First Principles The Ken

Alok Mittal is a serial entrepreneur. He has built three businesses, if you were to count his nearly decade-long stint as Managing Director of Canaan Partners from the ground up. Alok founded JobsAhead, a job listing platform, which he started just around the time of the dot-com boom in 1999. He sold JobsAhead to monster.com in 2004 and then went on to become a VC at Canaan Partners in 2006.

A decade later, Alok was back to being a founder, now with the thought of digitising lending with Indifi in 2015. He set out with a mission to lend to businesses that are usually overlooked by most traditional banks and NBFCs – Small and Medium Enterprises or SMEs.   

Back when Indifi began operations in 2015 they started with travel agencies and HoReCa(Hotels, restaurants, cafes) categories. Both of these categories are very volatile businesses and that’s why the big name lenders tend to stay away from them.

But Alok arrived at solving the problem not just with technology but also business strategy which shaped up over time. And today Indifi is solving not just for the travel and hotels segment but for sectors like e-commerce and retail as well.

Indifi over the years has enabled a lot of SMEs to have access to credit. Indifi does the hard work of assessing individual businesses and giving them the monetary means to keep their business running or renovate their establishments.

A thing to take note of is that many of these SMEs were receiving a line of credit for the first time because of Indifi. And this opportunity would allow them to grow their business or even reshape their businesses in ways they couldn’t before due to the lack of credit.

In this episode we also got Alok to open up on certain facets of his professional journey which are very fascinating because he’s been in both the shoes of a VC and a founder which is a first on First Principles. Also, it’s always interesting to learn something new and something that’s not largely talked about a founder’s journey. For example, among other things the journey of JobsAhead, Alok’s first startup that came about from ZipAhead, is very fascinating. Listen to that and a whole lot more in this Part 1 episode of our conversation with Alok Mittal.

Welcome to First Principles – The weekly leadership podcast from The Ken.

Let’s get started.
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Rebel Foods was incorporated in 2015. Before that it was Faasos and Faasos has been around since 2004. But co-founder and CEO Jaydeep Barman says back in 2004 when he and his co-founder Kallol Banerjee started it, they didn’t look at it as a means of living. It existed to some extent, primarily, to fulfil their own craving for good Calcutta rolls as Pune, where both of them were living at the time, didn't have any nice joints for the same.
A few years after starting it both of them left it behind to go and do their second MBAs from INSEAD and after completing it Jaydeep went on to work for McKinsey in London and Kallol headed to Bosch in Singapore.

But the dream of having their own company brought them back to Pune in 2011 and this time they were serious about making Faasos huge. They wanted to make it a QSR chain in the image of McDonald’s and Dominos of the world, but catering to the Indian taste buds. They raised some venture capital and got a few angel investors and decided to fire up their journey to growing their store numbers and serving great food.
But this journey hit a roadblock when they grew too fast and revenue didn’t match up growth on a per store basis. This is when they had the first of their ‘lightbulb moments or epiphanies’ as Jaydeep calls them.
Infrastructure or setting up a restaurant on the high street was a fixed cost that made it hard for Rebel Foods to scale beyond a point. So they decided to enforce a change in how they do business by taking away this fixed cost component and just investing in making food in a kitchen ideally in a location where rent is low.
This decision was aided by customer insight as well. When they ran a survey nearly 74% customers said they had never been to a Faasos outlet or they had been to it once. So they piloted the cloud kitchen or ghost kitchen concept, which meant you just have a kitchen which fulfils orders and no storefront or dine-in area, in Mumbai and it worked and they haven’t turned back from there.
There were two more lightbulb moments which have made Rebel Foods what it is today. What were those?
Find out that and a lot more in this episode full of a lot of 2x2 matrix examples, possibly one of the most fun brand origin stories, how Rebel Foods became the world’s largest Internet restaurant and priceless insights into the world of serving food without a restaurant that you and I can dine-in.
Welcome to First Principles – The weekly leadership podcast from The Ken.
Let’s get started.
If you want to know more about our Narrative Workshops – here is who are our trainers, what do we do and how we do it. This year, we have a few slots open for companies. Sign up here!
Also, how are you finding First Principles podcasts? What do you like? What can we improve? What do you think? Write to us at fp@the-ken.com.

When Chetan Maini – co-founder and chairman of SUN Mobility – stepped down as Mahindra Reva CEO in 2015, he wasn’t thinking what was the next venture to start. In fact even though he stepped down he was still involved in the space.
His time was still spent in understanding the possibilities electric mobility could unlock for the world and how these possibilities were being explored around the world. He was still involved in setting up and innovating the Formula E division at Mahindra, he still helped Anand Mahindra every now and then on strategic matters in Mahindra’s electric division, he was working with the government, he also helped the BMTC take a part of its fleet electric and the list goes on.

