First Principles

Lal Chand Bisu started Kuku in audio in 2018. Almost everyone in the press wrote them off — the louder competitor was getting the headlines, the VCs didn't believe vernacular India would pay, and the assumption was that short-video would flatten audio. None of that aged well. Kuku FM did ₹242 Cr in FY25 at 175% YoY growth, with roughly 10 million paying subscribers. This is the conversation Bisu, who is just not the kind of founder who walks around telling you these numbers, finally agreed to do.

In Part 1, we get into the company history, the pivots, the contrarian decision to cut the free tier, and what 40 million Hindi listens to Rich Dad Poor Dad really mean.

Chapter list

• 00:00 — How old is Kuku FM, and what Bisu was doing before (Easy Prep, two and a half years at Toppr)
• 00:02 — June birthdays, coincidence, and Bisu's definition of luck — "most things are out of control"
• 00:04 — The three pivots: podcast aggregator → UGC → PUGC. What killed each one and what was kept constant
• 00:09 — Why vernacular audio IP didn't exist, and why Kuku had to become a studio rather than an aggregator
• 00:14 — January 2021: cutting the free tier and charging ₹399 a year. The investor pushback. Why no ads, ever
• 00:23 — Rich Dad Poor Dad in Hindi: 40 million listens. What that number tells you about the listener that English-first publishers have been missing
• 00:27 — How Kuku's content mix has shifted from entertainment to educational and inspirational
• 00:30 — Audio first, then video. Why audio is roughly 50x cheaper to produce and 50x cheaper to stream
• 00:33 — AI in the marketing pipeline: 500 ads/month → 5,000 ads/month, same cost
• 00:42 — The competitor we don't name. What being the also-ran in the press for years cost — in hires, partnerships, and inside Bisu's own head
• 00:45 — The fundraising history: ~$156M raised, the Granite Asia round, and how much of the last cheque is actually still untouched
• 00:50 — Biggest learnings from unsuccessful fundraising. Why nos are usually the harder, better answer
• 00:55 — Kuku TV: from launch to #1 on India's App Store in four months. Microdrama, the ReelShort wave, MS Dhoni
• 01:01 — Cliffhanger: the Indian Institute of Zombies theatrical bet — and why an audio platform wrote, produced and AI-assisted its own film instead of licensing one. Bisu's answer to this is in Part 2.

Things mentioned in Part 1

• People: Vinod Kumar Meena and Vikas Goyal (co-founders, IIT Jodhpur batchmates); Hansa Bisu (Bisu's wife); MS Dhoni (Kuku FM brand ambassador); Nandan Nilekani / Fundamentum
• Companies & investors: Mebigo Labs, Toppr, Easy Prep, Pocket FM (the unnamed competitor), Granite Asia, Vertex Ventures, Krafton, Bitkraft, IFC, 3one4 Capital, Shunwei, India Quotient
• Content & references: Rich Dad Poor Dad (Hindi); Ankur Warikoo's Hindi book; ReelShort; Kuku TV

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.

Correction: During the conversation, Bisu mentions that the total amount of venture capital raised by Kuku is $170 million. The company has subsequently clarified that the correct figure is $120 million.

Welcome back to First Principles. This is Part 2 of our full conversation with Ankit Nagori, founder and CEO of Curefoods. If you have not listened to Part 1, go back and start there.

In this half, the conversation slows down a little and gets even more interesting. Ankit has strong opinions about why healthy food will always lose to biryani on a Friday night, what building a brand people actually love looks like, and what a Unilever of foods means to him. He is also candid about how he hires, how he spends his Sundays with his son, and what drives him beyond the business.
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This episode was produced by Uddantika Kashyap 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.

Welcome to First Principles. This is Part 1 of our full conversation with Ankit Nagori, founder and CEO of Curefoods.

Ankit joined Flipkart as the 22nd employee after cold emailing its founders at a book fair with almost no relevant experience and within six years he was Chief Business Officer. He then co-founded Cult with Mukesh Bansal, built it into one of India's most recognised fitness brands, and spun out Curefoods in the middle of a pandemic when the business was down to 2 crores a month.

