First Principles is a weekly interview podcast comprising authentic, candid, and insightful conversations between some of India’s most accomplished founders and business leaders, and Rohin Dharmakumar, The Ken’s CEO & co-founder.
From personal philosophies, mental models and decision making frameworks, to reading habits, parenting styles or personal interests, each episode will delve into what makes each of these leaders unique.
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Part 1: Anand Jain of Clevertap on starting with nothing and learning, building and leading as you go along
Season 3
Monday, August 11, 2025 • Duration 01:04:53
Hello and welcome back to First Principles. I’m thrilled to bring you episode 46, my conversation with Anand Jain, the co-founder of Mumbai-headquartered customer engagement platform CleverTap.
Anand and I were once colleagues at the media conglomerate Network 18. He got out before I did.
In 2013 he and two of his colleagues, Sunil Thomas and Kondamudi, left Network 18 and decided to fire up their respective laptops and code a new customer engagement platform. In just a few months, WizRocket, as it was then called, found its first – albeit non-paying customer. Then, in fairly short order, word-of-mouth driven inbound Seed and Series A investments.
Over time it became Clevertap, raising over $180M in VC funding and becoming a globally used and respected product.
As it turns out though, one of Clevertap’s operating philosophies is, well, First Principles. A strong reason is because Anand himself is a strong believer in it.
At the age of 12 he lost his dad. Thus, at an age when kids are taught to focus only on studies, Anand started tinkering, repairing and learning computer programming to earn money to put food on the table.
His first business was a scheduling system for lawyers in Ahmedabad, written in FoxPro. That was in 1994.
His friends in college called him “khurpechi” in Hindi. Literally, that’s a person who uses a khurpi – a gardening tool – to turn soil over to weed crops or plants. Colloquially though, that’s a person who is curious, restless and is always meddling around with things that don’t concern them directly.
Along the way, Anand co-founded Burrp, one of India’s first restaurant review portals, which got acquired by Network 18. While he was building and running Burrp, he also started manufacturing and selling pigeon spikes to shops, because he noticed there was no one doing that in India!
“I shouldn’t be here,” he told me. Why, I asked. He is not very smart, he replied. He doesn’t have good educational pedigree. He did not even study computer science formally. But, he said, he is extremely hard working and believes that anything can be learnt through hard work and perseverance.
You can see why First Principles is a concept that is dear to Anand.I asked him how happy he was on a scale of 10. He said 10.
I asked him if he’d ever thought of retiring. He said never. Life is too short to not have fun, he said.
Indeed, it is. So let’s dive into episode 46, with Anand Jain, co-founder of Clevertap.
This is part 1 of my conversation with him
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This episode was produced by Hari Krishna, with mixing and mastering by Rajiv CN.
Write to us at fp@the-ken.com 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: Ultraviolette Automotive's Narayan Subramaniam on tinkering, designing and learning by discarding
Season 3 · Episode 8
Monday, July 28, 2025 • Duration 01:01:44
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My first introduction, and indeed my ongoing and recurring one, to Ultraviolette has been personal. For years, driving by the Inner Koramangala Inner Ring Road from where I stay to Indiranagar, the Ultraviolette showroom would always catch my eye on the left. I used to constantly wonder about those really cool bikes hanging from cables in the double-ceiling office, intrigued by what kind of bikes they were.
Coincidentally, Ultraviolette was founded in the same year that The Ken also started. We've both been in Bangalore, both in a similar part of town, for most of that time. And yet, this was our first time meeting in the ninth year of our respective journeys. As Narayan himself beautifully put it, when you're chasing larger goals, time truly goes by incredibly quickly. We'll delve into what that means for a founder and how they perceive the passage of time when building an organisation from the ground up, because, as Narayan notes, time is the biggest limiting factor for a startup, encompassing money and talent, as founders are always trying to "buy time".
We explored Ultraviolette's foundational vision, how his engineering education laid a strong foundation, and how it fostered a passion to build things from an early age, even tinkering with electronics and DIY systems, their early funding challenges when VCs deemed their ambition "a little too risky" in the early stages, as they were trying to compete with entrenched players.
The Final Supercut Part 2: Founders 21-41
Season 2
Thursday, July 11, 2024 • Duration 01:28:54
Hello, we're back again with part 2 of our final, final supercut where we’ve spliced together one interesting bit of conversation from the last 21 guests I interviewed on First Principles.
