First Principles

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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 has in their life. And yet, buying a used car is still often a messy affair because trust or guarantees are hard to come by. 

It’s a large problem in our society, and Niraj believes solving a problem like this is the only way to build a product that lasts a lifetime.

So, it wasn’t surprising that Niraj and his co-founders set up Spinny, a used car marketplace. It was last valued at $1.8 billion.

The used car space, though, is extremely overcrowded. And overfunded. 

More and more Indians are comfortable buying used or pre-owned cars today. The demand is there. But on the supply side, there are so many sellers and platforms already.

So we asked Niraj why he would go into a market rife with overcompetition and overfunding?

And that’s when he broke down the used cars marketplace for us. A marketplace that, he says, behaves differently from any other. Where the key to solving for supply actually goes back to demand. And he tells us why this is.

Further, in this episode, Niraj talks about:

1. The courage and tenacity it took to get through eight years of rejection
2. Why there’s no longer a difference between a used car buyer and a new car buyer
3. Identifying the pain points of the industry you’re in
4. What kind of people succeed at Spinny 
5. How to build trust within your company

And, of course, cars!

This is Episode 28 of First Principles—The Ken’s fortnightly leadership podcast.

The Ken is India's first subscriber-only business journalism platform. Check out our deeply reported long-form stories, insightful newsletters, original podcasts and much more here.

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—describes what typically happens during these visits.

Take a city like Indore, for example. Hundreds of Groww users travel really long distances just to talk to the Groww team. They want to know things like how to use the app for something as simple as investing in an SIP that has actually changed their lives.

Lalit tells Rohin how the same people have told so many of their friends and family members about Groww. They're excited, grateful and most importantly, emotional, says Lalit.

And then he says there's just one word that can describe what's happening between Groww and its users…and it is love.

Love for customers, love for the product, and love for good financial services…

You'll see how this is a recurring theme in this conversation. Customers are at the centre of Groww. Customer obsession, Lalit says, with no uncertainty, is the thing that will make an employee succeed at Groww.

Lalit is a man who is sure of many things—like he's good at hiring or how to build an effective direct-to-consumer product. He knows the first principles for solving complex problems like the back of his hand.

And what he's unsure of, he's not too worried about. He tells Rohin how he was raised in a way that makes him a bit different from other founders.

Everything will pass, he says. Every problem will be solved. And he explains how this keeps him going, keeps Groww going.

In his stoic, cool manner, he goes on to talk about:

1. Why financial services is a basic necessity
2. How to create delight with your product
3. Understanding the difference between what your customer wants and what they will use
4. Why "discipline is overrated"
5. A simple process that Lalit uses to hire the right people

_____________

Chapters:

03:01 - What we talk about when we talk about financial services

07:19 - Democratising financial services

09:41 - Supply and demand of financial services

10:51  - How Groww grew 

16:33 - How to find future customers today?

20:09 - The one metric Groww watches

22:21 - What customers say is not what customers do

30:37 - What makes people love a financial services brand?

35:16 - Lalit’s career ladder

40:08 - The seeds for Groww

46:31 - “Not old & wise enough to give advice, but if there was one thing…”

53:14 - Cracking delayed monetisation

55:28 - The only thing that guides Groww

1:02:31 - “Discipline is overrated”

1:05:38 - A simple process to hire the right people

1:08:23 - What does Lalit read?

1:14:36 - A weekday in Lalit’s life

1:16:25 - What kind of people succeed at Groww?

_____________

Also, tune in to the latest episode of Daybreak—The Ken's podcast which breaks down one significant business story thrice a week—to learn about the talent exodus at Niti Aayog on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts!

The Ken is India's first subscriber-only business journalism platform. Check out our deeply reported long-form stories, insightful newsletters, original podcasts and much more here.

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 guests. 

The most interesting part of this is that every guest has a vastly different answer to the same question – their age, experience, outlook on life…even their co-founder or their family plays a significant role in how they answer our questions. 

Take motivation, for example. What drives founders/CEOs, even when things aren’t looking so good?

