First Principles

Part 2 picks up exactly where I left Bisu — on why a 7-year-old audio platform is releasing a theatrical film on May 8. From there, we go everywhere. Bisu's actual journey from a small village in Shekhawati to Bandra. The "full equation" view of metrics. Why saying no requires more work than saying yes. Why most of his learning comes from iterations, not books. And, in his closing answer, a quietly devastating line about the startup ecosystem itself.
If you haven't heard Part 1 yet, please go back and start there first.

Chapter list
01:02 — Indian Institute of Zombies: why theatrical, why in-house, why AI in the pipeline. The decision-making cadence behind it
01:08 — "Your vision grows with you." How the original vision changed from "premium storytelling for Bharat" to something larger
01:10 — Bathoth → Shekhawati → IIT Jodhpur → Bandra. Studying in Hindi until Class 10, then +2 in Hindi, then English at IIT
01:18 — The discipline of saying no. Why nos require more work than yeses, and why nos are usually the better answer
01:19 — "The full equation." Why CAC alone is meaningless; why he tracks revenue, CAC, LTV and cohort profit together. The two real metrics: equation health and engagement
01:21 — Numbers beyond a limit give you an illusion. "Don't go deeper in the data — keep your life simple."
01:21 — Co-founders, span of control, how the four-way role split actually got sorted
01:22 — How Bisu learns: most of it from doing and iterations; books help him articulate what the iterations have already taught him
01:25 — Pet phrases at work — "build it like a business, not a startup" — and what management style his colleagues would say he has
01:28 — Biggest value add as Bisu, not as CEO. The Uber-power-user analogy
01:29 — When did he change his mind about managing people? Going from technical-first to people-first
01:34 — Hiring: the open-ended questions Bisu actually asks when he meets potential leaders
01:36 — What motivates and drives him on a daily basis
01:42 — Family, parenting, and the village memory of his grandmother telling stories by oil lamp in the evenings — the original storyteller in his life
01:45 — The personal questions: which morning of the week, how he spends weekends, what a productive day looks like, sleep
01:46 — On a scale of 1 to 10, how Bisu rates himself as a CEO
01:51 — The closing thought. Would the average Kuku FM subscriber actually want to listen to a two-hour interview with the CEO of Kuku FM? "We live in a bubble. The startup ecosystem feels that the world thinks what we think. It doesn't."
01:53 — Goodbye
Things mentioned in Part 2
People: Vinod Kumar Meena, Vikas Goyal (co-founders); Kunj Sanghvi (Kuku's Content Head, previously on Two by Two and Zero Shot); the Dalal brothers (script of Indian Institute of Zombies — Hussain and Abbas Dalal of Brahmāstra / Farzi); Gaganjeet Singh and Alok Dwivedi (directors); Bisu's grandmother
Places: Bathoth (village in Shekhawati, Rajasthan); IIT Jodhpur; Bandra
Concepts: the full equation — Bisu's name for treating CAC, revenue, LTV and cohort profit as one calculation, not separate metrics; content is the only product; vision grows with you
 
To listen to all of First Principles
If you'd like to listen to all 54 First Principles episodes — that's close to 110 hours of conversations with founders and leaders building India's most interesting companies — please subscribe to The Ken directly, or to our premium channel on Apple Podcasts.

Lal Chand Bisu started Kuku in audio in 2018. Almost everyone in the press wrote them off — the louder competitor was getting the headlines, the VCs didn't believe vernacular India would pay, and the assumption was that short-video would flatten audio. None of that aged well. Kuku FM did ₹242 Cr in FY25 at 175% YoY growth, with roughly 10 million paying subscribers. This is the conversation Bisu, who is just not the kind of founder who walks around telling you these numbers, finally agreed to do.
In Part 1, we get into the company history, the pivots, the contrarian decision to cut the free tier, and what 40 million Hindi listens to Rich Dad Poor Dad really mean.

Chapter list
00:00 — How old is Kuku FM, and what Bisu was doing before (Easy Prep, two and a half years at Toppr)
00:02 — June birthdays, coincidence, and Bisu's definition of luck — "most things are out of control"
00:04 — The three pivots: podcast aggregator → UGC → PUGC. What killed each one and what was kept constant
00:09 — Why vernacular audio IP didn't exist, and why Kuku had to become a studio rather than an aggregator
00:14 — January 2021: cutting the free tier and charging ₹399 a year. The investor pushback. Why no ads, ever
00:23 — Rich Dad Poor Dad in Hindi: 40 million listens. What that number tells you about the listener that English-first publishers have been missing
00:27 — How Kuku's content mix has shifted from entertainment to educational and inspirational
00:30 — Audio first, then video. Why audio is roughly 50x cheaper to produce and 50x cheaper to stream
00:33 — AI in the marketing pipeline: 500 ads/month → 5,000 ads/month, same cost
00:42 — The competitor we don't name. What being the also-ran in the press for years cost — in hires, partnerships, and inside Bisu's own head
00:45 — The fundraising history: ~$156M raised, the Granite Asia round, and how much of the last cheque is actually still untouched
00:50 — Biggest learnings from unsuccessful fundraising. Why nos are usually the harder, better answer
00:55 — Kuku TV: from launch to #1 on India's App Store in four months. Microdrama, the ReelShort wave, MS Dhoni
01:01 — Cliffhanger: the Indian Institute of Zombies theatrical bet — and why an audio platform wrote, produced and AI-assisted its own film instead of licensing one. Bisu's answer to this is in Part 2.
Things mentioned in Part 1
People: Vinod Kumar Meena and Vikas Goyal (co-founders, IIT Jodhpur batchmates); Hansa Bisu (Bisu's wife); MS Dhoni (Kuku FM brand ambassador); Nandan Nilekani / Fundamentum
Companies & investors: Mebigo Labs, Toppr, Easy Prep, Pocket FM (the unnamed competitor), Granite Asia, Vertex Ventures, Krafton, Bitkraft, IFC, 3one4 Capital, Shunwei, India Quotient
Content & references: Rich Dad Poor Dad (Hindi); Ankur Warikoo's Hindi book; ReelShort; Kuku TV
 
To listen to all of First Principles

If you'd like to listen to all 54 First Principles episodes — that's close to 110 hours of conversations with founders and leaders building India's most interesting companies — please subscribe to The Ken directly, or to our premium channel on Apple Podcasts.
Correction: During the conversation, Bisu mentions that the total amount of venture capital raised by Kuku is $170 million. The company has subsequently clarified that the correct figure is $120 million.

Welcome back to First Principles. This is Part 2 of our full conversation with Ankit Nagori, founder and CEO of Curefoods. If you have not listened to Part 1, go back and start there.
In this half, the conversation slows down a little and gets even more interesting. Ankit has strong opinions about why healthy food will always lose to biryani on a Friday night, what building a brand people actually love looks like, and what a Unilever of foods means to him. He is also candid about how he hires, how he spends his Sundays with his son, and what drives him beyond the business.
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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.

Welcome to First Principles. This is Part 1 of our full conversation with Ankit Nagori, founder and CEO of Curefoods.
Ankit joined Flipkart as the 22nd employee after cold emailing its founders at a book fair with almost no relevant experience and within six years he was Chief Business Officer. He then co-founded Cult with Mukesh Bansal, built it into one of India's most recognised fitness brands, and spun out Curefoods in the middle of a pandemic when the business was down to 2 crores a month.
In this half, Rohin and Ankit get into what those Flipkart years really felt like, what talent density means and whether you can actually design for it, and how Curefoods found its footing when everything was falling apart.
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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.

Welcome to First Principles! This is part 2 of episode 52, the full conversation.
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 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.