, not a startup" — and what management style his colleagues would say he has
• 01:28 — Biggest value add as Bisu, not as CEO. The Uber-power-user analogy
• 01:29 — When did he change his mind about managing people? Going from technical-first to people-first
• 01:34 — Hiring: the open-ended questions Bisu actually asks when he meets potential leaders
• 01:36 — What motivates and drives him on a daily basis
• 01:42 — Family, parenting, and the village memory of his grandmother telling stories by oil lamp in the evenings — the original storyteller in his life
• 01:45 — The personal questions: which morning of the week, how he spends weekends, what a productive day looks like, sleep
• 01:46 — On a scale of 1 to 10, how Bisu rates himself as a CEO
• 01:51 — The closing thought. Would the average Kuku FM subscriber actually want to listen to a two-hour interview with the CEO of Kuku FM? "We live in a bubble. The startup ecosystem feels that the world thinks what we think. It doesn't."
• 01:53 — Goodbye

Things mentioned in Part 2

• People: Vinod Kumar Meena, Vikas Goyal (co-founders); Kunj Sanghvi (Kuku's Content Head, previously on Two by Two and Zero Shot); the Dalal brothers (script of Indian Institute of Zombies — Hussain and Abbas Dalal of Brahmāstra / Farzi); Gaganjeet Singh and Alok Dwivedi (directors); Bisu's grandmother
• Places: Bathoth (village in Shekhawati, Rajasthan); IIT Jodhpur; Bandra
• Concepts: the full equation — Bisu's name for treating CAC, revenue, LTV and cohort profit as one calculation, not separate metrics; content is the only product; vision grows with you

To listen to all of First Principles

If you'd like to listen to all 54 First Principles episodes — that's close to 110 hours of conversations with founders and leaders building India's most interesting companies — please subscribe to The Ken directly, or to our premium channel on Apple Podcasts.