"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.ep25If 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

First Principles

Ronnie Screwvala on why upGrad is neither a startup nor an edtech

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/ 

Fractal’s Srikanth Velamakanni on surviving before thriving

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 podcasts@the-ken.com. 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.

Kunal Shah of CRED on “exciting but painful” workplaces, gated digital communities, and employee shareholders

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 moreNext, 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 upNext 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 opportunitiesWhich 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 rulesAnd 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 candidI 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 podcasts@the-ken.com. 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. 

Five founders on fundraising, culture-building, clock- building, culture-shaping, people coaching, surviving and thriving

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 podcasts@the-ken.com. We might not be able to reply to all of them but we do read every single one of them.

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

The shortest distance between two points may be a straight line, but when it comes to entrepreneurial success, straight lines rarely exist. Instead, the paths taken by most successful entrepreneurs are meandering, if we’re applying the benefit of hindsight. If we don’t, well, they’re often random, confusing and even frustrating.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 podcasts@the-ken.com. We might not be able to reply to all of them but we do read every single one of them.

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

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 podcasts@the-ken.com. We might not be able to reply to all of them but we do read every single one of them.

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

In 2015 Ruchi Kalra was a partner with McKinsey in their Financial Services practices. In 2016 she, along with four co-founders, started OfBusiness, a business that saw the world in raw materials like plastic, steel, almonds where everyone else saw products like bottles, bridges and cookies. By using tech to disintermediate the various buyers and sellers in the raw material supply chain, OfBusiness wanted to make purchases cheaper and faster. In 2017 Kalra, again with her four co-founders, one of who also happens to be her husband and former colleague, started another business, Oxyzo. What would it do? It would provide credit to businesses that wanted to buy raw materials. Cut to 2023. OfBusiness and Oxyzo are both unicorns. They’re also growing at an incredibly fast rate. Kalra is the CEO of Oxyzo, while also doubling up as the CFO of OfBusiness. Last year OfBusiness drove around Rs.7,500 crore of sales, says Kalra. Which is slated to jump to over Rs.20,000 crore this year. In the same period Oxyzo’s balance sheet size as a lender will swell from Rs.3,500 crore to Rs.5,000 crore. For these numbers, the two sibling unicorns employ just about 1000 professionals between them. “If I were to do a rough employee-to-valuation calculation, that would place you in, I'm guessing, one of the highest...”Kalra cuts me off. “I think more than the employee-to-valuation, it's more an employee-to-profit calculation.”That’s because the B2B siblings also both profitable. Together they are slated to grow their profit after tax (a phrase that’s quite rare in the unicorn space) 150% over the last year, to Rs500 crore. Kalra starting at McKinsey after an engineering degree from IIT Delhi and an MBA from ISB is a pattern easy to understand. What’s not so easy is how and why she decided to quit after making partner, and start a business in a very different and “uncool” sector.In a candid and reflective conversation, Kalra talks about career choices, business building, market sizing, operational discipline, and her own transformation from an executive to a founder, and finally, leader. It’s a masterclass on how starting up later in life often brings perspectives and experiences that are hard for others to replicate.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. We normally record First Principles episodes inside a professional studio, but this episode was recorded inside one of the meeting rooms at Oxyzo’s buzzing Gurugram offices in December. Which is why, in spite of our best efforts, the audio will sound a bit different. A big shout out to my colleague Rahul Choudhary who diligently helps me with the transcripts each fortnight. Lastly, if you have any questions, thoughts, suggestions, or tips, please email them to podcasts@the-ken.com. We might not be able to reply to all of them but we do read every single one of them.