And like the last episode where we covered founders 1 to 20, you’ll hear super sharp slices of a few minutes each which are reflections on their approach to organization building, risk taking, decision making and life living.
Here are the guests you’ll get listen to in this episode:
Krish Subramanian, co-founder and CEO of Chargebee; Varun Dua, founder of Acko; Yashish Dahiya, co-founder and Group CEO of Policybazaar; Archit Gupta, co-founder and CEO of Clear; M N Srinivasu, co-founder and Director of Billdesk; Radhika Gupta, MD and CEO of Edelweiss Asset Management; Lalit Keshre, co-founder and CEO of Groww; Niraj Singh, founder and CEO of Spinny; Karthik Jayaraman, Managing Director of Waycool; Ritesh Agarwal, founder and CEO of Oyo; Soumya Rajan, founder and CEO of Waterfield Advisors; Viren Shetty, Executive Vice Chairman of Narayana Health; Aneesh Reddy, Founder and MD of Capillary Technologies; Vaibhav Gupta, co-founder and CEO of Udaan; Girish Mathrubootham, Founder and Executive Chairman of Freshworks; Harsh Mariwala, Chairman of Marico; Chetan Maini, co-founder and chairman of SUN Mobility; Jaydeep Barman, co-founder and CEO of Rebel Foods; Alok Mittal, co-founder and MD of Indifi Technologies; Kapil Chopra, Founder of The Postcard Hotels; and Manav Garg, founder of Eka.
This is not the end of the road for me as a podcast host as you’ll soon find out. Actually, very soon.
I'm Rohin Dharmakumar, your host. And here's part 2 of the final, final supercut.
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The Final Supercut Part 1: Founders 1-20
Season 2
Thursday, July 4, 2024 • Duration 01:24:41
I know what you’re thinking. Didn’t the First Principles podcast draw its curtains? Yes we did.
But then we decided to do a final super-splice of every single episode we did. There were 41 founders. A bit too many for a single supercut episode, don’t you think?
So, here’s the first 20.
We went through all the episodes and picked a few minutes from each that we felt captured the essence of the specific founder and their approach to entrepreneurship, leadership, and well, life.
You’ll listen to Kabeer Biswas, co-founder and CEO of Dunzo; Baskar Subramamian, co-founder and CEO of Amagi; Nithin Kamath, co-founder and CEO of Zerodha; Naveen Tewari, founder and CEO at InMobi; Ananth Narayanan, founder and CEO of Mensa Brands; Harshil Mathur, co-founder and CEO of Razorpay; Vineeta Singh, co-founder and CEO of Sugar Cosmetics; Amrish Rau, CEO of Pine Labs; Amit Agarwal, co-founder and CEO of NoBroker; Tarun Mehta, co-founder and CEO of Ather Energy; Deep Kalra, founder and chairman of MakeMyTrip; Ruchi Kalra, co-founder and CEO of Oxyzo; Kamal Sagar, co-founder and CEO of Total Environment; Srikanth Iyer, co-founder and CEO of Homelane; Shan Kadavil, founder and CEO of Fresh to Home; Kunal Shah, founder and CEO of CRED; Srikanth Velamakanni, co-founder and CEO of Fractal; Ronnie Screwvala, co-founder and chairperson of UpGrad; Gaurav Munjal, co-founder and CEO of Unacademy; and Smita Deorah, co-founder and co-CEO of LEAD.
Even if you’ve listened to many of these episodes, I think you might enjoy this intense supercut.
Meanwhile, we’re working hard at our next podcast. Which I should be able to introduce to you very shortly. I’m excited!
I’m Rohin Dharmakumar, your host. And here’s part 1 of final, final supercut.
Last Principles
Season 2
Thursday, June 20, 2024 • Duration 06:37
First Principles is coming to an end. But it's not the end of the road for you as listeners.
We still want to hear from you and know what you expect from the podcasts from The Ken. Let us know with your suggestions and critique.
We'd love to know your thoughts and you can let us know here.
Also, you can always write to us at fp@the-ken.com with your thoughts.
Five women founders speak about leading with empathy, ambition, and not being apologetic and just focusing on building
Season 2
Thursday, June 13, 2024 • Duration 01:25:52
Becoming an entrepreneur is a leap of faith. Regardless of when or even if your business sees the light of day, starting up is still a tremendously hard thing for someone to take up, work on and say out loud to the world.
The leap of faith still exists when you're a woman founder, but with a bunch of other variables you didn't ask for also thrown in.
