First Principles

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 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.

Where Part 1 followed the companies, Part 2 is about the person behind them. Picking up from Mukesh Bansal's move from one venture to the next, this half gets into how he finds talent ("work with them for six months"), the mental models he runs his life by, and the beliefs underneath them. He explains why rationally no one should start a company, how he processes every rejection as "no means not now", why he writes three books by simply showing up to a blank page, and how he separated the longevity basics he trusts from the biohacking he no longer does. It ends close to home: loyalty as loyalty to a mission, what he wants for his two children, why parents' expectations matter less than they did, and a life he rates an 8 out of 10.
Chapters
0:00  Where we left off
1:46  Finding talent: "work with them for six months"
3:23  The one open-ended question he asks
5:57  Winning vs looking good
8:00  The compounding argument, revisited
9:40  Learning vs winning: drawing the 2x2
11:17  Three books, and the annual look-back
16:18  Making time to think in a full life
18:45  What a chief of staff is actually for
21:27  "No means not now" and other mental models
25:57  How he writes a book
28:30  How health became a throughline
31:24  From ecosystem to the longevity basics
34:29  Why strength training matters after 50
38:08  Why he runs SparX, and the deep-tech turn
44:05  Loyalty to a mission, and the number two
50:35  The Apple teaching model
52:52  Three adjectives, and being "scary" to juniors
55:30  His kids' worldview
57:54  Do parents' expectations still matter?
1:00:12  Weekends, food, and reading now
1:02:17  Rating his life an 8
Quotes
[8:44] "I don't know if this rocket thing will work. But if it works, it'll take at least ten years… they said, we are willing to work on it for the rest of our lives."
[21:56] "I call this no means not now. That's how I process all the nos in my life."
[24:59] "Zomato was started in 2007. They did not pivot into food delivery till 2017."
[26:05] "Just show up and stare at a blank page for an hour. Sooner or later you'll start writing."
[61:43] "I feel very privileged and very fortunate. So many lucky breaks have worked out for me."
Frameworks & mental models
No means not now: process every rejection as timing, not a verdict; it protects the ego and the relationship.

Long-term patient, short-term aggressive / product is marketing: charge hard daily, give the ten-year game room, and let a product people love do the selling.

Horizontal compounding: compound entrepreneurial skill across ventures, not tenure in one sector.

Loyalty to a mission: the durable teams are bound to an unfinished job, not to a person; build a number two and give people room.

The longevity basics beat biohacking: sleep, eat less, move, strength-train after 50, tend emotional health; the exotic stuff is largely unproven.

Credits & sharing
This episode was produced by Rohin Dharmakumar and mixed and mastered 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.

Mukesh Bansal has founded and left more companies than most people build in a lifetime, and in Part 1 he explains why. He founded Myntra and sold it to Flipkart; he co-founded Cult.fit and turned fitness into a category; and today he runs the AI company Nurix and the Meraki Labs studio. Asked what he is now, he says "a learner", and admits he gets bored the moment a company starts working. Part 1 traces the thesis and the companies: how he allocates his weeks, why he thinks the AI era rewards the hands-on operator over the people-manager, what Nurix and Fermi are, why Myntra's move into fashion was an "adjustment" not a pivot, and the small-town Haridwar upbringing and library habit that set him off. This is Part 1 of 2; Part 2 turns to the person, the mental models, and how he thinks about health, family and success.
Chapters
0:00  Welcome and who Mukesh Bansal is
3:15  How First Principles is already connected to him
4:21  "Do you see yourself as an operator, a founder, an investor?"
5:27  Zero-to-one, and where learning stops
9:11  Allocating time across companies
10:34  Why an hour of his time isn't what it was
12:59  The three kinds of professionals in the AI age
14:52  His stack: Claude, Warp, agents overnight
17:58  Founder mode, reversed by AI
20:19  No more waiting for a tech co-founder
23:02  How big Nurix is; and what Fermi is
25:38  The Socratic tutor that won't answer
27:18  Back to Myntra: the fashion category today
31:30  Koyu, Lyskraft and the CRED hypothesis
33:41  Why a venture studio, one company a year
38:18  Rejecting the compounding path
42:57  The near-death at Myntra, and raising with a short runway
45:03  Haridwar, BHEL, and the books that lit the fire
48:15  Pivots as chess "adjustments"
50:48  Conviction vs discovery: betting the megatrend
53:08  The Bay Area years and the return to India
Quotes
[4:33] "I see myself as a learner… doing one company over a period of time, I get bored."
[7:08] "Crisis always comes wrapped with a massive gift, if you are only willing to unpeel the onion."
[17:12] "I'm making an even stronger point. If you're only a people manager, watch out."
[18:58] "For the first time you can hire something equivalent to human cognition for cents an hour."
[48:50] "I use the word adjustment rather than pivot. You come to work every day, you're playing chess."
Frameworks & mental models
Learner over operator: hand off once a company stops teaching you.