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

The year was 2004. MakeMyTrip was a struggling 4-year old company and Deep Kalra, its founder, hadn’t taken a salary for nearly 18 months and had exhausted all of his financial savings. His co-founders had already taken salary cuts ranging from 50-70%. That’s when they got an offer from a much larger company to buy MakeMyTrip out. After discussing between themselves, they decided that they’d sell if the offer was $10 million. The first offer from the potential buyer was $5 million. Which Kalra refused, of course. Then the haggling started. Over a few hours and price inched up bit by bit to around $7 million. “And the meeting ended. And I was actually very relieved,” says Deep in episode 11 of First Principles.He says his single biggest advice to young founders is to “just hang in there and don't give up too early because so many businesses haven't seen the light of day because someone gave up too early.”MakeMyTrip went through long periods of struggle, often existential, before it became the online travel giant that it is today. And Kalra has been part of it all through.In a reflective and wide-ranging conversation, Kalra covers a two decade span of evolution of India’s internet and startup space, including his own journey as an entrepreneur. It’s a masterclass on not giving up, staying in the game, and building to last.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.And if you have any questions, thoughts, suggestions, or tips, please email them to podcasts@the-ken.com. We might not be able to reply to all of them but we do read every single one of them.

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

Serendipity usually plays a huge role in entrepreneurship. It played an outsized role in Tarun Mehta’s journey to founding Ather Energy, easily India’s best-known electric scooter maker.When Mehta graduated from IIT Madras, he wanted badly to become a consultant because it was where the money and aura was. But he didn’t get a job as a consultant. Then he tried to get into Harvard Business School for an MBA, but that didn’t pan out either.Instead, he ended up at Ashok Leyland, a maker of buses and trucks. It took four months after he joined for Mehta to be allocated a computer of his own. During that time, he’d walk around and find a computer belonging to someone who hadn’t come to office. Or he’d walk through its sprawling Chennai campus and read books in its library. Of course, his salary wasn’t high by any standards.The low salary and lack of any meaningful work allowed Mehta to drift back to the IIT Madras campus he’d graduated from. After convincing a professor of their desire to build battery packs, Mehta and his co-founder Swapnil Jain, moved to an empty hostel room to start building things.Building hard things.That’s the origin story of Ather Energy, the company that started out wanting to build battery packs, but ended up doing multi-year deep dives to re-imagine virtually every part of an electric scooter. This stubbornness would bring Ather Energy to the brink of death five times.Today, Ather sells over 10,000 electric scooters in India. Next year, it wants to double that number. And then some more.Tarun speaks at length 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.If you’d rather (or perhaps also) read than listen, we have published the full transcript for this interview on our website. You can click here and read through it.If you have any questions, thoughts, suggestions, or tips, please email them to podcasts@the-ken.com. We might not be able to reply to all of them, but we do read every single one of them.

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

Few companies define themselves so sharply on the basis of what they’re opposed to like NoBroker, the 8-year-old Bengaluru-headquartered real estate platform. Opposition to brokerage is baked into its name, its business model, and even its ambitions.US$19 billion is the amount Indians shell out as brokerage fees on real estate rentals.That’s the market NoBroker wants to disrupt. Flip the mirror and that is also, thus, the total addressable market that NoBroker is targeting for itself.“At the end of the day, all a broker does is introduce people. You want to pay him one month's rent for an introduction? Really?”—that was Amit Agarwal, the co-founder and CEO of NoBroker, speaking to The Ken back in 2017 for a story.It’s almost 2023 and Agarwal is still sticking to his guns. (Which is why he can’t reveal the exact locations of his offices).In this episode, the “IIT-IIM” founder speaks candidly over an hour and a half on a range of topics. From entering management consulting as a young MBA because it paid the most, to starting a business that almost no investor wanted to fund, to convincing notoriously value-minded Indians to pay a subscription fee before finding a rental apartment, to running a frugal organisation with a cockroach mentality. 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. And if you have any questions, thoughts, suggestions, or tips, please email them to podcasts@the-ken.com. We might not be able to reply to all of them, but we do read every single one of them.Daybreak—a brand new podcast from The Ken (https://the-ken.com/podcasts/daybreak/)Business news is complex and overwhelming. It doesn’t have to be. Thrice a week, Daybreak tells one business story that’s significant, simple, and powerful. All in fifteen minutes or less. Hosted from The Ken’s newsroom by Snigdha Sharma, Daybreak relies on years of original reporting and analysis by some of India’s most experienced and talented business journalists. Episodes drop on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