One could say he stepped down to get a better view of the possibilities in electric mobility. He was not looking for opportunities actively during this period, he was merely synthesising what possibilities were feasible.
He did travel across the world during this break but even during that time he was looking at the electric mobility solutions and innovations that were present in the places he visited.
He realised the possibilities in battery swapping as an alternative to charging and filed patents long before he became part of what is SUN Mobility today.
In the first part of our conversation with Chetan we discussed broadly how the sector has evolved, what SUN Mobility has set out to achieve, how their BaaS or Battery as a Service model is an alternative to charging your vehicle and a whole lot more.
In this episode we discuss how Chetan figured out what was next for him, the mental models he applies at SUN Mobility, how he’s built a team that speaks its mind and a lot more.
Welcome to First Principles – The weekly leadership podcast from The Ken.

Let’s get started.

What does your company do?

There are many ways to answer this question.

Most founders have a really good answer, some have a meandering one.

Well, let’s just say it’s always a compelling answer.

This week we have five founders to answer that question on a broader range. They function in very competitive sectors and are successfully making their mark in their respective sectors by innovating and more appropriately reinventing the wheel.

First up, we have newly inducted Shark, Radhika Gupta of Edelweiss Asset Management telling us what her company does for its customers, and what she doesn’t want her customers to not do through a great example.

Next up, we have Lalit Keshre of Groww, who is very clear who the target consumer for his company is. Starting off as robo-advisory and then pivoting into the mutual fund sector and now on their way to become a complete financial services platform.

We have another Shark from the Shark Tank panel featured in this episode. Ritesh Agarwal of Oyo Rooms has built Oyo in his own words into a leading global hotel brand. But that’s not all it is as he went on to add further.

Next up, we have Kartik Jayaraman, who founded Waycool, a food and agritech company  at the age of 40. He started off  with the simple explanation: We’re a supply chain company. At our heart that’s what we do. After that he got into the nitty gritty of what Waycool does.
Lastly, we have Niraj Singh of Spinny, who is busy building in a space that has many competitors, old and new, and he explained how he’s servicing the aspirational class of the country by delivering something the competitors couldn’t.
If you want to read more about our Narrative Workshops – here is who are our trainers, what we do and how we do it. This year, we have a few slots open for companies. Sign up here!
Welcome to First Principles—the weekly leadership podcast from The Ken.
Let’s get started.

Our guest for this episode has a very specific weekly routine. 
Pilates - once a week.
Strength training - once a week.
Aqua therapy - once a week
Functional training, swimming, breathing exercises, meditating daily with just a little trouble
Golfing three times a week followed up with posture exercises 
And very recently, experimenting with intermittent fasting.
Maybe you’re imagining a very specific type of person. A really fit, disciplined person – perhaps, a fitness influencer?
Well, you ‘re kind of right. You could say the person I’m talking about is very much an influencer. And he’s fit too.
He’s huge on LinkedIn, where he is part of the Top Voice program. On Twitter or X, he has close to a million followers. He’s very popular online.
So, really, if you think about it, he could turn into a fitness influencer if he wanted to.
But, here’s the thing. We're not talking about a young, health obsessed fitness influencer.
This is the routine of a 72-year-old, health obsessed, and I must add restless founder and Chairman of Marico, Harsh Mariwala.
Welcome to First Principles, the weekly leadership podcast from The Ken. I’m your host Rohin Dharmakumar and this is part 2 of my conversation with Harsh Mariwala.
This is episode 45 of First Principles–The Ken’s weekly leadership podcast. Let’s get started. Let’s begin.
 

Chetan Maini, the co-founder and Chairman of Sun Mobility has done a whole lot in his life. He’s been forever a tinkerer as you’re bound to find out if you read his father Dr.S.K.Maini’s book REVA: India’s Green Gift to the World.
Chetan’s raced solar cars, built his own car company REVA and is now building a pay-as-you-go energy infrastructure for a greener future with Sun Mobility. You’ll see in this a proper evolution of owning the chain of control as well.
Well, it has to be said this is not fully intentional. Because in a world where REVAs are speeding down the road left and right you’re not gonna see Chetan going out and building a BaaS, battery as a service business. But it was 2001, and India, and most of the world, was not ready for electric cars.
Chetan, however, persevered even under the shadow of the Mahindra Group and made strides in their electric mobility aspirations before leaving in 2015.
He took a break of two years, observed the EV market across the globe and when he saw the opportunity back home, came back with his expertise and took charge to create what we know today as Sun Mobility. The vision is bigger this time around and time is on his side as well. 
The only thing left to see out: Execution.
And they are not pulling any punches on that front either.
Additional reading: this edition of Green Margins published way back in late 2022 to understand how, here.
Welcome to Season 2, episode 44 of First Principles - A weekly leadership podcast from The Ken.