First Principles (Private)

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.

When Mukesh Bansal is asked what he is now, he doesn't say founder or investor. He says "a learner", and admits that the moment a company starts working, he gets bored. That restlessness is the thread through a career most people would have parked long ago: he founded Myntra and sold it to Flipkart, co-founded Cult.fit and turned fitness into a category, and now runs the enterprise-AI company Nurix, co-leads the Meraki Labs venture studio, and backs companies from Groww to Skyroot. This conversation follows the shape of all of it rather than any single company: why he reframes pivots as daily "adjustments", why he thinks the AI era rewards the hands-on operator over the people-manager, why rationally no one should start a company, and what his string of failed Silicon Valley startups taught him. It closes on Haridwar, three books, the longevity basics he trusts over biohacking, and a life he rates an 8.

Chapters
0:00  Cold open: "willing to work on it for the rest of our lives"
0:11  Introduction
4:21  One studio, two incubations, and Cult.fit: where the time goes
5:23  "I see myself as a learner" (and why he gets bored)
7:36  When does learning stop? Crisis as a gift
11:25  Why an hour of his time isn't what it was
11:41  The three kinds of professionals in the AI age
15:30  His stack: Warp, Claude, eight to ten agents overnight
18:03  "If you're only a people manager, watch out"
20:57  What Nurix is, and its Myntra origin
23:53  How big Nurix is today
24:47  Fermi: the AI tutor that won't give the answer
28:09  Back to Myntra: fashion then and now
30:06  How online became a liquidation channel
30:51  Koyu, Lyskraft and the CRED hypothesis
33:11  Why a venture studio, and why one company a year
39:09  Rejecting the compounding path
39:53  VC, valuation, and the near-death at Myntra
45:54  Haridwar, BHEL, and the books that lit the fire
49:06  Pivots as chess "adjustments"
51:39  Betting the megatrend, staying loose on the path
53:08  The Bay Area years and the return to India
57:37  Finding talent: "work with them for six months"
1:04:34  Learning vs winning: the live 2x2
1:07:51  Three books, and how he writes
1:14:23  Habits: sleep, the gym, one day a week to think
1:18:02  "No means not now" and other mental models
1:25:04  How health became a throughline
1:31:04  The longevity stack after 50
1:38:37  Why he runs SparX, and the deep-tech turn
1:44:05  Loyalty to a mission, and the number two
1:50:29  When AI supercharges the experienced
1:53:02  His kids' worldview, parents in Indian careers
1:56:55  Food, reading, and rating life an 8

Quotes
[5:23] "I see myself as a learner. I do what I do because I enjoy learning… doing one company over a period of time, I get bored."
[8:00] "Crisis always comes wrapped with a massive gift, if you are only willing to unpeel the onion and embrace the gift."
[19:49] "For the first time, you can hire something equivalent to human cognition for cents an hour. Not using it is almost wasteful."
[49:41] "I use the word adjustment rather than pivot. You come to work every day, you're playing chess."

Frameworks & mental models

• Learner over operator: chase the zero-to-one learning curve; once a company becomes a treadmill of "how do I double this", hand it off.

• Crisis and momentum: in a shock, cut the bad and double down on the good; "never let a crisis go to waste".

• The three professionals in the AI age: the AI-native new-grad without judgment; the senior who has lost the ability to be hands-on; and the experienced operator who stays hands-on, for whom AI is a superpower.

• Adjustment, not pivot: every day you make the best move on the board; most are small, occasionally you castle. A pivot that throws away the code, category and team is just a new company.

• Bet the megatrend, stay loose on the path: be certain about the ten-year direction, zigzag the moves to get there.

• Horizontal compounding: compound entrepreneurial skill across ventures rather than sector tenure in one.

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

For fifty-odd episodes, First Principles kept venture capitalists off the show, because the conversation tends to drift to the portfolio rather than the person. Kanwal Singh is the exception. In 2017, at the peak of the tech boom, he walked away from tech investing to raise a fund only for Indian consumer brands, an idea investors could not place. His first cheques came not from institutions but from the families who had built India's consumer businesses. Nearly a decade on, Fireside is close to sixty brands and around 650 million dollars across four funds. What makes the conversation worth two hours is that Kanwal built the fund to reject the two instincts that define his industry: the power law, and the pull to get big. He would rather a portfolio where most companies win than one 100x outlier, and he turned down twice the money he could have raised to protect it. The episode covers all of it, and then the man himself.

2 · Chapters

3 · Pull-quotes

• [0:03] "I could have raised 2x of this. Genuinely, we could have raised 2x of this."

• [35:08] "We can build successful funds, fund after fund, by creating portfolios which are successful as a very high percentage, and not necessarily depending on those one or two outliers. Good news is we also have the outliers."

• [37:09] "For a 5x, nobody will call you legendary."

• [41:10] "The answer lies in the question. It is hard."

• [1:52:03] "A 10." (asked how happy he is with his life)

4 · Frameworks & mental models

• Anti-power-law investing: build a portfolio where a high percentage of companies clear "capital plus," rather than staking the fund on one or two outliers.

• The three breaks from the VC default: consumer not tech; Indian consumer-family LPs not global institutions; one team with shared credit, not lone-hero dealmakers.

• India 1, 2, 3: the market mapped across cohort, sector, channel and geography, where India 2 needs products designed for it and India 3 is reached through doorstep models with no marketing spend.

• Quick commerce is brand-first: scarce dark-store shelf space plus a shopper who arrives to buy, not browse, means only brands with real consumer pull survive.

• Founder assessment through the family: read a founder by their story and support system, often over a meal with their spouse.

• Value of good ("do good to do well"): founder first, planet first, one Fireside, on the belief that goodness is the foundation of doing well, not a trade-off against it.

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.

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 vegetarian 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.

Hello, listeners, and welcome back to 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.

In this episode, Ms. Morparia tells Rohin Dharmakumar about the day she realized she was sitting in a meeting like a piece of furniture because her deputy was handling everything and instead of feeling insecure, she celebrated. That's when Mr. Kamath gave her even more responsibilities. 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.