Crisis and momentum: cut the bad, double down on the good.

The three professionals in the AI age: the hands-on veteran is the one AI turns into a superpower.

Adjustment, not pivot: the best move on the board each day; a true "wipe the slate" is just a new company.

Bet the megatrend, stay loose on the path.

Credits & sharing
This episode was produced by Rohin Dharmakumar and mixed and mastered 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.

1 · Summary

Part 2 of 2. Part 1 laid out the bet: a fund built only for Indian consumer brands, back when the idea sounded absurd, and the anti-power-law machine Kanwal Singh built to make it work. This half is the person. The near-decade at Hindustan Lever that gave him his love of consumer, the Intel years, and the Paper Boat conviction that taught him to back the founder over the idea. Then the man himself: parents who came to India as refugees from Pakistan, a father who kept collecting degrees while feeding the family, the coach he started seeing in his sixties and what separates coaching from therapy, and how he reads a founder by meeting their family. He turned down twice the money he could have raised. He rates his life a 10.
2 · Chapters

0:00 Part 2 intro
1:22 The Hindustan Lever decade that started it all
2:25 Intel Inside, and bringing the inside out
4:22 The Paper Boat conviction: backing the founder
6:38 What he adds as Fireside's "CEO," and value of good
17:53 Capping the fund: turning down 2x the money
20:24 Hiring: read the person, meet the family
27:01 Refugees, and a father who never stopped studying
30:39 Three words, and a 100%-locked calendar
33:30 Motivating through the down days
34:51 The coach, and coaching vs therapy
43:40 How he learns, and consumer vs tech founders
51:27 Rating his life a 10, and success redefined
52:47 Cotswolds, golf, and the empty nest refilled3 · Pull-quotes

[17:56] "I could have raised 2x of this. Genuinely, we could have raised 2x of this."

[23:55] "You cannot build to sell. You build for sustenance, you build for good."

[27:04] "Both my parents were refugees from Pakistan."

[51:34] "A 10." (asked how happy he is with his life)

4 · Frameworks & mental models

Founder assessment through the family: read a founder by their story and support system, often over a meal with their spouse, on the belief that no one survives a decade-long build without one.

Build for sustenance, not to sell: the best businesses are bought, not sold; you build for the long run and treat a sale as a business decision along the way.

Value of good ("do good to do well"): founder first, planet first, one Fireside, with goodness as the foundation of doing well.

Coaching vs therapy: therapy addresses a medical issue; coaching is vulnerability and honesty in a business context, and only works once you have the self-awareness to accept there's a problem.

This episode was produced by Rohin Dharmakumar and mixed and mastered 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.

1 · Summary

Part 1 of 2. Kanwal Singh is the first venture capitalist to appear on First Principles, and the reason is the bet he made with the fund itself. In 2017, at the peak of the tech boom, he walked away from tech investing to raise a fund only for Indian consumer brands, when almost nobody believed India had a consumer story worth venture capital. His first backers weren't institutions, they were the consumer families who had built India's brands. This half covers the whole bet: what investors actually said when he pitched a consumer-only fund, why he raised in India rather than abroad, the ownership and follow-on design he corrected fund after fund, his claim that most of his companies succeed rather than one outlier, and his working map of India 1, 2 and 3. Part 2 turns to the person behind it.
2 · Chapters

0:00 Cold open and Part 1 intro
3:27 What Fireside is, and why it exists
10:04 How the fund makes money
11:23 The stats: 9 years, 4 funds, 68 investments
12:50 Raising fund one: consumer families, not global institutions
17:14 Two years as a solo angel
25:51 Ownership by design, and the follow-on model
34:05 What "success" means, and the anti-power-law
36:56 The centre of excellence
45:40 The three breaks from the VC default, and India 1/2/3
53:47 Quick commerce is brand-first
57:54 Brand vs performance: Underneat, Truvi3 · Pull-quotes

[0:20] "For a 5x, nobody will call you legendary."

[34:24] "We can build successful funds, fund after fund... not necessarily depending on those one or two outliers. Good news is we also have the outliers."

[40:26] "The answer lies in the question. It is hard."

[54:12] "The power of the brand is truly manifest in quick commerce."

4 · Frameworks & mental models

Anti-power-law investing: a portfolio where most companies clear "capital plus," not one built to live or die on a single outlier.

The three breaks from the VC default: consumer over tech, Indian consumer-family LPs over global institutions, one shared-credit team over lone-hero dealmakers.

India 1, 2, 3: his working map of where consumption grows, with India 2 needing products designed for it and India 3 reached through doorstep models.

Quick commerce is brand-first: scarce shelf space and a buy-not-browse shopper mean only brands with genuine pull survive.

This episode was produced by Rohin Dharmakumar and mixed and mastered 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.