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

In a career spanning 25 years, Amrish Rau has been on multiple sides of the leadership equation. He’s been a corporate leader, founder, professional CEO and angel investor. As the CEO of Pine Labs, the payments solution provider whose point of sale terminals can be seen in most Indian shops and stores, Rau says his ambition is to “make money from every transaction”.In 2016, Citrus Pay, an online payments provider Rau co-founded, was acquired by rival PayU for $130 million in cash. It was one of the biggest acquisitions back then.But Rau says it is also one of his biggest regrets. As a first-time founder, he made the decision to sell his company too quickly. As an entrepreneur, he says, “at the end of the day, you need your own horse and your own carriage. And you need to be able to hug it every day and saying, this is mine.”In this wide-ranging conversation Rau touches upon a range of topics. From creating corporate cultures to “FU money” to risk-taking to the evolution of fintech, there’s interesting themes every few minutes.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.And if you have any questions, thoughts, suggestions, or tips, please email them to podcasts@the-ken.com. We might not be able to reply to all of them but we do read every single one of them.

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

SUGAR Cosmetics, though now amongst the most popular and fastest growing cosmetics brand in India, wasn't the first choice when Vineeta was asked to name her new cosmetics company, and neither was cosmetics the first business that Vineeta undertook when she set out to be an entrepreneur. Getting SUGAR to it's users was a tumultuous journey and as Vineeta sits down with Rohin to recount some of the most important points in the journey, we get a peek at the lenses she uses to look at the world around her. We have also published the full transcript for this interview on our website. You can click here and read through it. If you have any questions, thoughts, suggestions, or rants, please email them to podcasts@the-ken.com. We might not be able to reply to all of them but we do read every single one of them. 

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

Today’s guest on First Principles is Harshil Mathur, CEO and co-founder of Razorpay.Razorpay claims to be India’s first full-stack financial solutions company. And if that sounds very much like how a coder would describe a company, it’s because that’s exactly what’s happening.When Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar, two coding enthusiasts fresh into their first jobs, started working on what would later become Razorpay, they never really set out to build a company or be entrepreneurs. They just wanted to solve a problem.But in doing so, they were compelled to create Razorpay.Today’s episode is a delightful mix of first principles thinking, thoughts on product development, and the importance of deliberately driving company culture. Earlier in August, The Ken’s journalist Shashwat Mohanty did a story on the challenges Razorpay faces in realising its neo-banking dream. The story is now behind a paywall but you can find it here.Feedback? Write to us on podcasts@the-ken.com

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

Mensa Brands is India’s fastest unicorn. It took them only six months to zoom past the one-billion-dollar valuation mark. Having raised over US$300 million in debt and equity so far, Ananth Narayanan, the founder and CEO of Mensa Brands and the former CEO of Myntra, seems to be on to something.In this episode, we tap into all of it. From his time at McKinsey as a consultant and his stint as Myntra's CEO, to leading MedLife and its sale to PharmEasy, and eventually founding Mensa Brands, Ananth shares everything good and some things that weren't. We touch upon his thoughts on ploughing through the tough times, the ability to bounce back after major lows, and the value of learnability and curiosity.As always, we’re happy to hear your feedback. Please share it with us at podcasts@the-ken.com. You can write to us with feedback, questions you want us to ask future guests, or even guests you would like to see on the show!The free story mentioned in the episode can still be found here albeit behind a paywall: Mensa, Evenflow pitch e-comm brand aggregation to rigid Indian sellers

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

First Principles is a fortnightly 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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First Principles

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