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 their paying subscribers and now operates in the broader revenue management market. This Indian company was last valued at over $3.5 billion.

Krish's own path to success, though, was anything but formulaic.

He graduated in 2001, as the dot-com boom was cratering and when the 9/11 attacks on America spooked the world. 

Krish couldn't find a job. Six months later, when he finally did, his first salary was Rs 3500. It would be another ten years before he finally got together with his co-founders and started Chargebee.

And even then, they spent the first five years going around in circles before finally hitting their groove. 

In today's episode, he reflects and explains the meandering path he took to success and the lessons he learned along the way. 

Krish talks about learning to let go of the need for world-changing ideas, hiring for strengths, why someone great for a zero-to-one project may be terrible for a one-to-10 project, why early-stage founders must set constraints and say 'no' instead of 'challenge accepted!', and treating business as a game.

He also shares what he believes is the most critical role for a CEO: Trusting others, getting out of the way and letting go or, in Krish’s own words, continuously firing yourself.

This is Episode 21 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: https://the-ken.com/?utm_source=website&utm_medium=podcasts&utm_campaign=podcast_ep

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 enough to be exposed to the right stimuli and resources at a young age by her mother.

This was one of the key motivators that drove Smita to start LEAD, an ambitious company trying to solve for better school education in India. Smita is the co-founder and co-CEO of LEAD School.

Of India's nearly 280 million school-going children, just around 5 to 8 million might be getting a quality education. 

She says the rest are either in government-run or affordable private schools that simply aren't equipped to engage their curious and boundless minds. 

Instead, they're subjected to mindless rote learning, often by underpaid teachers and ill-equipped administrations. 

To change that, you have to relook at everything, including their curriculum, pedagogy, technology, teaching aids, government policies, parent mindsets and child psychology.

In this episode, hosted by Rohin Dharmakumar, Smita explains how she lives on this mission, why she moved back to India, whether schools should work for profit, why India's students lag in learning by two years, and much more.

You can read the full transcript of the conversation here: https://the-ken.com/podcasts/first-principles/smita-deorah-lead/

This is Episode 20 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: https://the-ken.com/?utm_source=website&utm_medium=podcasts&utm_campaign=podcast_ep

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 payments from Google for the ads he ran on his content.

In college, he had a blog devoted to the actress Priyanka Chopra. That fetched him hundreds of thousands of rupees each month. On a Facebook page that he ran—this one devoted to fashion—Chinese brands paid him hundreds of dollars each month to run their ads. 

So when he finally started Unacademy in 2015, it was, in many ways, a logical evolution of his life thus far. Nearly eight years, and $835 million in venture capital later, Unacademy is a company that reflects much of Gaurav's personality.

It has no time for niceties. It would rather disrupt than defend itself. It is supremely confident in the face of even existential crises. And it attaches zero value to classical or theoretical notions of education. 

I mean, who else would say that education is really a tournament that can change lives and that teachers are coaches and that the best coaches are like mercenaries, and that they already earn more than second-rung movie stars?

This is Episode 19 of First Principles, with Gaurav Munjal — The Ken's fortnightly leadership podcast.

You can read the full transcript of the conversation here: https://the-ken.com/podcasts/first-principles/gaurav-munjal-unacademy/

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

"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, an online higher education company last valued at over $2.2 billion. He insists, emphatically, that upGrad is neither a startup nor an edtech.

"Edtech", he says, was "a parlance invented by people who wanted to go out raise money, and VCs who liked the word Tech as it was the flavour for the last five years to invest in."

Instead, he says, he tells the 5000+ employees who work at upGrad to have faith that they're going to build something really valuable over the next 5-10 years. And that you cannot have report cards on companies measured over six months or a year.

But that's not all Screwvala does.

He co-founded Swades Foundation, a philanthropic organisation that works across 2000 villages in Maharashtra.

He runs RSVP Movies, a film production company. And much more.

Welcome back to First Principles, the fortnightly leadership podcast from The Ken. This is episode 18, and I am Rohin Dharmakumar, your host.

Stay with me for a wonderful conversation with Ronnie Screwvala about ambition, organisation building, online education and long-term thinking.

You can read the full transcript of the conversation here: https://the-ken.com/podcasts/first-principles/ronnie-screwvala-upgrad/

The Ken’s newsroom also publishes Cost to Company, a weekly podcast about careers and workplaces. 

One of our episodes, inspired by a message from a Cost to Company listener, explores the future of talent in Bombay. Listen to it here: https://the-ken.com/podcasts/cost-to-company/bombay-is-running-out-of-talent/?utm_source=website&utm_medium=podcast2&utm_campaign=ctc_ep&utm_id=ctc.ep25

If you, too, have a story to tell about how your work and workplace are adapting to the world around us, please write to us. Click on this link to fill out our survey: https://theken.typeform.com/CTC-may2023?utm_source=ken&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=ctc_survey&utm_id=ctc.05.23

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 up, I told myself that while I’d go and get a world-class education, I would always work for a high-quality company. I would never start a business. It was very clear to me,” he says as we sit down for the latest episode of First Principles.