In this half, Rohin and Ankit get into what those Flipkart years really felt like, what talent density means and whether you can actually design for it, and how Curefoods found its footing when everything was falling apart.
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This episode was produced by Uddantika Kashyap 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.

Welcome to First Principles! This is part 2 of episode 52, the full conversation.

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, his choices, and what drives him. It makes for one of the best examples on this podcast of a guest easing into a conversation and then, almost without noticing, going places you didn't expect.

The story itself is hard to believe. A kid from landlocked Mysore, with no connection to the sea, no family background in business, builds a billion-dollar global seafood company. He took salary cuts at every job change, even after getting married. He has never owned a car and the highest tax he paid was in 2015. And his eight-year-old son, unable to get his father's attention any other way, started a fake company called Blackfish and would set up a little boardroom at home, just to have something to talk to his dad about.

This episode covers what seafood as an industry actually looks like, why the last 1000 years haven't changed it, what it really means to build a global company from India, and what happens when a founder finally stops chasing money and has to sit with the question of what he actually wants from all of it.

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This episode was produced by Uddantika Kashyap 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.

Welcome to First Principles! This is part 1 of episode 52, the full conversation.

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, his choices, and what drives him. It makes for one of the best examples on this podcast of a guest easing into a conversation and then, almost without noticing, going places you didn't expect.

The story itself is hard to believe. A kid from landlocked Mysore, with no connection to the sea, no family background in business, builds a billion-dollar global seafood company. He took salary cuts at every job change, even after getting married. He has never owned a car and the highest tax he paid was in 2015. And his eight-year-old son, unable to get his father's attention any other way, started a fake company called Blackfish and would set up a little boardroom at home, just to have something to talk to his dad about.

This episode covers what seafood as an industry actually looks like, why the last 1000 years haven't changed it, what it really means to build a global company from India, and what happens when a founder finally stops chasing money and has to sit with the question of what he actually wants from all of it.

**********

This episode was produced by Uddantika Kashyap 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.

Hello, listeners, and welcome back to part 2 of 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 but her colleagues told her: "You do not say no to Mr. Kamath and live to have a great career in ICICI."

So she said yes and built one of the most remarkable careers in Indian banking.

She talks about the ICICI culture where contradicting the chairman wasn't just allowed, it was encouraged. A senior JPMorgan executive once said the most impressive thing about ICICI was that "the junior-most person could contradict the chairman and get away with it."

She also gets candid about things most leaders don't talk about. Like why she wishes she had done an MBA. Why she has strong opinions about people's physical appearance at work and knows it's a flaw. Why her spiritual guru completely changed her relationship with the one thing she considered her biggest regret in life.

She went to a Ferrari racetrack and hit 304 kmph. She believes work-life balance is nonsense and wishes every youngster would realize that life is work and work is life.

Listen in for all this and more, including why she thinks India's next 30 years belong to banking, healthcare, and infrastructure. Why retirement at 60 is an outdated concept. And why on a scale of 1 to 10, she rates her happiness at 9 plus.

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This episode was produced by Uddantika Kashyap 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.v

Hello, listeners, and welcome back to part 1 of 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 but her colleagues told her: "You do not say no to Mr. Kamath and live to have a great career in ICICI."

So she said yes and built one of the most remarkable careers in Indian banking.

She talks about the ICICI culture where contradicting the chairman wasn't just allowed, it was encouraged. A senior JPMorgan executive once said the most impressive thing about ICICI was that "the junior-most person could contradict the chairman and get away with it."

She also gets candid about things most leaders don't talk about. Like why she wishes she had done an MBA. Why she has strong opinions about people's physical appearance at work and knows it's a flaw. Why her spiritual guru completely changed her relationship with the one thing she considered her biggest regret in life.

She went to a Ferrari racetrack and hit 304 kmph. She believes work-life balance is nonsense and wishes every youngster would realize that life is work and work is life.