It could simply be untameable perseverance – like in the case of Deep Kalra, the founder of MakeMyTrip. For Ruchi Kalra of OxyCo, it was the people around her. Srikanth Iyer of Homelane, in fact, quotes from a book that changed the game for him.

We highly recommend going back and listening to our full episodes, but this is a great place to start, too. 

We went back to some of our older episodes to make a supercut of some very specific answers from our guests to questions on motivation, perseverance, finding the right opportunity in a difficult market and fighting stress. Good stress, as one of our guests calls it.

Here are our guests:

We start with Deep Kalra, the founder and chairman of MakeMyTrip – a company that began when India wasn’t even ready for internet businesses. Deep talks about surviving as a travel business through the pandemic, learning to stay in the game and building to last. 

Deep Kalra of MakeMyTrip on being “22 years young”, presenting from Excel sheets instead of Powerpoint slides, the importance of open disagreements, and the good stress of building

Next, we have Ruchi Kalra – who has built two profitable unicorns in seven years: OfBusiness and Oxyzo. She takes us through an important maxim that drives both her businesses: finding the right opportunity in the right sector, even if it’s crowded.

Ruchi Kalra of Oxyzo on creating two unicorns in 7 years, spotting gigantic market opportunities, putting profits and cash flow first, and letting go of personal ambitions

Kamal Sagar, the founder of Total Environment, has had one thing driving him for 27 years: good quality. Good quality that even thousands of real estate companies in the West are just not able to deliver on. The most interesting part is how he does it: Kamal builds homes the way software is built. 

Kamal Sagar of Total Environment on picking principles over convenience, reimagining real estate, design, authenticity and learning to say no

When I asked how Srikanth Iyer, the founder of Homelane, fought through the first few years of absolute chaos at his startup, Srikanth said he focuses on understanding what you’re bad at. 

He explains how he learnt and applied this First Principle in his career.

Srikanth Iyer of Home Lane on embracing what you’re bad at in order to do better at what you’re good at, and being a wartime general

Shan Kadavil of FreshToHome cracked a really tough business in a super competitive market. And then, he evolved as a CEO and a leader. He talks about scaling a 40-employee organisation to a 4000-employee organisation, encouraging his team to “be their own CEO,” obsessing over the right metrics, and much more. 

Shan Kadavil of FreshToHome on selling fish, building moats, encouraging bottom-up “shots on goal”, and being honest with boards

This is First Principles— The Ken’s fortnightly leadership podcast.

The Ken is India's first subscriber-only business journalism platform. Check out our deeply reported long-form stories, insightful newsletters, original podcasts and much more here.

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 take risks and bets that larger companies might not.

That’s how Edelweiss pulled Bharat Bonds into their armour, which shot up their assets massively. It went from number 30 in the mutual fund rankings to number 13 in just a few years.

As a CEO, Radhika is a big fan of keeping things simple and effective.

She has a straightforward way of dealing with workplace politics. A one-step way to shut down mansplaining. A very simple approach to trying to understand her consumers. And even an easy but brilliant way of organising her favourite poetry, excerpts and stories!

In this episode, we talk about:

1. What is the problem that Edelweiss is trying to solve?

2. How does Radihka define success?

3. How Radhika uses an inner scorecard to evaluate herself

4. How does she deal with criticism and separate constructive criticism from targeted bias?

5. Why Radhika doesn’t believe in work-life balance

6. Why Radhika has a third category of priorities after personal and professional

7. Radhika’s advice for young, professional women

This is Episode 26 of First Principles, with Radhika Gupta — The Ken’s fortnightly leadership podcast.

The Ken is India's first subscriber-only business journalism platform. Check out our deeply reported long-form stories, insightful newsletters, original podcasts and much more here.

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 room.

For a 23-year-old organisation that handles over $150 billion in payments, BillDesk is surprisingly lean at just over 800 employees. And that's not the only thing contrarian about it. It has been profitable for over a decade and a half now. 

When I asked Vasu—that’s how others usually address Srinivasu—how old he was, his answer was, “BillDesk is 23, I am 55.”

For this episode, we threw in many new questions based on the subscriber feedback I’d been receiving.