And yet, in 2000, Srikanth and five of his friends quit their jobs, scraped and pooled in Rs 2 lakh each (~US$2,400), and started Fractal.

It takes a lot to build companies for the long term—only 2% of all companies get to celebrate their tenth anniversary. The school of hard knocks is unforgiving to young companies and first-time founders. The odds are measured in terms of survival first and not success.

Fractal and Srikanth were part of the 2% that survived the first ten years.

Listen to this episode of First Principles to understand how the soon-to-be 25-year-old company plans to beat the odds and still be around 50 years from now.

You can read the full transcript of the conversation here: https://the-ken.com/podcasts/first-principles/srikanth-velamakanni-fractal/ 

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 million in venture funding puts the pressure on a founder to show a potential market size that’s massive and untapped.

And yet, Shah did quite the opposite. He is single minded in his focus on catering to the top 30-odd million consumers in the world’s most populous country. Why? Because they are the ones with enough disposable income to drive the majority of most discretionary spends, he says. CRED currently has over 11 million users, which fit the definition of “California users” put forth by my colleague Praveen Gopal Krishnan way back in 2021.

And over the last two years, this has become painfully apparent to most Indian startups and founders.
How did CRED and Kunal Shah arrive at this reality ahead of others? I asked him that.

Shah has a habit of saying “Good question” before launching into fairly sprawling and vivid answers. Answers that involve analogies, generalizations and psychology.

Having been thrust into working to support his family while he was still a teenager, Shah ended up being coached through the school of hard knocks and an accidental exposure to philosophy (it was the only course available in the morning, before he left for work).

The result was a curious mix of abilities, knowledge, ambitions and perspective. Chip on the shoulder mixed with the urge to pay it forward. The ability to put himself in another person’s shoes while also being brutally blunt with feedback. Left brain execution and right brain exploration.

This has allowed Shah to create a fairly shape-shifting business model with CRED (worth over $6 billion after its last fund raise). When I asked him to define CRED, he described it in terms of its users, not features. He sees CRED as a community, to which features and monetization methods can be tacked on and off over time.

In another wide-ranging and reflective founder conversation, we go behind Shah’s thoughts about building businesses, hiring “high-slope” professionals, why one of the biggest crises staring India in the face is the disappearance of working women and why many meetings inside CRED as called “shareholder meetings”.

And if you have any questions, thoughts, suggestions, or tips, please email them to [email protected]. We might not be able to reply to all of them but we do read every single one of them.

This is episode 16 of First Principles.

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 founders. While I’d urge you to listen to each of their conversations in full, this episode is a good place if you took to First Principles recently and are searching for reasons to listen to older episodes. 

We begin with Kabeer Biswas, the co-founder and CEO of Dunzo, the cult-like instant delivery service that started from Bangalore. He talks about the 10,000 plus tasks he’s run himself on Dunzo, the impossible grind of fundraising, how founders’ traits tend to show up as organization’s culture and many more things. 

Episode 1: Kabeer Biswas of Dunzo talks about raising money, gathering user insights, battling deadlines and more

Next, we have Baskar Subramanian, the co-founder and CEO of Amagi, the most unlikely of unicorns to emerge from India. It is a media technology company that enables virtually the entire video production and distribution chain for all sorts of media companies globally. “Glass to glass solutions” is how Amagi describes itself, implying its presence from the glass of the camera where video is being shot to the glass of the screen on which it is finally watched. 

Baskar dropped out of his master’s program at IIT Bombay because he found it oriented around getting grades, not necessarily learning. He talks about why entrepreneurship is like a drug for him, why vulnerability is a core value at Amagi, why a CEO’s job is to be a clock-builder and not a time-keeper, and many more things. 

Episode 2: $1.5B Amagi Founder Baskar Subramanian talks about culture at work, parenting, and building from ground up

Next is Nithin Kamath, the co-founder and CEO of Zerodha, India’s largest online brokerage. He doesn’t believe in setting targets or goals for his company or employees. He also is one of those rare Bangalore founders who have succeeded at scale without taking a single dollar of venture capital. No, in fact Nithin insists Zerodha’s success is partly due to avoiding venture capital.

From his anonymous days as “Nathan Hawk”, “Tarzan” or “Columbus” at a call center or internet forums, to running one of the most profitable and yet leanest startups in India, Nithin covers a lot of ground. He talks about thinking like a trader, running a company with zero attrition, creating optionality and many more things. 

Episode 3: Nithin Kamath of Zerodha candidly talks about building his bootstrapped business, weighing risks, and finding opportunities

Which brings me to Naveen Tewari, the co-founder and CEO of adtech giant InMobi, which is not only a unicorn in terms of its own valuation, but was also the first Indian company to incubate another unicorn of its own, lockscreen giant Glance. 

Naveen is one of the earliest tech entrepreneurs from India, having started his very first company, SMS-based search provider mKhoj, way back in 2007. Thus, survival is one of his recurring themes.

Over the conversation he talks about the mistakes he made as an entrepreneur and his lessons from them, building careers and companies slowly instead of “blitzscaling”, CEOs pushing the envelope of what’s possible within companies, and a lot more. 