But I'll tell you what doesn't change. It still takes the same amount of passion, the joy of building, stress, frustration and the ability to manage fires that might go off anytime to keep the ship steady, and eventually succeed in the long run.
Being a woman founder does present its own challenges and hurdles that are often unexpected or even patronising. Because if you've decided to jump into the world of terrible and exciting, then these are just additional hoops that you have to jump through.
That's why role models matter. I must confess we - I - have been disappointed at not being able to get a lot more woman founders and their stories on First Principles. You can be sure we're trying to change that over time.
But in today's supercut episode, we bring together five women founders from earlier episodes.
Welcome to First Principles—The weekly leadership podcast from The Ken.
Part 2: Manav Garg sold his business and started TogetherFund with Girish Mathrubootham. Naturally, the $150M fund has a founder-operator bias. What does that mean?
Season 2 · Episode 29
Thursday, June 6, 2024 • Duration 01:06:56
In the first part of my conversation with Manav Garg, I introduced him as the founder of Eka Software. This week, I would like to reintroduce Manav as a venture capitalist and the co-founder of Together Fund, a VC firm. Well, you know how I feel about having venture capitalists on First Principles if you've listened to my conversation with Alok Mittal.
I had said in that conversation that venture capitalists are facilitators or enablers, not builders or doers.
Manav, too, like Alok Mittal earlier, has been at both ends, being a facilitator and also being in the thick of building an organisation. A few months ago, he fully transitioned into being a venture capitalist and has raised almost $150 million for Together Fund's Fund II(Fund Two), which is almost double the $85 million they raised for their first fund. Manav terms Together as a founder and 'operator-led' firm, and that distinguishes it from other VC funds.
Manav explained it as, "So we are the people who can, you know, roll our sleeves with them and really help them where they can really think like founders. And our concept was repetition over returns. We want to really think for the founders with empathy and really help them build a global company."
If Alok Mittal's story was about turning from a VC to a founder, Manav's is about turning from a founder to a VC. Well, he is sort of both as a co-founder of Together Fund. But the question is, can a founder be a better VC than, well, a VC?
Welcome to First Principles—The weekly leadership podcast from The Ken.
Let's get started.
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Have you listened to The Ken's early careers podcast, The First Two Years, yet? If you haven't, we've got the perfect episode to start you off. In the latest episode, host Akshaya Chandrasekaran went about exploring how to do networking without making it feel forced and cringe. Check out the episode
Part 2: Alok Mittal—teacher, angel investor, former VC—asserts Indifi is not a disruptive business. He also emphasises organisations should not fall into the trap of founder-worshipping
Season 2 · Episode 28
Thursday, May 30, 2024 • Duration 50:40
"This notion of a startup should be centered around the founder is a mindset. It makes for great stories. It makes for great heroes. And that's the reason why that sustains But, you know, there are great organizations that have been built where founders did not believe in that. And the organizations sustain even after the founder leaves."
That's what Alok Mittal, founder and MD of Indifi, an online lending platform, had to say about startups getting caught up in the founder-worshipping trap.
I hope you have heard my first episode with him. I often ask founders if they believe in the concept of a founder-led organization. Or how they're planning for a post-founder future for their organization. Because like Alok, I do believe that just like a parent's role is to eventually step back and let go of their child, so it is for founders.
But that's not easy when we're living in the golden age of founders. Where co-founder tags are coveted much more than CEO titles. It's not easy for many founders to let go.
But that was just one of the things that Alok and I discussed in our conversation. Alok, if you didn't know already, is involved in a lot of things. His day job might be MD of Indifi, but he is also the founding board member of Indian Angel Network and co-founder of Plaksha University.
Plaksha is a project he has been working on for quite some time and the way it is structured was interesting and something a lot of centers of education should be aiming to build in India as Alok explained:
"The notion of departments that exist in educational institutions is not the right architecture. Especially for a country like India, more and more of technology skills have to get expressed as entrepreneurship for it to be relevant to society. I don't think we have another answer for the jobs we need to create or the growth that we need to build.
Part 1: Manav Garg started and ran Eka Software for 20 years before selling it. His #1 advise to founders? Budget 6 months to "manufacture" your co-founders
Season 2 · Episode 27
Thursday, May 23, 2024 • Duration 01:03:25
“As I said, I am from a middle-class family. I was earning $10,000/month, which is a large sum in those days. And sitting in Singapore, Bangkok, travelling around the world. So my the larger question in my mind is that how do I take the decision?” says Manav Garg.