• What often keeps founders going is the urge to prove something. What is it for Vasu?
• How has his view of a leadership team evolved?
• How does he prefer to be “managed upward” by his reportees
• How has what excites or challenges him changed
• Managing people isn’t what founders have in when they start out. And yet, it is the most important thing that determines their success. How has Vasu’s managing style or philosophy evolved since he started Billdesk in 2000?

Over the entire conversation, we also talk about:

1. Why BillDesk doesn’t handle person-to-person payments, for instance, via UPI.
2. How the three co-founders hired and coached their first 100 employees
3. Why BillDesk does not incentivise chasing glory metrics
4. Why the three co-founders continue to work from a single table even today

Snigdha breaks down the story of Disney's decline, on our business podcast Daybreak. Listen here.

This is Episode 25 of First Principles, with MN Srinivasu — The Ken’s fortnightly leadership podcast.

The Ken is India's first subscriber-only business journalism platform. Check out our deeply reported long-form stories, insightful newsletters, original podcasts and much more here.

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 below the funding and valuation radars of 2020-2022, Clear has been quietly effecting a business model pivot under Archit's leadership. Today, it is overwhelmingly a business-to-business focused company, not a business-to-consumer one. As India digitises and formalises its tax systems together, Clear has ridden both waves to help businesses and consumers stay compliant. But this transition hasn't been quick or easy, as Archit candidly opens up about in our conversation. 

We talk about building a profitable and lasting company and why he turned from a "business-focused" to a "product-focused" CEO a year ago. We also go into how much of a cultural shift it took for Clear to start charging its customers to file taxes – and then, another significant shift: deciding to expand from India to Saudi Arabia. Archit also tells us how he spots excellent talent and much more in this episode.

This is Episode 24 of First Principles, with Archit Gupta — The Ken's fortnightly leadership podcast.

The Ken is India's first subscriber-only business journalism platform. Check out our deeply reported long-form stories, insightful newsletters, original podcasts and much more here: https://the-ken.com/?utm_source=website&utm_medium=podcasts&utm_campaign=podcast_ep

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 co-founder and Group CEO of Policybazaar, takes us through this story in this episode of First Principles.

Policybazaar started in 2008 and is a publicly listed company today. It's the largest in its space by far. Many of the things it does, or how it does, don't fit into the easy patterns we've been used to.

For instance, employees making phone calls to prospective customers is at the core of their business. In an era where we're told phone calls and call centres are a relic of the past.

So, why do they do it?

Yashish attributes this and many other decisions to PolicyBazaar to being fundamentally First Principles-driven. 

Yashish is incredibly energetic and driven. He is a serious sportsman and triathlete. He's also as straight-talking and candid as they come.

In this episode, we talk to Yashish about why he calls PolicyBazaar an education platform and not a comparison one, the "right to win", how he spots and grooms talent and the importance of physical endurance and excellence.

Chapters:

3:49 - Running 22 kms, drying swimming trunks in the car and other practical decisions

7:54 - How and when Yashish learnt about life and health insurance

15:54 - What is PolicyBazaar

18:13 - The problems of the insurance industry

23:55 - The short-term perils of educating the customer too much

28:25 - How does PolicyBazaar detect insurance fraud

37:23 - Is there an ideal claims ratio for a product

38:42 - Why PolicyBazaar is grateful to the call-centre model in this day and age

47:50 - You are first a soul, then your body

51:55 - Yashish the father vs. Yashish the co-founder

1:00:26 - Why confusion is as important as curiosity

1:03:15 - How to identify and groom talent

1:05:54 - Building and evolving a company’s culture

1:14:13 - How to mentor people

1:22:21 - Yahish’s go-to First Principles

This is Episode 23 of First Principles, with Yashish Dahiya — The Ken's fortnightly leadership podcast.

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The Ken is India's first subscriber-only business journalism platform. Check out our deeply reported long-form stories, insightful newsletters, original podcasts and much more here: https://the-ken.com/?utm_source=website&utm_medium=podcasts&utm_campaign=podcast_ep

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, the CEO title is but one milestone in their journey. The road doesn't end there.