Episode 4: InMobi founder Naveen Tewari gets candid about survival, innovation, and playing the game by changing the rules

And finally, we have Ananth Narayanan, the co-founder and CEO of Mensa Brands, a global tech-led house of brands – I know, it’s a mouthful – which earned the distinction of becoming India’s fastest unicorn. It buys existing brands, and then punches up their scale by providing the resources and knowledge to do so. Ananth says that’s no different from a P&G, which too is a house of brands if you really look closely.

Ananth talks about the emotional toll founders pay silently each day, learning to manage energy and not time, the best way to solicit and give feedback, and many more things.

Episode 5: Learnability, curiosity, and brand building; Ex-Myntra CEO and Mensa Brands founder Ananth Narayanan gets candid

I hope I managed to interest you in at least a few of those incredible conversations, if not all of them! Tell us what you thought of today’s format. Did you like it? No? What other new features would you like from First Principles or The Ken?  Write to me at [email protected]. 

And if you haven’t already rated us on your favourite podcast platform, why is that? I would truly appreciate your rating, no matter what it is. 

Lastly, a big thanks to my colleague Rajiv CN, our resident sound engineer, for helping put together this special episode across nearly 8 hours of conversations. 

See you next time with a new conversation with another accomplished founder. Till then, this is me Rohin thanking you for listening and for your support. 

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 can’t go wrong selling meat and fish in the world’s largest country where the majority of the population are nonvegetarians. Go one level deeper and Kadavil says the consumption of fish outstrips that of poultry by nearly a factor of three. And fish offers gross margins of 40-50%, unlike, say smartphones or consumer products.

Starting with a mission to “Clone Mathew” (Mathew Joseph being one of the Fresh To Home co-founders and its current COO) to running an OKR-driven organization modelled around gaming pioneer Zynga (where Kadavil was an early employee, and subsequently executive), this conversation covers a lot of bases around the first principles of running a business that isn’t easy.

From obsessing over CURR, NURR and RURR metrics or encouraging employees to look for ways to disrupt their own business, Kadavil offers a lot of first hand insight from his multiple stints as an entrepreneur.

This is episode 15 of First Principles. If you like our deep interviews with some of India’s best known founders across a range of domains, please consider rating us on your podcast platform.

And if you have any questions, thoughts, suggestions, or tips, please email them to [email protected]. We might not be able to reply to all of them but we do read every single one of them.

Take Srikanth Iyer, the co-founder of CEO of Home Lane, one of the market leaders in the online home interiors space today.
But wind the clock back on Iyer’s entrepreneurial journey and we see him doing terribly in class 12, but getting into a good college because he was a state-level table tennis player. He gets into Wipro after finishing his degree, but quits in just 3 months to…assemble and sell PCs. When that business naturally gets commoditized, he shuts it down and starts an edtech business way before it was cool to do so.

Unfortunately, not enough Indians have PCs or broadband to buy his “CD-ROMs” (a concept as alien today as rotary telephones). So he hitched his wagon with PC makers, book publishers and even soap brands!
He would end up selling the same business thrice over.
By the time he started Homelane in 2014, Iyer already had over two decades of entrepreneurial experience, though none of it was in home interiors.

His first year was chaos. His first NPS score was -27. He almost went into depression.
The popular view of enterprise is that you succeed by doing more things. Iyer offers a well-argued (and well-experienced) countertake to that. Sometimes it’s best to say no to things or to focus on understanding what you’re bad at.
“I'm a better wartime general,” says Iyer to me during an honest, candid and insightful conversation that spans his three decade career as an entrepreneur.

If you like First Principles, please help us reach more listeners and subscribers by rating us. And if you have any questions, thoughts, suggestions, or tips, please email them to [email protected]. We might not be able to reply to all of them but we do read every single one of them.

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 as a bit of surprise. (Last year the company did around $250M in sales.) “I don't know what the valuation is,” said Sagar. “We didn't build it with the idea of selling it, so we haven’t ever looked at that option.” And this is nearly 27 years after he started Total Environment.

During that time, the company has charted a distinctly contrarian path for itself. At every stage of its evolution, it chose to do things that took more time, more money and more effort. It built its own design software. It vertically integrated its operations, down to the bricks, tiles and furniture that went into its homes. It stuck trees and lawns into balconies and roofs. It turned apartment designs into versioned products, much like productized software.

In a candid and reflective conversation that spans his three decade career as an architect and entrepreneur, Sagar shows us an alternate view of building a company. A word that comes up multiple time in the conversation is “authenticity”.
Starting with the “C” he got at IIT for being obstinate, to the many times he chose to take Total Environment down paths that traded rapid growth for slower design, Sagar gives us a glimpse into the incredibly inefficient, frustrating and lucrative sector that is real estate.

If you’d rather (or perhaps also) read than listen, we have also published the full transcript for this interview on our website. You can click here and read through it.

As usual, a big thanks to my colleague Rahul Choudhary who diligently helps me with the transcripts each fortnight.

If you have any questions, thoughts, suggestions, or tips, please email them to [email protected]. We might not be able to reply to all of them but we do read every single one of them.