Manav Garg, founder and former CEO of Eka Software, a SaaS company that operates in the global commodities trading space. "Former CEO" because Manav started Eka in 2004 and just sold it earlier this year.
Since Manav was earning $10K a month back in the early 2000s, we talked about golden handcuffs.You know, when people earn so much that they become risk averse? A lot of people are attracted to the lure of startups but not necessarily the grind that comes with them. Including much, much lower pay.
“So, my competition was TriplePoint, Openlink, SAP. Large companies, at that time. $100 million plus companies. So, I started calling them. Cold calling. And few of them didn't pick up my phone.
One person luckily picked up my phone saying, ‘Please don't call me again and again. It's not nice. I'm never going to work for Indian company.’
I said, ‘Fine. Since I have you on phone, can I meet you?’
He said, ‘No.’
He said, ‘No. What will you do by meeting me?’
I said, ‘Let's have coffee. What I will do is, tell me your travel schedule.’
He said, ‘I am flying to London tomorrow, so I am going to be very busy.’
Part 2: Jaydeep Barman explains how internet restaurant Rebel Foods and luxury good giant LVMH have more in common than one can imagine
Season 2 · Episode 25
Thursday, May 9, 2024 • Duration 47:18
Jaydeep Barman has settled into his role of being a CEO for quite some time now. He admits he was not always the nicest of people when they restarted or ‘actually started’ Faasos, which later became Rebel Foods, as a QSR chain in 2011. He would be unreasonable and brash with the people he worked with and in his own words “must have rubbed people the wrong way”.
But with time he has gained perspective, as one does when they go through all those experiences. Now, he’s thankful for all those who remained despite him not being the best boss.
Today Jaydeep believes Rebel has found its way but he resists to rest in this fast changing world even though he stands by one belief: People’s love for good quality food will always be there and till the day that doesn’t change Rebel will be very much in business.
In the first part of our conversation with Jaydeep he recounted the journey of Rebel Foods, a lot of anecdotes about the restaurant industry at large, how he hires people with founder’s mentality and not LinkedIn mentality and a whole lot more…
We strongly recommend listening to the first part of our conversation with Jaydeep to get the full picture or if you wish you could read the full transcript of that conversation here.
In this second part of our conversation too, Jaydeep was full of insights about the internet restaurant empire he has built and how they arrived at its current version not with clear, set ideas but a lot of experimentation and realising what works and what doesn’t on the way.
Jaydeep also touched upon a lot of other things including:
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Narayan is also the head of design at Ultraviolette, so naturally, the conversation went in the direction of him defining the Ultraviolette brand's core pillars as design, technology, and performance, with the promise of "bringing you the future faster than the competition".
He shared Ultraviolette’s ambition to expand to Europe this year and address a significant market gap for compelling electric mid-segment motorcycles at price parity with internal combustion engines.
Narayan also revealed that his colleagues often describe him and his co-founder and childhood friend, Niraj, as "paranoid," driven by a deep attention to detail. He constantly pushes his team to ask, "Have we found the optimal solution after discarding all other possibilities?"
The journey of Ultraviolette is one that defies conventional wisdom.
Welcome to First Principles.
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This episode was produced by Hari Krishna, with mixing and mastering by Rajiv CN.
Write to us at fp@the-ken.com 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.
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Let's get started.
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Apply for the Young Business Leadership Programme!
What is it?
It is an ambitious and exciting role where we take a handful of talented, ambitious and eager-to-learn graduates from India's top colleges and put them through a two-year program where they will work in different roles and functions at The Ken.
And throughout the two years they will learn virtually all key aspects of building, innovating and scaling a modern "journalism as a product" organization, well, from first principles.
If you want to understand the "why" of why we're doing this, you'll find the details to that here, but if you're just excited about the opportunity from the little I have told you and you're just thinking about "how" do I apply, here's the link for that.
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Also, have you listened to the latest episode of The First Two Years(or TFTY)—The Early Careers podcast from The Ken?
In the latest episode of TFTY, host Akshaya Chandrasekaran goes on a quest to explore how to solicit feedback as requested by a listener of the podcast. Akshaya directed the listener's question to guests on the episode who shared surprising tips and pragmatic ways to ask for feedback. What exactly did they have to say?