Varun Dua, our guest for this episode, co-founded Acko—a digital-first insurer most recently valued at over $1.4 billion. He was also Acko's CEO before hiring a seasoned insurance industry leader to take over that role.

That's not the only thing different about Varun. 

He freely admits that as a graduate, he was super lazy and had neither a plan for his life nor any interest in being an entrepreneur. His dream at one point was to get hired by eBay or Cleartrip. Thankfully for him, neither of the companies hired him.

So, he ended up starting one company, which morphed into another firm, which morphed into Acko.

Along the way, he went from super lazy to super driven.

In today's episode, Varun reflects on the choices he made in his career and life and talks about how he's preparing for the ones that still lie ahead. 

This is Episode 22 of First Principles with Varun Dua.

The Ken is India's first subscriber-only business journalism platform. Check out our deeply reported long-form stories, insightful newsletters, original podcasts and much more here: https://the-ken.com/?utm_source=website&utm_medium=podcasts&utm_campaign=podcast_ep

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 is a great place to start if you've been meaning to check out our older episodes but haven't gotten around to it.

We begin with Harshil Mathur, the co-founder and CEO of Razorpay—a fintech giant offering loans, payroll services, and even bank accounts.

Harshil talks about his journey into entrepreneurship, how Razorpay develops products, the importance of deliberately driving company culture, and much more. 

Episode 6: Razorpay CEO Harshil Mathur talks about deliberate culture, building to a need, and the principles of product development

Next, we have Vineeta Singh, the co-founder and CEO of SUGAR Cosmetics—one of India's most popular and fastest-growing cosmetics brands.

Vineeta talks about overcoming stereotypes as a female founder, the importance of passion when selecting your workplace, and why hustle, hunger, humour, and humility are key pillars of SUGAR's culture. 

Episode 7: Vineeta Singh of SUGAR Cosmetics talks about building products, educating consumers, and focusing on the long term

And then, we have Amrish Rau, the CEO of Pine Labs—the payments solution provider whose point-of-sale terminals are visible in most Indian shops and stores.

In 2016, Citrus Pay, an online payments provider Amrish co-founded, was acquired by rival PayU for $130 million in cash. It was one of the most significant acquisitions back then. But Amrish says it is also one of his biggest regrets. As a first-time founder, he decided to sell his company too quickly. Amrish tells us why.

Episode 8: Amrish Rau of Pine Labs talks about the differences between being a founder and CEO

Next, we have Amit Agarwal, the co-founder and CEO of NoBroker—the 8-year-old Bengaluru-headquartered real estate platform that wants to disrupt the very concept of brokerage fees.

Amit speaks about entering management consulting as a young MBA because it paid the most, starting a business that almost no investor wanted to fund, convincing notoriously value-minded Indians to pay a subscription fee before finding a rental apartment, and running a frugal organisation with a cockroach mentality.

Episode 9: Amit Agarwal of NoBroker talks about his single-minded mission to disrupt brokerage, building a cockroach company, and why his office address is a secret

And finally, we have Tarun Mehta, the co-founder and CEO of Ather Energy—India's best-known electric scooter maker. 

Tarun speaks about his journey to convince investors of his vision, doing hard things that defied common sense, building an organisation over decades, and why it takes at least three years to make a true impact at work.

Episode 10: Tarun Mehta of Ather Energy talks about doing hard things, going down multi-year rabbit holes, building companies over 30-40 years, and being chief storyteller

The Ken is India's first subscriber-only business journalism platform. 

Check out our deeply reported long-form stories, insightful newsletters, original podcasts, and much more here: https://the-ken.com/?utm_source=website&utm_medium=podcasts&utm_campaign=podcast_ep

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 newsletter will bring fresh insights into how accomplished founders, leaders, and changemakers apply First Principles thinking to see the world differently and remake it in their vision.

If you’re a free or paying subscriber of The Ken, you’ll find this newsletter in your inbox already.

But if not, please click here, sign up for free on our website, and you'll receive the newsletter in your inbox for free: https://the-ken.com/?utm_source=website&utm_medium=podcasts&utm_campaign=podcast_ep