Listen in for all this and more, including why she thinks India's next 30 years belong to banking, healthcare, and infrastructure. Why retirement at 60 is an outdated concept. And why on a scale of 1 to 10, she rates her happiness at 9 plus.

**********

This episode was produced by Uddantika Kashyap 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.

In the 2nd part of the 50th episode of First Principles, Rohit Chennamaneni, co-founder of Darwinbox, joins the show to talk about what changes after the early chaos of a startup fades.

He explains how Darwinbox has operated without a CEO for years, how the 3 founders divide ownership of decisions instead of debating everything together, and why this structure helped them move faster as the company grew.

Rohit also gets specific about product building. He talks about designing HR software that does not need training sessions or long explanations, why adoption matters more than feature depth, and how small product decisions can end up shaping behaviour across entire organisations.

The conversation also turns inward. Rohit reflects on moments where intelligence stopped being the advantage he thought it was, why staying with uncomfortable problems mattered more, and how his understanding of leadership changed as Darwinbox scaled.

This episode looks at company building through real decisions, and what it takes to keep going long after the excitement wears off.

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This episode was produced by Uddantika Kashyap 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.

In part 1 of the 50th episode of First Principles, Rohit Chennamaneni, co-founder of Darwinbox, joins the show to talk about what changes after the early chaos of a startup fades.

He explains how Darwinbox has operated without a CEO for years, how the 3 founders divide ownership of decisions instead of debating everything together, and why this structure helped them move faster as the company grew.

Rohit also gets specific about product building. He talks about designing HR software that does not need training sessions or long explanations, why adoption matters more than feature depth, and how small product decisions can end up shaping behaviour across entire organisations.

The conversation also turns inward. Rohit reflects on moments where intelligence stopped being the advantage he thought it was, why staying with uncomfortable problems mattered more, and how his understanding of leadership changed as Darwinbox scaled.

This episode looks at company building through real decisions, and what it takes to keep going long after the excitement wears off.

********

This episode was produced by Uddantika Kashyap 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.

What a year it's been.

After a long hiatus and when we thought we'd closed the curtains for good, First Principles came back in April 2025 for Season 3. And what made this comeback so special? Simple: Rohin was genuinely excited to be back in the interviewing chair.

That excitement is infectious. It showed up in every conversation and every question. This year, he sat down with eight incredible CEOs and founders who opened up about their journeys, their philosophies, their wins, and their struggles. These were deep, candid conversations about what it really takes to build something meaningful.

In this special wrap episode, Rohin looks back at all eight conversations from 2025. He gives you the context about what it was really like sitting across from each guest, the moments that surprised him, the insights that stuck with him and then we play you the clips that mattered most. Think of it as a guided tour through the year's best moments.

And here's the thing we're most proud of: First Principles has been named one of Apple's Best Shows of 2025. It's testament to you, our listeners, who make this more than just a podcast. You make it a community.

And next year? It's going to be even better. More intriguing guests. More candid discussions. More first principles thinking applied.

Here are all eight episodes from 2025:

Episode 42: Vidit Aatrey on building a problem-first mindset into Meesho’s culture

Episode 43: Sahil Barua on why Delhivery is the antithesis of moving fast and breaking things

Episode 44: Manish Sabharwal of Teamlease on creating great ancestors, India’s development journey and ‘regulatory cholesterol’

Episode 45: Ultraviolette Automotive’s Narayan Subramaniam on tinkering, designing and learning by discarding

Episode 46: Anand Jain of Clevertap on starting with nothing and learning, building and leading as you go along

Episode 47: Trilegal’s Rahul Matthan on the firm, the partnership, and the principles

Episode 48: Indiagold’s Deepak Abbot on turning a nation’s ‘dead asset’ into credit scores and working capital

Episode 49: Ixigo’s Aloke Bajpai on using empathy, customer experience, and resilience to both survive and thrive

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Once again, thank you for listening to First Principles. Check out our newsletter and discover more at here.
You can email us at [email protected] to share your thoughts, suggestions or anything else.

This episode was produced by Uddantika Kashyap and mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN, our in-house audio engineer.

See you next year,
Team First Principles