If you haven't already, subscribe to the First Principles newsletter. It's free. All you need to do is sign up, and you'll find a thoughtfully curated newsletter capturing unique insights on the mental models and first principles, along with a curated list of photos and books contributed by the enthusiastic First Principles community.
Also, if you enjoyed listening to this episode, do rate us on your favourite streaming platform, and if you have opinions on what we should be doing differently or just any feedback, good or bad, write to us at fp@the-ken.com. We'll be sure to read it.
Also, if you're still here, help us improve First Principles with your suggestions, feedback, and guests you would wish to see featured in a future episode. Write to us fp@the-ken.com. And if you haven't already, become a part of the First Principles community by signing up for the First Principles newsletter here!
Now, you take all of that, and the question that we are asking is, what does that mean for the university system? And so, for example, at Plaksha, there are no departments. There are these integrated centers of research which are oriented towards a particular problem like climate. But there is no computer science department, there is no mechanical engineering department. There is no mechanical engineering major because we don't think that students will need to be experts at mechanical engineering in a silo to be able to build.
So there is a major in autonomous systems, which means robotics, which means drones, which means all of that. But there's a major in biological systems, which means genetic engineering, which means personalized medicine, things of that nature. So that is the new architecture that we are putting in place for how technology education should be done."
If you haven't already checked out the first part of my conversation with Alok Mittal, now would be the perfect time to give it a listen. You'll find in that conversation when and how Alok fell in love with the idea of being an entrepreneur.
Welcome to First Principles—The weekly leadership podcast from The Ken.
Let's get started.
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I said, ‘Okay, let me do one thing. I will travel to London next day and I will meet you at Heathrow. Just have a coffee. You anyway will take a shower.’
Most of the people from New York travel to London that red-eye flight, take a shower in the arrival launch. I knew that. I said, ‘I will meet in the arrival launch. Half an hour coffee and then you are free to go.’
He said, ‘Fine.’
Luckily, he said, ‘Fine.’”
It takes a LOT of courage to fly to London to meet someone who said he doesn’t want to work for an Indian company. And a LOT of vision to convince that person to join you. That’s what happened at the end of that 30-minute meeting that stretched to 2 hours.
Today, after 20 years as founder, Manav has jumped right back into the ring as the co-founder of venture capital firm TogetherFund, along with Girish Mathrubootham of Freshworks and others. When I asked him about something most potential founders overlooked, his answer was easy: Co-founder selection.
“See, in India also, still we have in that cultural mix, where you start up with your college friends because you spend time in dorms together, in college, you went through life's ups and downs together, right?
So, therefore, you're very attuned to start up with your friends from college, most likely, that's the most likely case, or from your workplace. You work with somebody in Amazon, Flipkart, Freshworks, Eka, Zoho, so therefore you end up starting up.
I personally think that there is also a way to manufacture your co-founders.”
Manav advises founders to set aside at least 6 months to “manufacture” their co-founders by just meeting a LOT of people.
My conversation with Manav uncovers a lot of insight on how young founders should think about building for the long haul. He did it for 20 years.
There’s a lot of very counterintuitive builder wisdom to unpack in today’s conversation.
Welcome to First Principles–The weekly leadership podcast from The Ken.
If you love listening to First Principles, we’re sure you will enjoy reading our Sunday newsletter, aptly titled First Principles as well. Sign up here, it’s free.
Also, write to us fp@the-ken.com with your feedback, suggestions and guests you would want to see on First Principles.
(P.S. A lot of you have written to us over the last few weeks with thoughtful suggestions and excellent feedback. We’ll be sure to take all of it into consideration when putting these episodes together for you.)
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Also, have you checked out The Ken’s new app? It’s packed with a lot of new features. Read all about it here. If you haven’t downloaded it already, here are the links to both iOS and Android.
The role his co-founder, Kallol Banerjee plays at Rebel
How they arrived at Rebel OS and the possibilities it holds
How, at Rebel written reports are the norm and not the exception
Welcome to First Principles–The weekly leadership podcast from The Ken
Let’s get started.
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Additionally, if you love listening to First Principles we’re sure you will enjoy reading our Sunday newsletter aptly titled First Principles as well. It’s the perfect read for a laid back Sunday morning. Every week you’ll see us discussing mental models, insights from disruptive thinkers and founders, photos and book recommendations curated with help of our wonderful First Principles community and even fun playlists. Sign up here, it’s free.
In fact, listen to the Summer Playlist we shared in our latest edition. It’s eclectic, vibe-y and a must listen.
